To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted – to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling – isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations?
Fernando Pessoa (1)

1.

22 September 2007. On my way to the festival Steirischer Herbst in Graz, I’m reading Fernando Pessoa’s unfinished, posthumous The Book of Disquiet in the train. The collection consists of diary fragments by Pessoa’s semi-heteronym Bernard Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who maintains that writing is preferable to trying to live. His notebook offers Soares space to embrace the dream, not burdened by life. “But if I had the Kings of Dream, what would be left to me to dream? If I had those impossible landscapes, what would be left to me of the impossible?”(2) The impossible makes Soares muse and drives him to a life in literature, in which solitary writing borders on solipsism – but also becomes sharp-witted and restless, because it inevitably has to contemplate also the many impossibilities in which our lives are steeped.

Soares’ notes are my preparation for reportable portraits, a new choreographic piece by deufert + plischke that premieres in Graz. A phrase by Soares turns up from time to time in the work of the German ‘artist twins’, which is in line with their poetics of knitting: “Living is knitting according to the intentions of others. But as we do it, our thoughts are free and all the enchanted princes can stroll through their parks between the instants when the hooked ivory needle sinks into the yarn. I crochet things… I digress… Nothing…”(3) The Book of Disquiet relates especially to issues from their directory trilogy (2003-06), in which Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke are searching for a narrative form to share their life and work, and also addressing the impossibility to write one’s ‘own story’ without the intervention of others. With Soares, Pessoa may offer a clue to finding an answer to this one tricky question that keeps reverberating: does deufert + plischke’s inclination to withdraw themselves into a hermetic, personal mythology mean that the work is about anything other than the artist twins’ solipsism?

A flash-forward. reportable portraits is about to end. After a black-out, the five performers return to greet the audience. I’m flabbergasted, because this gesture is all but self-evident in deufert + plischke’s oeuvre: in six and a half years of joint work, they greet the audience for the first time. Before that, they would guide the spectators through their performances via an intricate setting or dramaturgy, address them indirectly via an imaginary other, or leave them adrift in all kinds of open endings: whether they liked it or not, the spectators had to take their imaginary double home. In interviews deufert + plischke dismissed greeting and applause as a leftover of a conservative performing arts tradition, a last element that still required deconstruction. It didn’t seem to be much of a concern that their ideological stubbornness saddled their choreographic research on the social with some serious paradoxes.

So this one bow marks a break and introduces a new cycle in deufert + plischke’s work. In a sense, it is an integral part of reportable portraits: the gesture is a recognition of the fact that this performance can’t exist without this audience. Just like deufert + plischke’s former group creation directory: tattoo (2006), reportable portraits poses the question of the social, this time literally in the form of a group portrait. But thereby the artist twins’ personal mythology is left aside, the multimedial dramaturgy gives way to a strictly choreographic approach, and as a whole, the piece exudes an unprecedented lightness, playfulness and openness.

And yet the bow and renewed freedom of interpretation do not completely resolve old, obstinate questions. How should we understand the tension between the social and the solitary in deufert + plischke’s work?

2.

What the solitary space of writing can’t eradicate is the existence of the others. Bernardo Soares unceasingly broods that issue, as it points out the limits of his writing. The death of a neighbour or the leave of a colleague at the office make him clear that these people do really exist. Even in their absence they are still part of the narrative fabric that constitutes Soares’ life, also beyond his notebook. The life of others surpasses imagination’s power: “It’s the central error of the literary imagination: to suppose that others are like us and must feel as we do. Fortunately for humanity, each man is just who he is, it being given only to the genius to be a few others as well.”(4) It is well-known that Fernando Pessoa created an extended series of heteronyms, all with their own life and poetics, even with mutual correspondence. Also Soares holds that literary truth in his diary: “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. (…) In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. (…) And my entire world of all these souls who don’t know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow – this calm, writing body (…).”(5)

In creations and workshops, deufert + plischke have developed during the past years a working method they call ‘formulating and reformulating’. Over a long time, notebooks circulate in the studio, with their text always being reformulated by someone else. For the directory trilogy, personal memories were the point of departure, which after repeated rewriting got removed from the original and gained a precise, fictional form. Through the shared diary (which as a medium contains the notebooks, writing, and the intervention of other people) this collective practice also relates to the impossibility to write one’s own biography without the presence of others – a thought that also holds for the portrait. After a first attempt in directory: tattoo to apply this working method also to movement material, in reportable portraits it was fine-tuned and constitutes the creation’s core. The process of reformulating finds an extension on stage, where it seems to blend into a ‘semi-heteronymic’ choreography. Not the heteronym of the ‘artist twins’ deufert + plischke is central, but the many doubles that populate the bodies of five people in a group constellation.

In an after talk, deufert + plischke elucidated their method, which they have revised thoroughly for reportable portraits in dialogue with dramaturge Sandra Noeth. The five performers all danced a short self-portrait, which was captured on video and subsequently analysed in writing according to a set of parameters (texture, state, association, figure). Eventually, each notebook contained the multiple portrait of a dancer, written and rewritten by all the collaborators. In reportable portraits these five portraits are treated as a movement score and performed simultaneously, whereby a minimal compositional framework attunes the individual interpretations to one another. A specific view upon the group portrait and the social is thus inscribed in this working method, is even made possible by it.

Equally important is the radical perspective upon choreography: apart from the departure point, the movement material was not mediated through video, nor through showing and imitating, but only through a collective writing process. In that respect, the notebook opposes also the use of recording media, which by their technological nature strongly influence the result. In deufert + plischke’s words: “There is no visual regime of imitation. For us, choreography is not a reconstruction of an original (as it is the case with video), but a process in which response is central, and hence responsibility and subjectivation.” They call what emerges “polyphysis”: “How can you avoid the way you are conditioned to present your likes, dislikes, and the image you have of yourself?”

Imitation and sense of appearance: two notions that are important for the portrait are connected here with choreography and dance. Is choreography not always a kind of portraiture, and dance a kind of self-portrait? To find out what is exactly at stake in this question, the shifting from video to writing is crucial. In opposition to the mirror image’s self-evidence stands the paradoxical act of writing, fuelled by the awareness that the words will always arrive too late for an accurate self-description. The impossibility to see one’s own face drives us toward others, toward the social, toward the public sphere. But in order to recognize this dynamics, the social has to stand in a strained relation with the solitary moment of writing – and precisely this commuting between two extremes seems to me the core of deufert + plischke’s way of working, just like Bernardo Soares facing up to his restless condition when he is writing. During a workshop (6) with deufert + plischke, it became clear how lonely their writing practice actually is: the collective moment consists only in the shared method and passing on the notebooks, otherwise all energy and ideas, but also all friction and disagreement, are channelled through the solitary writing – even though it relates to the words of all individuals in the group.

The solitary space of writing also finds a counterpart on stage in the set design. In directory: tattoo the space reminded of a dance studio or school class with black board: the choreography was a series of exercises in socialisation, simultaneously practiced by five individuals. The social was being announced and prepared, but didn’t so much happen in intersubjective relations, and certainly not in dialogue with the audience. For reportable portraits, Herman Sorgeloos designed with panels and fragile lamp posts a box-like space, which somewhere still evokes the intimacy of the studio or writer’s room. Just like the back wall made up of large pieces of paper, painted black, reminds as one large palimpsest of the notebook. But the box is opened up and the footlights take away any doubt: we are in the theatre.

3.

A woman (dancer Hanna Sybille Müller) enters the stage and walks to the front while she addresses the audience with her eyes. She has a soft smile on her face, then relaxes her cheek muscles, turns inward, closes her eyes and bends forward. A simple yet layered movement of exposure and withdrawal, as if Müller enters Soares’ disquiet realm, symbolized by an impossible sleep. Soares: “I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel. (…) Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching – with the awareness of my body – a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things.”(7) Throughout reportable portraits the other dancers (Kattrin Deufert, Helena Golab, Thomas Plischke and Benjamin Schoppmann) will also make their way into this twilight zone via gestures and movements that hint at sleep – from averted bodies to the hazy gaze lost in daydreaming. A withdrawal from the cross-fire of social interaction, as moments of interruption, in which our memories keep ourselves nevertheless awake and continually postpone that one pause in which we think to leave life aside for a moment. In the long, silent black-outs between the different sequences, performers and spectators share that rest, or its impossibility.

Let this be the most striking motif in reportable portraits: the dancers look at one another and the audience all the time. Alternatingly shy and self-assured, the mutual gaze is a gesture of recognition and negotiation that reveals the social space. At the same time, the performers are looking in simply practical terms for moments of connection whilst executing, repeating and juxtaposing their movement phrases. Though duration and interruption are part of the choreography, reportable portraits thrives upon interaction and a nearly unstoppable flow of movement. Picking up cues sometimes entails small hesitations, delays and accelerations, but the dancers let these moments exist, and they deliberately work with the gaps, frictions and doubts. Therefore reportable portraits is – apart from its existential overtones – also light and playful, a quality underscored by the colourful costumes.

The Flemish philosopher Bart Verschaffel calls a “sense of appearance” or “awareness of image” the actual subject matter of the painted portrait. The portrayed doesn’t look so much into a mirror, but is confronted, as it were, with the backside of the painting and can look out of the world in which he finds himself. For this approach of the image, theatre provides the paradigm: “The backside of the image is like the open ‘fourth wall’ of the theatre space; and the one portrayed is like the actor that looks out through that fourth wall into the dark, looks ‘outside’, and sees nothing, but first comes to an awareness of the image, and then to the awareness of his face. The portrait is not a representation of a face, but of a face which knows that it, for the image, is all but face.” And: “To the fourth wall belongs an ‘auditorium’. Someone who watches an image like a portrait, takes place in that very situation created back then. The spectator is expected.”(8)

In reportable portraits, the dancers’ sense of appearance turns itself explicitly against a notion of dance as pictorial medium. The portraits remain in movement, never congealing into images. They do relate to the spectators, with the dancers looking back at them. The combination of a strict writing with a seemingly loose, jolting execution, exudes the urgent temporality of real time composition – and thereby it also evokes the working process in the studio, that is the initial portrait situation. But in the end, the choreographic “sense of appearance” creates a different horizon of expectation for the viewer: by working with movement scores that are instantiated time and again – in which there is no place for improvisation – each minimal shift is meaningful.

The dancers’ many hesitations remind us of the compositional method, but also of the fact that the social does not consist only of a set of rules and representations, but is also a series of practices. Therein lies the “sense of appearance” of the choreographic group portrait, and its political countenance emerges – the deconstruction of a visual regime is not just a matter of artistic disciplines. On stage you don’t so much see five dancers that share a common aesthetics or movement language, but five persons. And indeed they are all different: you see five different registers, five different perspectives, five different realms of meaning. What becomes visible on stage is the virtual multitude of the many doubles that come alive in social interaction, that make us who we are, but also prevent us from ever coinciding with ourselves.

That brings us to the “blind gaze” through the fourth wall and the ever belated consciousness of one’s own face. In The Look of the Portrait, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy holds that the portrait doesn’t revolve around recognition or the visual imitation of an original, but around resemblance. What does the portrait resemble? Nancy discusses the self-portrait of Johannes Gumpp (ca. 1646), in which the painter is represented three times: at the left side in a mirror; at the right side on a painting; and, in the center, the back of the painter at work. The painter’s gaze is three times different: left it is engrossed in technical self-analysis; right it is the portrait’s gaze looking out of the image, “looking out for an undefined possibility of attention or encounter.” The painter’s dark back shows the back surface of the gaze and indicates that we don’t see his actual face. For Nancy, in that absence lies the actual resemblance and the portrait’s truth – what the portrait reveals is the condition of the subject, namely that our own face will always remain invisible to ourselves.(9)

Notice that the triple gaze at work in Gumpp’s self-portrait also explains the different looks in reportable portraits: the technical gaze of dancers picking up cues to execute their movement score; the self-assured gaze with which they address one another and the spectators; and the absence of the gaze when the dancers turn away or withdraw themselves in sleeping poses. According to Nancy, in the portrait’s resemblance lies also a movement theme: “I can ‘resemble myself’ only in a face that is always absent from and outside of me, not like a reflection but like a portrait brought before me, always in advance of me. The portrait portrays this advance and this movement before, this keel at, in the stream of what lies without, opens the thin and quickly erased wake of a ‘self.’”(10)

Nancy formulates the thought of an ever belated self-description in an alternative way, in order to indicate the subject’s condition even more precisely: in the social space the subject is always in advance of itself, it is exposed to other and to the world even before it can relate to it. That is the portrait’s blind gaze: it looks without seeing, it is already subject and stands in the world, before regarding it as an object. And that is also the gaze of the theatre’s social space, as caught in reportable portraits: the vulnerable gaze of people in advance of themselves, exposing themselves and therein acknowledging their subjectivity is made of exteriority, that is of involvement with what is other than oneself. Where recognition founders, Nancy sees resemblance’s promise emerge: “And isn’t a portrait first and foremost an encounter?”(11)

4.

That the dancers in reportable portraits do not share an aesthetics or movement language, is not entirely true – the gestural quality and consistency are too striking for that conclusion. Though a personal interpretation of the notebooks determines the composition, the movement material doesn’t depart from an idiosyncratic logic – in contrast to the directory trilogy. Working together for weeks on a choreographic method also leaves traces in the material, permeates it in its smallest details, because that method is conceived as a system of communication or a game structure in which movement is being passed on. In the discussions after the performance, deufert + plischke didn’t provide much details on their compositional practice, but ‘kinship’ is a theme that occupies them – as their self-description as ‘artist twins’ already indicates. Where the directory series explored that theme in relation to family and gender, this time it is the point of departure for a choreographic endeavour.

Though the dancers have their preferences and tics, their movements are not quotidian. The prevailing material with the hands is remarkable for its gestural character, graceful and stylized, almost emblematic in form. Like antennas the hands or fingers caress the air softly, explore spaces close to the body, or shield off the face and shoulder blades. In those gestures the others have become a memory and a symbol. Or they treat the sensorial in a nearly ritual manner – just like daily weather reports (or Bernardo Soares’ extended, eloquent descriptions of weather and moonlight) are quotidian rituals that remind us of the reality our bodies absorb, or that reconcile us with phenomena that elude our grip. All this can be read in the gestural movement material of reportable portraits, yet there is a particular contrast between a quotidian body and a ‘scripted’ body that doubles it at its surface, which is legible rather than visible, without ever becoming unequivocal. What does this symbolical body, captured in gestures, mean?

Visual anthropologist Hans Belting discusses the relation between emblem and portrait, between the body’s sign and image, in the genesis of the autonomous portrait. In the Renaissance, a modern notion of body and subject are still in process, which means that portraits before that time always refer to the genealogical body of the portrayed: to his family history and kinship, as well as to his place in the social hierarchy. That holds for both emblem and portrait, but often they are to be seen in connection, whereby the natural face is hidden by the collective body: sometimes they are united in the image, otherwise the emblem functions as a lid, side panel or backside of the portrait. On modernity’s threshold, the portrait thus “resembles” its genealogical body, while the mortal, individual body will play a role in the emancipation of the modern subject out of the old social hierarchies.(12)

This historical analysis does not seem compatible with Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-modern, anachronistic reading of the modern autonomous portrait. And yet it is. What the portrait shows in both cases is a heteronomous subject notion: with the genealogical body, the early portrait affirms existing social hierarchies, while Nancy finds traces in the modern portrait of the subject’s blindness and exteriority, detecting its fundamentally social character – but understood as sense of possibility. With this in mind one can say that the second, ‘heraldic’ body, which shows itself in the stylized movement material of reportable portraits, is a genealogical body. Not one that represents blood connections and power constellations, but one that, through a specific choreographic practice, turns the idea of genealogy upside down and completely hands it over to the yet undefined affinities in the public space of the theatre. In that sense, the deconstruction of a clear authorship and an unmistakeably social notion of kinship pervade every movement sequence, down to the smallest gesture.(13)

5.

Near the end of reportable portraits all the dancers find themselves in similar poses on a diagonal, whereby a living practice is for once being reduced to a single image. The dancers are turned inward, covering their faces with their hands. It is not the ‘eventual’ group portrait: as a seemingly solidified image, it still quivers and soon falls apart, and after is dispersed in space and swallowed by a black-out – the performance’s ending. And yet the dancers stand there for a while as dumbfounded question marks, forming a closed image that challenges the previously unfolded complexity of their social choreography. They return for a moment to the writer’s solitary moment, as to suggest that other pole which equally underpins their choreographic practice and poetics: do we after all have to deal with certain issues ourselves?

This image’s obstinate silence is still followed by greeting and applause, with which we find ourselves at the other extreme. Again: this gesture is the recognition of the fact that this performance cannot exist without this audience – or better, without these spectators, because one is treated as an individual throughout the performance. That for deufert + plischke choreography is a process of response, of responsibility and subjectivation, has also a far-reaching impact upon the spectator. Between the restless pauses and the individual exchange of looks, the responsibility is ‘handed over’ in yet another way. reportable portraits takes place mainly in silence, which underscores an awareness of sharing time and space in real time. In contrast to directory: tattoo there is no dramaturgical logic to take care of the spectators and guide them. In reportable portraits you can dream away, remain indifferent, or participate in the choreographic interaction: not so much to work but to act, embrace a moment of blindness and be in advance of yourself in a potential choreography that portrays the social and destines it anew.

Notes

(1) Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Richard Zenith (ed. and trans.), London, 2001, p. 356
(2) Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Alfred MacAdam (trans.), Boston, 1998, p. 41
(3) Pessoa 1998, p. 6. Remark that deufert + plischke use the MacAdam translation in their work.
(4) Pessoa 2001, p. 153
(5) Pessoa 2001, p. 328 and Pessoa 1998, p. 14
(6) Right after the premiere at the Steirischer Herbst Festival, deufert + plischke led the workshop Kinship and other monstrosities (24-29 Sept. 2007) around Sophocles’s Antigone, with theoretical interventions by Marcus Steinweg, Katharina Pewny and myself.
(7) Pessoa 2001, p. 33
(8) Bart Verschaffel, ‘Kleine theorie van het portret’, De Witte Raaf, jg. 14 nr. 81, sept.-okt. 1999, pp. 3-4
(9) See Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, Simon Sparks (ed.), Stanford CA, 2006, pp. 228-233.
(10) Ibid. p. 233
(11) See ibid. pp. 227, 242-243, 246
(12) See Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, München, 2001, pp. 115-142.
(13) On the political meaning of a radical ‘social’ notion of genealogy and kinship (in contrast to a symbolic or natural one), see Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Kinship Between Life & Death, New York, 2000, pp. 12-25.