Symptomatic (Writing the Movement)

He’s going to say something. He moves his lips in front of the microphone. He adjusts. He adjusts again. At the back of the space the other dancer is moving in position. He stands up, walks to the front. Then they are both standing alert. Still. Breathing. Then break.

Shadows against the white paper. Copy me. I’ll do what you do. What am I doing. I know, I’ll follow you. What are you doing. No, you follow me. No. Yes. I’m doing it wrong. I’ll fix it.

Deleuze wrote of the philosopher Spinoza that he defined a body in two ways. First, he defined bodies in terms of their motions and rest; the movements of the particles in space. Secondly, he defined bodies in terms of how they could affect and be affected by other bodies. In Spinoza’s universe bodies are always involved, always interacting. New questions must be asked about these interacting bodies. These questions will be specific. “How do individuals enter into composition with one another to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world?”

With a stage, sound, lights, microphone cables, a yellow pair of headphones, white paper and themselves, Emmett and Otto Ramstad negotiate the microphysics of interaction. I say microphysics, following Foucault, because microphysics describes power. “Micro” here does not mean miniature; it means “mobile and non-localizable relations”. Power constantly flows across, along, through the space. Sometimes it follows the lines made as the performers draw things. Sometimes power is evidently a push-pull back and forth between the performers—evident in the shrug of shoulders, an eyelid twitch, a covert glance. But the invisible power lines are important too. These are the lines of power that spectators use to interpret what they are seeing.

From a filmed interview:

Olive: What do you know about your birth?
Emmett: Well, our mom had a C-section, and they pulled me out first. I was pulled out by the head and Otto was pulled out by the feet.
Otto: Yeah.
Olive: Can you talk about what you consider to be the same and different about you?
Otto: I guess I’m just a lot more verbal. More of a lyrical genius. Emmett is more just like a… I don’t know, sort of, better at any construction and more good at uh spackling.
Olive: Can you talk about similarities, not just differences and competition?
Otto: We’re both really good at wiring and electrics.
Emmett: I would think our differences are, I’m a more visual, and literal kind of person, and Otto’s more kinesthetic. And that could be because I was pulled out by my head. I’m more in my head, and Otto’s more in his feet.

An experiment: three viewings take place during an artist residency in Florida. Each audience is offered something different to frame their experience of watching the show. In the first viewing, the performance begins as Olive interviews Otto and Emmett about their twinship. Feedback consists of audience members talking about the differences and similarities between Otto and Emmett. At the second viewing, an article purporting to be from Scientific American is placed on the theater seats before the performance. This article introduces Emmett and Otto as rhizozygotic twins: twins whose ova were released four years apart, but whose embryos grew and fused together. Technical language, historical facts about the history of artificial reproductive technologies and cryogenics, and quotes from “specialist researchers” bestow an aura of truth upon the text. In the Q&A later, viewers interpret the microphone cord drawings as the umbilical cord and birth references. One graduate student viewer writes feedback: “Without the Scientific American article, I would not have understood this performance at all.” At a third viewing, audience members are given no texts, no introductory interviews. No personal information. This time, viewers talk about the performance as “art” rather than “interpreting truth”. We discuss the shadows on the back wall, the feelings that erupt as the performers come close together and far away; the temporal rhythm and stillness in the piece; how the back-and-forth of the duet triggers memories of relationships or family situations.

In this science experiment, we learn that truth effects are easy to simulate. Scientific language, no matter how rudimentary, retains an unquestionability, a magical power. This power has the capacity to stratify the lines of interplay between knowledge and movement that “Symptom” seeks to disrupt and bend into new or other openings. Emmett and Otto become other to the individuals in the audience, placed on stage as science experiments themselves. “In the twin study, they were really interested in the shape of our heads,” Emmett explains in the filmed interview. Someone in the audience hears this and responds in three ways. She looks at the shape of the heads of the performers. She thinks of “twins” and wonders if Otto and Emmett live apart, if they tell each other everything, if they date sisters (or brothers). Which is the “evil” twin and which is the “good” twin? Third, she feels a twinge of sympathy for these twins who have been studied since birth. Poor things. What freaks. How weird. It’s all they can do, I suppose, to take power into their own hands and exhibit themselves.

“It’s like a feedback loop,” Dan Graham wrote about his artwork Past/Future Split Attention. Graham could have been talking about the möbius strip that happens between two people when one predicts the other’s movements/feelings and the other describes what the first has just done or felt. The secret of a möbius strip is that it never repeats a circle. The path of a finger tracing the surface of the paper can’t ever be only inside or outside. The logic of cause and effect bends into a loop where one becomes indistinguishable from the other. A feedback loop can take place between audience and performers too. But the finger tracing the möbius strip still repeats. Inside or outside, cause or effect, the path is the same. So we ask different questions: how can we open up the space, the performance, the frame, so that we are all disrupting the repetition of cause and effect, inside or outside, sameness and difference?