Notes towards a Theatre of Assemblages

Abstract

The article discusses two recent performances, SUMMIT by Andy Smith (2018) and we are all made of stars by johnsmith (2016). The two Smiths construct theatrical space in divergent but complementary ways. Where Andy Smith produces a form of assembly, johnsmith produces a form of assemblage. The article discusses each of these performances each in relation to Judith Butler’s recent reformulation of Hannah Arendt’s conception of the ‘space of appearance’. Butler (2015) suggests how ‘action is always supported and that it is invariably bodily, even … in its virtual forms’ (73), and that consequently ‘we will need to consider more closely the bodily dimension of action, what the body requires, and what the body can do’ (73). The article traces Butler’s argument to its roots in Spinoza, via Deleuze. As Deleuze writes: ‘A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (1988: 127). A body, Spinoza argues — of whatever kind — is composed of speeds and slownesses, movement and rest, which he calls ‘longitude’ and ‘latitude’. In the question of what a body can do, I locate a convergence between the concept of assembly and assemblage. Andy Smith’s assembly, and johnsmith’s assemblages, produce longitudes and latitudes — orientations not only within a social world, but a material universe, one defined in terms of ‘orders, forms, wills—forces’ (Grosz 2008: 5). The article take the two performances as exemplars of an emerging conception of theatricality, each attempting to more deeply respect the place of the human and nonhuman within a wider cosmology. In the reemergence and recovery of sensation, the two Smiths’ theatrical performances become artlike in their speeds and stillnesses, their resonances, refrains — artlike in their unfolding revelations of this sentient world.

Notes

1 Qualifying this now, the artist writes: ‘The process of making this work 3 years ago changed me. It brought me face to face with how people read my body as “female”, which had implications both in life and on stage. Consequently the image of a flower coming out of my vagina now feels too much like it equates “nature” with cis womanhood/birth. Although the title “we are all made of stars” and the name “johnsmith” were always tongue in cheek, the undertones of white masculine universality they carry were not fully undermined or examined in the show. As with the moss costume, which I initially romanticised as a human-nonhuman “collaboration”, I came to feel that my aesthetic fascination with breaking down categories was not enough; any future iteration needs to acknowledge positionality in both human and nonhuman relations and more explicitly challenge poisonous power dynamics. Personal email, The Artist to the author, 17.07.2019.