Performance philosophy with chairs and small boy
Jonny Blamey. 2014
How Many Chairs to make the future: Hamish MacPherson. Portrait Room, Grove House, University of Roehampton.
Me and Balthazar my three year old Swedish speaking son met Stella Dimirakopoulou, my performance philosophy collaborator, at Waterloo station on the train to Barnes to attend “How Many Chairs to make the future” at the Portrait room. The event was called an “Installation” and lasted all day from 9am ‘til 6pm so we turned up at around 3pm after dawdling through the beautiful grounds of Roehampton University with the Wisteria tunnel and goose lakes and trees showering blossom most poetically.
Balthazar is a kind of authenticity gauge for me because he is a natural in terms of appreciating reality and his mood is very sensitive to the environmental context. We entered into the Portrait room and it is very beautiful in itself. It has a small stage at one end and French windows that lead out into a lawn all along one wall giving lots of beautiful light. There is a rose wood grand piano well-tuned in the near corner stage end and sumptuous portraits lining the oak panelled walls. All the wood and golden light made for a beautiful noble mood. Balthazar insisted that I take his shoes and jacket off and give him a little lunch. Stella and I appreciated the “rules” that were explained on a flip chart. One of the rules allowed for any rules to be changed, but insisted that the rules must be followed, however this itself was a rule, so hypothetically could be changed. We were to select a concept from a list of concepts and explore the concept using chairs. The chairs were of a good institutional type, four sturdy legs, square rigid design with cushioned seat and back rest. I did not count the chairs but I think we were told that there were 25.
I selected the concept “Discourse” and began arranging the chairs. Some were already arranged in a circle by the previous participants with whom we over lapped but did not interact. Hamish asked if he could take pictures. Balthazar was instantly taken with arranging chairs and began arranging them into an orderly line with much enthusiasm. Stella was more reticent and thoughtful. My first idea was to arrange some chairs into two opposing lines facing each other. I suppose it was in my mind that discourse was a binary thing with two opposing ideologies or points of view. There ought to be some sense of interaction. Stella was interested in the instability of discourse so arranged a statue of chairs that were unbalanced or precariously balanced. I imitated the sculpture in an organic way, like the Dali painting of Narcissus. This to me was visually impressive, two similar chaotic structures in the middle of the room. Balthazar meanwhile began working on the closed circle of chairs. He created an entrance into the circle and began saying “open”. I responded by taking chairs from the row and putting them into the circle. Here was a concept of an open discourse but where the frame work was fixed and ideas were “digested” without significantly changing the framework. However the framework did eventually dissolve and the attention moved elsewhere.
Stella seemed to find it difficult and suggested that we add another concept to make it easier. She suggested that Balthazar added “Pleasure”. I thought that Balthazar was doing pretty well on discourse. Balthazar left the building entirely on at least one occasion and we had to catch him outside.
Discourse between me and Stella on discourse took an interesting turn when we discussed time and whether discourse relies on what is there, or reacts against it. Stella asked what are the chairs? I had kind of thought this was obvious without thinking about it, but when the question was asked I did not know the answer. Positions? Statements? People? The question of time reared its head. Is discourse developmental? In that is any point in a discourse in a way better than any previous point? Our chair discourse had covered the room with abstract shapes that Balthazar seemed to find easy to respond to. I found it easy to respond to as well and my mind was teeming with thoughts about discourse. I felt discourse to be destructive and chronologically flat, like a life. Stella said that discourse was an objective thing that existed timelessly although things are added at specific times. So for example philosophical discourse over the last 2000 years is something one can study today, it is still in some sense in the present. The room was a history of our meta discourse. I wondered whether our final activity, which was to build chair by chair a completely unstable structure with maximum instability, was set against the context of the relics of our previous actions, relics which were in themselves fossils of previous now unseen activity. Balthazar tried to climb the maximally unstable structure and it collapsed although he sat in a central chair and was completely unharmed or even touched by the collapse all around him. Hamish said that we were approaching the task in a Process fashion. I can’t remember his words but he said “process” which I have learned is a key concept among contemporary choreographers and performance artists. Process versus product. We had no product, we were just shuffling chairs around and making comments. We are after all just living, and I increasingly feel that this is all we can do, and that a hope to achieve something lasting is a delusion of capitalism. Had we created the most fascinating fixed arrangement of chairs that perfectly expressed the beauty and complexity of the concept of discourse, it would still have passed and we would have still passed the same amount of time. There is no escaping time and time is essentially related to decay and death and can only be measured or observed through change. Perhaps this was my insight into discourse, that it is ultimately pointless, it is a process that does not necessarily lead anywhere. This may sound bleak but it can actually be liberating to think that discourse is just there, just another peacock tail in our most beautiful of pointless creatures.
We moved on to another topic which was “Therapy”. I felt that what we had to work with was the disorder created by discourse. I have studied the philosophy of mental disorder and have thought deeply about aspects of psychotherapy. What is the purpose of therapy? One answer is to restore normal function. The normal cunction of a chair is quite obvious. So me and Balthazar arranged the chairs into rows, face up and neat and tidy, with one chair facing two rows like a lecturer facing the audience. Meanwhile Stella made the chairs at the back face each other in pairs. Stella took a card to get inspiration and the card said to relate the concept to you personally. She laughed at this in a way that revealed that she did not want to related how the concept of therapy related to her personally. Balthazar used two of her chairs to form a bed and lay down peacefully. Stella also did this on another pair.
This made me think of Sophia Efstathiou’s Ideobics talk in Athens School of Performance Philosophy. My idea was this, the arranging of the chairs according to a concept is very much an intense way of emanating the concept. Balthazar had been very energetic enlivened and engaged during discourse. He was much more happy than his average. I think the cncept of discourse was in the air and he could feel it. Discourse is fun and sporty and Balthazar picked up on that. Therapy on the other hand is more healing, relaxing and restorative. Arranging the chairs into their normal positions and restoring them to normal function meant that Balthazar felt relaxed and able to lie down and rest. He was still playing, but he was playing at resting and self nurturing, instead of exploring and interacting. It is surprising how different Discourse felt from Therapy in our bodies.
Hamish asked as what we thought and I deflected the question to Stella asking her if we had learned anything. She replied that we had learned that therapy was not like discourse. I objected that I saw many connections, but that is because I am insane.
New people came in and Balthazar became unmanageable. I decided to leave but Balthazar kept running away and fighting me. He escaped into the rest of the building and I had to keep catching him. I had a play on the beautiful piano while the new people continued with Stella. They were working on “fear”. It dawned on me that Balthazar was now running away and objecting to things, to paradigmatic fear reactions. The connection with ideobics was this. Saying words can have an effect on your physiology, and ideobics utilises this commonly known fact to influence our physiology in benign ways. Arranging chairs in a room according to a concept is obviously going to have a larger effect than merely uttering the word.
Eventually I managed to leave with Balthazar. He was very happy and spent the next hour picking flowers and singing with birds.