A Disappearing Number, By Complicite

5 September 2007 - 6 October 2007

Barbican Theatre

Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney
Devised by the Company
Original music by Nitin Sawhney
Design by Michael Levine

Co-produced by Complicite, barbicanbite07, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival, Ruhrfestspiele, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth

On April 14th 1913 Srinivasa Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge after a long journey from India. A former postal clerk, he spent the next five years working closely with the mathematics professor G.H. Hardy, who had invited Ramanujan on the strength of some theorems he sent through the post. Thus began what Complicite call, “the most mysterious and romantic mathematical collaboration of all time.”

Or did this collaboration begin with the first letter Hardy received? Or when Ramanujan, a Brahmin, sought permission to go overseas? Did it begin when he first began asking questions? When Hardy was playing Real Tennis? Or when the S.S. Nevada left port in Madras? Where or whenever it began, ‘A Disappearing Number’ draws inspiration from Ramanujan’s time in Cambridge like water from a well, exploring its implications for mathematics, creativity, spirituality and – most of all – the continuity of time, space and emotions. In doing so, it travels between Europe and India, the First World War and the present day, the burden of proof and the possibilities of string theory. It weaves between themes and stories, and eventually weaves them all together. By the time this mesmeric performance draws to a close, it’s impossible to say whether anything has a beginning or an end.

And yet ‘A Disappearing Number’ starts with quite a different approach. The play opens with a mathemetician explaining some concepts, as if the theatre is a lecture hall and we are her students. Then an actor comes along and dramatically disolves the fourth wall – he pushes the set around, adjusts his colleague’s microphone, tells us that he’s an actor and that none of this is real – apart from the maths, that is. As a theatrical device, this is even more clever than it might seem at first. It dynamically engages the audience and introduces us to the malleability of the set. By drawing us in as collaborators in this fiction (instead of spectators), it harnesses our imaginations to create and populate complex scene changes. But just as the actor acknowledges the artifice of the theatrical endeavour (and builds our trust), he tells us that the ‘Maths is real.’ He reveals one trick, in other words, to pull off a bigger one. In one sleight of hand, we are both initiated into the fabric of the play and convinced of the strength of its message.

This initiation is important because ‘A Disappearing Number’ does not have a clear direction. It meanders between times, concepts and stories, presenting fragments of visual and aural experience whose significance is not immediately clear. At times, it can be frustrating when the drama pauses on a piece of action that’s hard to understand. At others, it’s disconcerting to find a thread disappear just when its meaning starts to come into focus. Instead of building like a linear series – like the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 that were drawn on a board at the beginning of the show – ‘A Disappearing Number’ fills out like the circles of chalk that are poured on stage, or like the inter-continuity of numbers that comes to light as the play progresses. Just as there is no gap between numbers, so there are no gaps in or between the stories told. The device of the opening scene gives this anti-linear continuity the time to develop – it wins our trust and buys our patience to wait for patterns to emerge.

When these patterns do emerge, it is almost imperceptibly. They evolve through words, sounds, images and movements that are layered together in a continuous stream. So although we see Ramanujan die at the beginning of the play as well as at the end, this circularity becomes clear somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, the play’s themes don’t aspire to be universal. The tragic love story between an enthusiastic lecturer and her ambitious husband is not a cliché, but a moving and sombre relationship between two people who appear very real. And what could be a hackneyed distinction between a ‘spiritual’ East and a ‘rational’ West is given credibility by its weight in real relationships. When the overall ‘pattern’ of the piece makes itself clear it is not as a solution, but a reconciliation of individual truths.

Complicite is one of Europe’s best known theatre companies. Its name is synonymous with experimental theatre and it has been influential in terms of movement and visual display, as much as anything else. So there is a tendency to arrive at A Disappearing Number and expect to be blown away. But don’t expect results without giving something in return. This play requires effort and engagement, and (for some at least), an initial leap of faith that – yes – mathematics can be a beautiful and delicate skeleton for art.

Drawing from Ramanujan and Hardy’s collaboration like a well, A Disappearing Number never quite gets to the bottom of how their relationship worked. Likewise, India is a country skirted around – visited or left behind, but never explained or lived in. And the relationship between two lovers is only revealed through their desire for closeness, not the closeness itself. In fact, A Disappearing Number does just that on its audience – it disappears. What is left instead of plot resolution, is the loud, enduring resonance of memory, creativity and belief.

Written by Mary Paterson

www.complicite.org

‘Exposed’ by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens is part of ‘Love Art Lab’
Chelsea Theatre, London
Saturday 22nd September 2007

You might have heard of Annie Sprinkle as the former porn star and sex-worker turned performance artist, whose piece ‘Public Cervix Announcement’ invited audience members to look inside her vagina. You might also have heard of Elizabeth Stephens, a multimedia artist and academic who has been making work about women’s sexuality for over a decade. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t. In ‘Exposed’ Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens aren’t here to talk to you about their work, their egos, their politics. Sure, it might come up along the way, but what’s really being exposed here is their mutual affection for each other and their explicit desire to “make the world a more fun, sexy, tolerant, well-educated, love-filled place”.

‘Exposed’ is part of ‘Love Art Lab’, a seven-year performance piece devised by the two artists, that includes visual art, theatre, performance, interventions, filmmaking, lectures, printed matter and activism. The structure of Love Art Lab is born out of a spirit of generosity and collaboration – artist Linda M. Montano invited other artists to use her seven year theme. Sprinkle and Stephens have incorporated the seven chakras into the Love Art Lab schema, which means that 2007, with ‘Exposed’ in its third year, is the year of the yellow chakra – signifiying courage and power.

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens tell us about their relationship – including the story of how they met, the story of how they got (and continue to get) married, the story of how they tried to get pregnant. The two women talk over each other, meandering in and out of the same narrative, occasionally waiting for the other to hurry up or remember her cue. Their stage presence together is affectionate and affecting, and told in this way their stories add up to more than just anecdotes. They are a record and manifestation of Sprinkle and Stephens’ life together.

This means that there are bad bits as well as good. Annie’s breast cancer elicits one of the only non-spoken parts of the show. The cancer comes as a horrific surprise to the audience, who until now have been able to revel in the joyousness of Annie and Elizabeth’s relationship. But the illness also makes clear quite how apparent - and infectious - their love for each other has become.

Aside from the cancer, the joyful tone of the performance means that when politics does crop up, it’s in the nicest possible way. There’s an open debate about marriage when Annie and Elizabeth describe how they decided to get hitched. They invite discussion with the audience, hear everyone out and hand round a list of reasons about why marriage is a bad idea. Then they quietly give their reasons, and get on with the show. It’s an inclusive and respectful example of the artists’ dictum to spread love around, and it seems – like everything in this show – to be completely natural.

The catalyst for making ‘Love Art Lab’ was the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These particular wars hang behind ‘Exposed’, making the performance an act of defiance against war and everything it stands for. But it is referenced obliquely by familiar footage of US troops in a desert, which emphasies the fact that ‘Exposed’ is an indirect reaction to violence and destruction. Critics may say this makes it harmless at best, and evasive at worst. But I defy even the most hardened cynics to spend an hour and a half in these artists’ company and not come out with their hearts melted. Perhaps this is a throwback to an idealistic, seventies kind of activism, but it feels genuine and efffective nonetheless. Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens ask us all to, ‘spread a little love’, and by the time you leave the theatre you’ll be urging others to do the same.

Written by Mary Paterson

http://www.loveartlab.org/
http://www.anniesprinkle.org/
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/stephens/

Production still. courtesy matts gallery 2007

Michael Curran
Look What They Done To My Song
19 September – 18 November 2007
Matts Gallery, London

Three songs - The Devil is Afraid of Music, What have they done to my song, Ma and How does it Feel to Feel? - were performed and filmed in the exhibition space of Matt’s Gallery, creating an open recording session and film set for three days. Through the subsequent editing process, the recorded material is subjected to radical temporal shifts through the use of overlays, speeding up, slowing down and repetition. This manipulation creates a series of rhythms, counterpoints and silences and explores the construction of song and narrative expectation, forming a drama (or crisis) of performance. The songs themselves are at stake, their survival questioned through these processes of translation.’ (Matts Gallery)

In Chapter 2 of ‘The Inoperative Community’ Jean Luc Nancy defines myth as a group of people gathered together to hear the same story or myth. These people, whoever they are, are brought together in, and defined by, the moment of story telling. In this way, the telling of and listening to myth (or ‘mything’ to use Nancy’s phrase) binds together those who are present in a common - mythical - purpose. Importantly, the scene of telling, showing and revealing of the myth is also mythic. Analogising myth to Curran’s first London solo show ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ at Matts Gallery is not mere writerly whim. The clues are in the exhibition. Myth links together what is actually happening in the combined booklet, CD, installation and film that makes up ‘Look What They Done To My Song’.

Inside Matts Gallery is an unmanned microphone resting on a stage, abandoned recording equipment and unplugged headphones. Partial song lyrics, fan paraphernalia and detailed event memos are stuck to two large pin boards. There is no sound. Various mythological characters, including a Cenataur- half man half horse – are painted directly onto the walls as leitmotif throughout the installation. Outside in the foyer is a screening of a live recording session that was conducted in the installation. In it musicians can be seen and heard tuning instruments, singers sing, camera crews film. Clearly, something happened here in the gallery. However, it is clear from the displayed remnants of that past event, the scribbled lyrics, the memo’s, the film of the prior action and the distinctly abandoned feel of the installation that the object, focus and content of ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ is somewhere else, somewhere other than Matt’s Gallery.

The main focus of ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ is actually the three songs that have long since left the building, or are now out in the ether or on another frequency. That which remains in ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ represents only their traces; the space the songs were created in, the film that captured their making, the book that describes them, the CD that contains them. Combined, these elements are not, nor ever could be, the song, but that’s the point. Curran is creating something else in Look What They Done to My Song, something that carefully encircles the absent songs and their originary or primal scene; he is creating a myth. The myth is of the songs themselves, their sound, purpose and content, as well as their now lost or mythical past moment of performance. It is the subsequent act of creating, telling and revealing of this particular myth that the exhibition ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ embodies. Going back to Nancy’s definition of myth, it is also clear that as visitors to the exhibition, we are implicated in this myth making; our coming together at Matts Gallery with the common purpose to hear, see and know more about Look What They Done To My Song is also mythical.

‘Look What They Done To My Song’ is a highly self-reflexive exhibition; both its object and subject (the songs and their myth) are simultaneously about myth and are mythical. The installation performs the myth surrounding the songs by framing their absence; the missed moment of the songs’ creation, the lack of sound, the huge gaps in the narrative as to what happened to the songs in the editing process, moreover why they were edited. ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ also uses the songs as myth to infect, transmit or power its mythical message; the song and its story is re-told on every CD, witnessed in each tour venue. The texts in the exhibition booklet, and of course my writing here, also play a part in performing that myth.

Having visited Matts Gallery and subsequently gone home to listen to the CD and read the booklet, I’m still not sure exactly what the content of Curran’s message is. Its clear these songs and the myth that surrounds them are supposed to live on, temporally, materially and performatively; to be ‘live’ as both song and myth in order to do something but, to my ears at least, their message is truly subliminal. Perhaps this is too critical. Nancy defines Myth as tautegorical, meaning that it says nothing other than itself or is self asserting. Mything, then, is a speech act with which ‘Look What They Done To My Song’ doesn’t describe or interpret but simultaneously does or ‘communicates itself’. The exhibitions’ focus isn’t the content or ‘truth’ of its message but the act of telling or communicating it; its music is in the making, the process of encircling or ‘coming to’ its particular content: its myth. The lack of clarity or classification, the messy gaps or ‘crisis’ of narrative and performance the work manifests are where the exhibition thrives. In this sense Look What They Done To My Song represents an artistic hybrid and potentially misunderstood liminal being; an impossible, uncanny – and wise – mythical character trapped in a moment of transformation, much like the Cenataur himself.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

References
‘The Inoperative Community’, Jean Luc Nancy, 1991, University of Minnesota Press

Look What They Done To My Song’ is accompanied by a free publication, the 14th in the second series of Matt's Gallery booklets and includes a CD of the performances.

The film ‘Look What They Done to My Song’ will tour to the Arnolfini, Bristol from 17 September 2007 to 6 January 2008