We Are All Alone Together
Thoughts on Feminine Principles in Performance & Creation Vol. 2
On Jill Connell’s “The Supine Cobbler: A Contemporary Western For Girls”
Well, here we are again. Still here. We’re still meeting in back corners in dusty bars with speculation, war stories, and heartbreak to fill the silence. The musicians arrive and take their place, its Tech week after all, and everyone’s eating a lot more chocolate, smoking a lot more cigarettes, drinking a lot more coffee and wearing a lot more of yesterday’s socks. I said I’d keep you posted on what I know, or don’t know, so far on what it means to work on a western for women out by the tracks of Toronto.
So here’s a thing…..we are all alone together.
The hero departs into the wild. He must learn the landscape if he wants to survive.
Landscape. Which landscape? Wild. Which wild?
We work a lot with eyes open and closed in our movement and listening work. Both present different challenges. At any given moment, where is my focus? I close my eyes and boom my mind, heart, thoughts, memories, sensations, blood, guts, gravity flood into focus. The wild interior. What is there on any given day is vast. What’s there now? Dare you to close your eyes and find out…. The landscape of you. Constant. Constantly changing. Constantly you constantly changing. You can spend a long time with your eyes closed traversing the interior landscape, the wilderness of your soul. How do you survive it? What must you learn? How many times do I have to keep going down these same paths before I realize which ones take me to the snake pit, the haunted forest, the deep waters of grief? Truth is the paths change with me. Constantly changing, constantly me. Luckily these same paths also lead to defiant joy and tender abandon.
I think I became a writer because I can get so easily lost meandering around the interior world(s) within me that I needed ways to find my way back to centre (wherever that is). I hurl letters out hoping they will fix into words that will weave into sentences that will lead the way for me to follow.
Language can be a machete in the jungle. A match in the dark. A map from beyond.
I know this because in times of personal crisis I have a tendency to stare at my bookshelves. I turn to the words of others for proof. To remind me many maps exist. To remind me many souls have been, and are currently out there traversing the wild landscape—inner and outer--and that we are all alone together.
Open your eyes love. The moon is rising and if we’re both sitting in a dimly lit corner in the back of this run-down bar with our eyes closed we may never make it to morning. You can merge the inner wild with the outer in one silent, subtle motion.
Open your eyes love.
On any given day how many people do you look in the eye? How much sustained eye contact do you think you make? It’s taken me a while to remember to look people in the eye more when I talk to them. I’m actually quite shy and I often think better staring off into the distance or at the floor in conversations. I practice eye contact (secretly).
What happens to us when we look into the wildness contained within another’s eyes? Science says you can fall in love after 4 minutes of sustained eye contact with someone after a series of intimacy building questions. Wow. No wonder performers keep falling in love with their collaborators. Art is a form of intimacy. It can also accelerate and exponentially expand intimacy. Through Art the inner wild is exposed. (Strip-tease of the soul?) I’ve usually felt most naked while being fully clothed, staring at the floor trying to make art while people watch. So what happens to me when I look into the eyes of my fellow collaborators? Or when I use durational eye contact with audience members in my solo performance work? To attempt to put the experiences into language is difficult. But a phrase I return to is this:
We are all alone together.
Our eyes can be open but closed.
They can also be closed but open.
It’s a matter of intention.
Tedi Tafel, the artist leading our movement work has introduced a new approach to seeing. She suggests we approach our seeing as though we are touching. See as if to touch. How does this change our seeing? What does this feel like? What is it to touch without touching? We practice it in our work together. As our familiarity with the practice develops, so does our language around sharing our experience of it. Tedi speaks of how ‘seeing to touch’ invites the awareness and sensation of density into seeing. That the density of our being can meet the density of what we are seeing. Brain scans have revealed to us that when we see, it is not just the visual cortex that activates in our brains, but also the brain maps for tactile sensation, spatial relations and physical movement. Neurology is proving the supposed differences between our senses to be somewhat illusory within the phenomenal plasticity of our brains. Your inner landscape is not fixed, but highly adaptive, evolving and alive.
As I write this I start looking at the objects strewn about my desk. Papers, cords, a spoon, nail polish, elastic band, pens, pencil, cigar box, envelops…I start to see these objects as if to touch them with my seeing. I feel sensation in my chest, the weight of my form within space. For me, seeing as if to touch changes my experience of proximity. I feel nearer to the object. I feel its density meet my own. I feel incredibly alive looking a pencil. Suddenly visual stimulation feels out of control. It feels like touch. My skin feels stimulated, I can hear my pulse. This pencil is insane. It has so many details. Varied colours and textures, lines and shapes within it—temperatures—smells—my heart beat accelerates.
If I look at this pencil for the next four minutes will I fall in love?
Probably.
Truth is--I have fallen in love with a new way of seeing.
I believe this ‘seeing as if to touch’ is a form of empathy. One that anyone can practice. And empathy is something we must all practice. To bring one’s density to an encounter. Density: mass divided by volume. What is my density? Mass divided by Soul? Inner and outer landscapes divided by what?
Here we are sitting across from one another, eyes open and I am seeing you as if to touch. To encounter the density of you I must acknowledge my own. To see the wildness of your landscape I must see you from within my own. Wild to wild.
How will we survive this meeting?
We either fall in love or have a shoot out.
If you’re me, probably both at the same time. It’s a western after all.
We open the show this week. We are inviting new eyes and ears and bodies and hearts into our collective landscape. We are learning to see each other as if to touch. We endeavour to see our witnesses as if to touch. We invite you to see us, in our work, in such a way. Wild to wild.
Alone. Together.
For more on The Supine Cobbler, Jill Connell & tickets www.itcouldstillhappen.com
