Paz: Hello, welcome everybody and thank you for being here.

The stage is not empty.
Participants gather for something to happen.
There are some general lights.
Participant A sits among you, spectators
Participant B is on the stage.

Christa: there is this question. Maybe even before there is anything or anybody visible. The question of you and the question of me. But I won‘t ask you. I won‘t ask you for your name. We could be guests, we are both arriving. But, how can I invite you when all I have is this body as a space? Maybe we are both displaced persons.

Paz: Maybe it is better that you know right away: I might not be able to keep my promise. I’d like to be able to do so…but because I don’t want to simply remind silent, still, I fully intend to dialogue with you. I accept to reply. I pretend to reply to the question. Yes, indeed, I cannot answer your questions but I can answer you. I’m doing it to tell you that, and, in doing so I am participating.

Christa: I saw that dance piece of yours. First you were choreographing a solo for yourself which you then showed and offered to another dance-maker. You started to negotiate about what his translation of your solo could be and in the performance, the two of you were showing both solos, one after the other. It was as if you gave away your history; you dissected it and offered it to a ghost who then became its host. Your movements were becoming his guests and I could watch the act, the movement of hospitality, the promise of hospitality going on between you.

P: ok…I promise you to do something: I promise to translate the ‘who’ that is promising into ‘what’.

C: while you are arriving your past keeps want to be told. There is your moving and it’s like I lay down in the pattern it leaves behind… Maybe you are giving a temporary space, the utopia of a ‘Here I am’. Can we negotiate that fiction? But anyway, I won‘t identify with you. No identity to refer to: no name, no father, no nation.

P: You are saying that this negotiation is a fiction? So, ‘What’ are we in this negotiation? I don’t think that what we negotiate is in regard of a personal project or a collective one. ‘What I’m doing here is thinking ‘with’ you. I don’t have in mind to assimilate you and it is not you that I try to include, but to re-think our own sensibility and the different ways we are using in dealing with each other.

So, here we are: You are watching the act, I’m giving the move and perhaps we hope to become becoming ‘An Ourselves’ through the dominant gaze of a third one. For instance, it was the hands of somebody else that brought me here. This is the accident I recognize. And by doing so, I’m establishing this relation in order to disagree OF myself.

C: But I think that recognizing, in general, is an accident, it may be very helpful in our lives, but to be honest, I don’t think that recognizing can actually take place. Because recognizing needs identity, and we said: no identity.

P: Well, and we also said ‘no name’ but we do know that we are surrounded by names. The problem is that there is no one name, but many, as well as there is no one identity but many…there may be names and identities but they are not the result of any action … but perhaps the result of history, history as a series of disobedient events to original intentions. Like in a letter or a postcard: I can speak the message in a different way than the one who sent it: to change the key, to translate or interpret…

C: While you are standing there, I touch you with my gaze; I make a copy of you in my head. I cannot take your place, I cannot be in your place but I can try to meet you by sight-touch, by eyes-on, in a way so that I can actually build you inside of me. This is my way of empathy: I can never really know what you are but the form of you I build inside of me is being in contact, in touch with the inside of my shape, my form, my space.

P: ‘The future is given as being from what is absolutely surprising’: I am your guest. This is what allows the intervention of your eyes in the formation of my body. In this intimate violence that we are establishing ‘You could always kill me’: ‘The murder of my body could be the impossibility for me of saying ‘I am’ inasmuch as what I am means ‘here I am’. And ‘yes, I do’: I want to endure and take the risk of this experience and the purposelessness of this act.

(Pause)

…Let’s BECOME secondary and questioned from either side:

I propose you to employ all the surgery in our hands, in a cruel way, in order to measure the degree of questioning and critic that we could bare…

(Pause)

Are you afraid? …I’m aware that I may be setting off a certain panic… but maybe this proposition could also be setting off a ‘discovery’.

Discovery could be the evidence of this fear, or the interruption of our auto-complacency: To make feel fear is not an act I produce out of my will, no; it is the event which brings this sense.

(Pause)

Let’s put it in a different way: We said no name, no nation, no state. But for instance, my body, my presence here could be the state. If the state is the search of the common good then, art could be the truly state.

Offering the good.

But don’t get me wrong please: I talk about the ‘common good’ as the state which is given in a place able to host the different, to presence, the place in which there is always more of what is actually given. Because ‘the given’ as being surprising puts me into ‘a state of emergency’ and thus into a state of ‘emergence’.

C: Still, this is a kind of ‘here I am’ that I need to disturb. The common good could be violent… I won’t be able to host, to welcome or recognize the good that is being offered and instead – “in my state” – I want to make use of the surgery in our hands to cut this open.

P: I have undergone surgery many times. My body knows of emergencies and reparations; It knows were new paths were broken, spread apart and reorganized; it knows where it is advisable to open up still empty places, to rearrange the gap, the blank spaces.

(Pause)

Eyes touch me, Hands move me but they do not precisely ‘visit’ my body. In the moment my body is touched, it loses its sovereignty. This place no longer is what it was.
My body plays itself out as being represented as divided, un-established, disorganised and unstable as heterogeneous. Perhaps my body is a place split, surrounded: a haunted place.

C: This is not a place I can go. My empathy is my alternative to a way of appropriation that is happening out of fear. And it is about not bridging the gap. I see a ghost. I am not afraid. One cannot protect oneself from disappearance anyway. So we better rehearse for it:

You offer the visibility you create and dissolve. While you make yourself visible you are blind but leading me to the place where you will disappear. I offer my house of perception, this non-place, and this utopia. I invite you and we are creating time. Emotion is a measurement of time.

(Silence)

P: Yes, this is the attempt: I offer you the visibility I create and dissolve. I rehearse my own disappearance by way of disorganising the assumptions that brought me here. While rehearsing, we interrupt time and we become a unity impossible to complete.

It is a sort of tactic: of nomadism, of emancipation, in which we distribute our history and geography differently. It is a tactic of finding ways on how we can or could create distance. Or it is as if we put ourselves on the side of change, against self-interest — because if you do change, you’ll no longer be that self, and will no longer have the same interests. Also the possibility of misunderstanding, of mistake…this possibility of evil, if you want, is in its own way, a chance. It gives time.

Let’s allow time.

(Long Silence)

Let’s allow time as another time to be invented. Perhaps we need a third one to interrupt the ‘time’ we are ‘making’ here, one that suspends the dialogue as an uninterested transaction: This dialogue, this meeting to be undone, even abandoned…

(Paz disappears. She goes behind the curtain, back stage)

C: I will not understand, I will not get you right. One can explain the illness and the other one describe the pain and both are a lie.

P: …

C: …shall we change places?

P: …

C: (To the audience): I’d like to ask you to move to the stage please…

(Audience moves to the stage. Paz comeback and places herself on the stage together with the audience). A big circle has being formed on the stage.

(Christa and Paz participate in that circle, they are in between the crowd and they keep on with their dialogue now in this new situation)

C: While we are negotiating about which fiction to be in power, the danger of disappearance is always there. If you knew my language, if I could assume our understanding, I could not be hostess for you. I could not welcome you; I could not embrace you in the moment of your disappearing.

P: Could we negotiate with the ones, we are not noticing right now? Nor a negotiation between colleagues, to that would mean to be negotiating in a common place or defending only what we already know.

We don’t want this negotiation ‘to become’ effective…I mean… we do not want to know its end or to know something definitive about it. This is not about ideology. We come here without imperative, without order and without duty. As spectators and participants of this event, we welcome each other ‘unconditionally’…

But, how is this ‘unconditional-negotiation constructed? I think that it is constructed through fiction …Whether I like it or not, whether it moves me or not…here we are…

(Pause)

C: The German word for ‘Hospitality’ is ‘Gastfreundschaft’, consisting of the word meaning ‘guest’ and the word meaning ‘Friendship’, so actually it says: friendship with the guest. Can we try to establish a kind of friendship with a ghost as well? Would this then be a – temporary - friendship without a purpose? Like you were saying about this act of art, any act of art: it is purposeless. Again: when I was watching your piece, watching and “meeting” the performers was like meeting ghosts, meeting someone between absence and presence but at the same time feeling empathy for them.

P: I think that we are moving in between ghosts. My body is the one I have and the history of the ones I’ve lost. The ghost doesn’t warn us of its visit. It eventually appears. I could not say that I’m ready for it as I don’t know how I would react on it. I can only anticipate the movement in between the ghost’s space and mine and the ‘nostalgia’ that we could be sharing at that moment: the ghost longing for a familiar place which does no longer exist and the discovery that my body is no longer properly mine, but ‘the other’s body’.

Perhaps this stage is the ground of all nostalgias. Here I am. Here’s my body. And here’s the occasion for an unveiling of what I am partially.

Perhaps this stage is the ground of all displacements as well: practicing surgery upon our own bodies. The stage as if is being the operation room: quitting our place of origin. Split, cut off, disturbed and therefore reorganized…

Should this operation care for the spectator, or should it disturb her and give her and ethic benefit? … There is no ethic benefit without and aesthetic benefit. That’s the artistic challenge I suppose…

C: But caring for the spectator means disturbing her. Taking care of her means questioning her ‘here I am’. She is your hostess as much as she is your guest. Not asking her name you might offer her some medicine, but no cure while she is almost visiting your body. And she, too, might break her promise. No satisfactory relationship, it seems.

P: How could it be otherwise since one never knows what must be kept?

C: What could we gain from it? Some new past to carry with us, the way we measure time and the way we measure questioning. I am hosting the scars and I am hosting the knife, the surgery. I won’t give away the power of dividing and I want to rehearse it again, this becoming friends with a ghost.

(Paz moves to centre of the circle. She undresses and makes an action with her body. Showing holes of her body until she lies down to breath and hear the sound of her stomach and guts)

Fade out