Holding Breath

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Notes

1 The eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull (in the southern region of Iceland) began on 14 April 2010 (seismic activity had occurred since late 2009) and continued for six days. Although a relatively small event in the scale of volcanic eruptions it was the plume of volcanic ash and the subsequent volcanic ash clouds drifting across Europe that caused major disruptions to air traffic.

2 ‘The Director’s Forum: The six senses of the director’—Aberystwyth, April 2010 was an intensive participatory project that offered a rare opportunity for both experienced and emerging directors to gather and share the methods, approaches and skills of professional directing practice via laboratories and presentations, demonstrations and dialogue. See: https://bit.ly/33eYVie

3 Since writing/delivering this text, humankind has suffered the global pandemic COVID-19 and most countries in the world have experienced lockdowns and restrictions on travel. By comparison, being grounded for six days will appear trivial, but back in 2010 it was unprecedented and felt deeply disorientating.

4 Eugenio Barba (1936–) is an Italian author and theatre director, the founder and director of the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). See: https://bit.ly/3DBpt9L

5 Lundy island is a small rocky island off the north Devon coast in the Bristol Channel, England. It is owned by the National Trust and its dwellings are managed by the Landmark Trust as holiday rentals. Day trips in the Waverley paddle steamer used to operate from Cardiff in the 1970s and continue to this day from Penarth (and Devon). They were a favourite Sunday adventure for my father.

6 Djemaa El Fna (also referred to as Jemaa el Fnaa) is the main square of the old town (medina) of Marrakesh, connected to its labyrinthine souk and also functioning as a market. During the day, snake charmers, ice, water and orange juice sellers circulate for tourists but in the evening storytellers, acrobats, magicians and musicians begin to populate the square and then in the night it fills with food stalls. Back in the 1970s, with tourism to Morocco only just establishing itself, the evenings and nights in the Square of the Dead were mainly for local inhabitants and travellers across North Africa.

7 I am in the process of documenting this series of exercises that have developed over thirty years and have been shared with workshop participants around the world. The shorthand description for this elaborate series of task-based ‘consequences’ (a physical/spatial form of the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpses) is ‘Chair Work’.

8 August Sander had a commercial photography studio in Cologne, Germany from 1909 but his ambitious private project was to photograph people at work and leisure from many different backgrounds, professions and social class: People of the 20th Century. His first book, Face of our Time, comprised sixty portraits (from what was to become the multi-volume work People of the 20th Century). It was seized by the Nazis in 1936 and the plates were destroyed.

9 Richard Avedon was a New York-based fashion and portrait photographer, renowned for his work for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, his photographs of celebrities, theatre and dance and also poets, writers, musicians, the Civic Rights Movement and Vietnam War veterans. His photographic album (with a text by John Lahr), Performance (2008), is of specific interest to Performance Research. See: www.avedonfoundation.org

10 I referred to Mount Hermon in this speech to suggest a remote, unpopulated landscape in Israel (it was intended to evoke any such place in the world—Snowdon in Wales, or Ben Nevis in Scotland). I was not aware, at the time, of the complex geo-political significance of this mountain on the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria and the existence of the ‘Hermon Hotel’ (the permanent United Nations (UN) outpost) but I leave in place as it is even more unlikely to encounter a ‘living statue’ here.

11 Buffering is when data is preloaded to reserved memory (buffer) in advance of streaming via the Internet. The downloaded data must be in advance of what is being accessed or the streaming will pause to allow the download data to catch up and stack up ahead of the viewing.

12 In the Natyashastra (the ancient treatise that details all aspects of classical Sanskrit theatre) the nirvahana is the conclusion, the final fifth part of the dramatic plot (not to be confused with Nirvana, the state of freedom from all suffering, central to Buddhist belief, attained by relinquishing all personal desires).