Doppelgangster | NOTE: The Eternity of the World

01 July 2017

Dr Tom Payne

DRAMATURGICAL NOTE

THE ETERNITY OF THE WORLD

The situation of the guilty person travelling through life to eternity is like that of the murderer who fled the scene of his act – and his crime – on the express train: alas, just beneath the coach in which he sat ran the telegraph carrying his description and orders for his arrest at the first station.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death

I like to think that if audience members walk out part way through, that it is because they have had an Ecomyopic* epiphany.

Dr Tom Payne

The Eternity of the World: Parts Missing or sometimes The Eternity of the World is the third full length theatre production by UK/AUS performance company Doppelgangster. It has been produced in Australia by new writing powerhouse MKA and developed for presentation with the remarkable and ‘highly original’ Kerith Manderson-Galvin or Unofficial Kerith Fan Club (186,000, Being Dead [Don Quixote] and Don’t Bring Lulu).

The startling script for this gallery based performance builds on and extends urgent ideas emerging out of Doppelgangster’s ‘provocative’ inaugural season, Catastrophica (2015/16). The company’s first year of work featured a series of agonistic performative explorations and risky activist interventions into the themes of climate change, migration and the violent effects of globalisation. Flagship productions include Doppelgangster’s TITANIC, a frenzied and satirical reworking of James Cameron’s 1997 tearjerker, staged in, on and around a weeping shipping container; and Baby, an unforgiving slice of anti-theatre about an aggressive polar bear, a jiery Russian pilot and their uncertain encounter beneath the arches at Waterloo Station.

The Eternity of the World has been artfully written and performed by Doppelgangster Co-Director Tobias and his sister Kerith Manderson-Galvin. It is a rebellious companion piece to my forthcoming one man show Everybody Loses: the Death Diary of Karl Patterson Schmidt, which is due to premier at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in mid Wales, 23 November 2017. These two second season productions signal a deeper ethical and aesthetic engagement with climate change, the Anthropocene and the sixth great extinction.

The performance occurs in a gallery space with white walls. Six to eight pillars neatly hold up the roof and there is a clean bare floor. Two performers are present, as though artworks, each representing a moment in time, familiar, uncanny. The spectatorial experience afforded by the injection of traverse seating is deliberately incongruous with the habituated paerns of gazing, grazing and superficially lounging that have become the hallmark of performance art sharings and happenings in gallery spaces around the Western world. This simple theatrical intervention seeks to highlight and awkwardly disrupt the sudo theatricality of the art consuming experience. If it looks like theatre and smells like theatre, it is, as Modernist critic Michael Fried thornily observed, probably theatre.

Kerith’s mesmeric aesthetic has a traumatic unassailable cuteness that is by turns disarming and alarming. Their tendency is towards textual and physical stillness; a Pulchritudinous Pina Bausch on pause. Their corporeal and lyrical approach is in stark contrast to their brother’s propensity to violently froth forth poetry whilst impudently thrusting. Together, they lead the audience through a series of tableauxs, vignees and uncoordinated autobiographical mis-rememberings, interspersed with surrealist meanderings and punctuated by songs. Performer/spectator relations are periodically problematised as audience members are encouraged to switch places, wear sleeping masks and awkwardly become the subject of individual biographical aention, “your children will aimlessly destroy… they’ll decide to kill themselves… they’ll do it to other people too, and everyone will be doing it.”

The dramaturgical challenge with this work was to try and hold Tobias and Kerith away from the middle ground, to maintain the difference, the creative uncertainty and at times to allow a complete separation in performance style, occasionally producing the sensation that these two performers are, to all intents and purposes, acting in two separate shows. Ecstasy, disbelief and wonder meet the savage wordsmith in the theatrical melee. The aim, to produce a Beckettian sense of futility that emerges out of the cyclical nature of their jarring encounter. The work has no aspiration towards the sensible and, as with our current Anthropocentrically induced mass extinction, relief is most likely to occur upon acceptance that there will be no narrative fulfilment. Instead, the performance aspires to more pertinent sensations of isolation, defeat, suffering, pride, life, consciousness, existence, compassion and the absurd.

If, as scientists tell us, humanity has become such a profound geological force that our collective activity is tilting us towards our own extinction event, what does this particular eventuality feel like? Well, one suspects that for those siing in the institutional context of a gallery space in Sydney or Melbourne, it feels very much like watching the siblings Manderson-Galvin reminisce about childhood experiences, muse about missing people, worry about snakes and become preoccupied with dirt. Like it or not, the audience is participating in the expiration of its own species. For sixty minutes they are charged with making sense out of the senseless, tasked with comprehending the cataclysm of which they are minor part, whilst simultaneously pondering the privileged mundanity of their sentience. The audience and all their component parts are slowly, imperceptibly, absenting themselves from the Woruld (Old English); departing from ‘the affairs of life’.

Kerith and Tobias’ text reminds us of two contradictory philosophical principles, that while ‘life must be understood backwards… it must be lived forwards’; at the same time, it is only in stillness, argues Kierkegaard, that it might be possible to perform a backwards orientation and understand life in reverse. Saecula saeculorum, ‘the ages of ages’, the Eternity of the World is an invitation to perceive the endlessness of human existence. The parts missing? The elimination of dissonance. The absence of inconsistency in our cognitions; our beliefs and opinions. Belief about what? The eternity of the World! Which oddly, might only make sense once it has come to an end.

The performance seeks to remind us of our sins and misdemeanours, all forty two of them. These range from “war” and “terrorism”, to the “slaying of cale belonging to the gods” and “witchcraft against the crown”. Certain sins have temporal or geographic specificities that make them unfamiliar to audiences

siing within the pristine white walls of a Western gallery space. Although we are all guilty of number 41: “stealing the future from the children”. The telegraph carrying our description travels beneath our seats to eternity, where either nothingness or judgement awaits.

Of course, judgement and our impending Anthropocentric stillness are a lile way off; although not so far away that we should be geing comfortable! When the time arrives, there will be complete stasis, in human terms. Like all good things, human-eternity will come to an end and when it does, I’d like to think that we’d have the opportunity to look back and make sense of it all. Perhaps viewing the past from the comfort of Douglas Adam’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe. However, in the work of the siblings Manderson-Galvin, we are reminded – with reference to ‘death and taxes’ – that the final moment of Anthropological “release” may well be met with the “sense that every midnight looks the same… the atrocities remarkably similar”. Peering back into the history of human-unkind from the vantage point of our own annihilation may prove to be as repetitively disheartening as rereading thirty years of tax returns. The relief here? That the work is actually very funny, and for all of the aesthetic difference, at its core, Eternity of the World wants us to laugh at the futility of it all.

References

Soren Kierkegaard’s Papier, ed. N Thulstrup, trans. A. Hannay, IV, p. 61.

The Sickness unto Death, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, p. 124

*End Note – The Long Duree, Ecomyopia

The Long Duree Pioneered by French scholars in the early 20th century—and carried on by French historian Fernand Braudel –

longue duree refers to a method of studying history focused on cycles and slowly-evolving social structures, as opposed to viewing historical events as the consequence of immediate causes.

“The definition for ecomyopia is the tendency for societies to ignore, not recognize, or fail to act on new ecological information that contradicts political arrangements, social norms, or world views,” says Casagrande. “The failure to meaningfully address climate change is a spectacular example of ecomyopia.”