Fissure(s): Walking/dancing along, across and in-between lines of difference

Abstract

Fissures and ruptures, understood in a literal, material sense, change the way in which we perceive our environment; surfaces suddenly reveal depth and unexpected structures from underneath. What other kind of “insights” do these forceful material openings offer, what do they tell us about the ways in which we relate ourselves to the surroundings and what kind of knowledge could be gained from them? Asking more specifically from a perspective of performance research, this paper seeks to re-trace the kind of “ground” such phenomena can provide for theatrical scenarios. What kind of dramaturgies do they instigate, what is their relationship toward performativity?

Through the case of the site-specific walking performance “Fissure” (2011), the essay rethinks the notion of rupture in relation to movement, embodiment and emotion.

Dealing with the loss of a close family member, the performance is a commemoration, a devout walking ritual, leading its audience into quarries, deep caves and onto windy mountains in the Yorkshire Dales in mid-England. Fragments of dance, music, poetry and lectures, which take place alongside the path, bring different material and metaphorical notions of “fissure” to our attention. While pushing the notion of audience participation during the course of the performance to a physical limit, the conceptual distinction between “bodies” and “landscape” becomes more and more blurred.

AN ENTRANCE WITH A RIFT

In his poem ‘A Winter Evening’ Austrian poet Georg Trakl describes the following scene: a lonely wanderer discovers on his walk through a dark winter evening a seemingly empty house, brightly lit, with a laid table inside. As the wanderer steps in quietly – invited or not, we do not know – the poem describes a strange moment: ‘Pain has turned the threshold to stone’ (cited by Heidegger 2001b: 192). Ignoring the biblical connotations of the scene for the moment, philosopher Martin Heidegger notices that this is the only line in Trakl's poem in past tense – but what exactly has caused the pain remains in the dark. Like Trakl's poetry, Martin Heidegger's philosophy, too, has the tendency of making seemingly common metaphors and concepts again unfamiliar. Starting to reflect upon the enigmatic transformation of the threshold, Heidegger's considerations themselves make a sudden, unexpected turn. He remarks: ‘But what is pain? Pain rends. It is the rift.’ (Heidegger 2001b: 201) Trakl's poem does not mention a rift or a rupture, but for Heidegger it seems clear that pain and rift are somehow deeply connected. In this moment of quietly crossing the threshold, this moment of silent entry, a painful rending ‘takes place’ – the rending makes room for itself.

There seems to be something slightly uncanny going on, in Trakl's poem, just as in Heidegger's ontological thinking. Not only when Trakl speaks of dark paths on which the wanderer walks, but something strange is happening within the walls of this abandoned house with a laid table (for whom is the table laid? where has everybody gone?) and in-between the lines of Trakl and Heidegger, within their language where concepts like pain and rift introduce themselves ‘out of the blue’ – appearing suddenly like ghosts out of nothing, silently.

In order to approach Heidegger's notion of the rift, it is helpful to remember that the philosopher previously has defined language as ‘the house of being. In its home human beings dwell’ (Heidegger 1998: 239). As Derrida points out, this does not make the ‘house’ a metaphor simply representing language, but part of a rather complex configuration – he argues that metaphors are never simple acts of transferral, as something always withdraws itself in the metaphorical ‘movements’ (Derrida 2007: 69).

In this essay I would like to ask how the above-described scenario could be linked to questions of theatre, dance and dramaturgy. How is our idea of ‘housing’ related to language in and about theatre? How does this influence the way in which we conceptualize and ‘remember’ (Brandstetter 2000) our own body and its relation toward others? How does movement enter the discourse and how does it affect and shape the ‘landscapes’ of feelings and emotions? While, on the one hand, the notions of threshold, language, pain and rift seem to resonate with concepts of liminality and in-betweenness as forms of destabilization during aesthetic processes (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 174ff.), on the other hand this touches the relation of motion and emotion and raises questions of ‘choreographing empathy’ (Foster 2011). If we understand Heidegger's ‘house’ as a complex metaphor not only for language but for language within the realm of performance – as well as language about theatre and dance, would in this sense (institutionalized) theatre function as a threshold, a discursive filter, a liminal space/place that is testing and probing-, and perhaps even domesticating certain ‘travelling concepts’ (Bal 2002) and ‘circulating references’ (Latour 1999)? What if we were to understand the wanderer and the movement of walking not (only, simply) as metaphor but rather/also quite literally, in the sense of bodies in motion? What could it mean to reverse this movement and to exit the familiar house of theatre/language?

A QUARRY WITH A LAID TABLE

There is not one but many wanderers this summer evening in May 2011, perhaps about thirty, entering the scenery slowly, one after the other, quietly. The evening sun is hanging low over the abandoned quarry, near Ribblehead Station, and the wanderers in their hiking gear cast long shadows as they enter the giant man-made hole in the landscape. The stones from the quarry had been needed more than a century ago to build the Settle–Carlisle railway tracks, the very same tracks on which the train has brought us here. The railroad, cutting straight through the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, just like the nearby Ribblehead Viaduct (Batty Moss Viaduct), once was a visible sign of progress and modernization in the era of industrialization. In the meanwhile abandoned quarry, nature has begun to repopulate the grazed, devastated landscape. Grasses, bushes and small trees are coming back, growing over and between the remaining grey boulders.

A small creek babbles somewhere close by. Groups of dancers, dressed in sweatpants, green or white fleece jackets and sturdy shoes, are exploring the vast space, moving individually, in pairs, in groups, stretching their arms diagonally in the air, small figures spread in the rugged landscape, sometimes just silhouettes in the distance. We walk along the quarry's elevated edges, entering the panoramic scenery in a big spiral movement, counter-clockwise. The choreographer, Nigel Stewart, who is walking along with us, every now and then reminds us to stay in the group, to ‘keep in position’. Like the dancers, who have started laying down a long, red rope on the ground of the pit, it becomes clear that we, the audience, are somehow part of the choreography as well.

This evening, the central object in the quarry is a laid table, covered with a white tablecloth, held in place by the already familiar red thread that is wrapped around it. Among the objects on top there are feathers, a knife, a skull (of a sheep?), a hammer, needles, red yarn and a whole loaf of bread (but no wine). Displayed like this they appear as ritual objects, artefacts or found items – collected memorabilia, things from the past. In a strange way the table with the objects on top simultaneously evokes and distorts the image of the biblical scene of the last supper, well known from Leonardo da Vinci's iconic depiction, but here no one is sitting at the table; the dancers are dispersed in the landscape. As we come closer toward the table, we discover a map stitched on to the white tablecloth with the red yarn. A map without names, without a legend, crooked lines that seem legible perhaps for those who know the area well – if it is showing the surrounding at all. For foreigners, like most of us in the audience, the ‘map’ would therefore be of little practical use; it may as well represent something else altogether, like the enlarged section of a brain.

This evening in the quarry marks the beginning of a unique and one-time-only event, entitled Fissure. The site-specific walking performance is taking place during three consecutive days in May 2011 in the Yorkshire Dales. In this region in Northern England, Director Louise Ann Wilson grew up together with her sister Denise, who died in 2001 of a brain tumour. The performance is a commemoration, a devout walking ritual, every now and then interrupted by fragments of dance, music, poems and short lectures taking place alongside the path. While neurologists provide background information about the nature of brains and growing tumours, the course of the disease and possible effects on a person's character, we also learn how the landscape was shaped during the Ice Age and afterwards. Sediments, as geologist Mike Kelly explains, formed this special topography some 350 million years ago, when the whole area was partly covered with water.

Fissure combines personal and cultural history with geological and medical discourses, each implying very different systems of knowledge, languages and dimensions of temporality. These different dimensions of temporality imply various sets of durational, relational and, to a degree, existential questions: How are individual experiences, personal stories and histories shaped by these surroundings? How does the topography as both a living environment and a living environment leave an imprint on those who grow up in this area, or, compared to that, on those who walk across it for the first time? What remains when (individual) human beings disappear from its ‘surface’?

SITE - SPECIFICITY

Site-specific performance, by our definition, is one in which the ontological, semiological, phenomenological, and epistemological values of a culture are provoked, sustained, and made meaningful and interpretable by the specific ambience, physicality and tactility of the location where a performance takes place. It is strongly associated with environmental art, including environmental theatre that is free from the confines of the proscenium tradition. The age-old division between stage/auditorium is disrupted through its tendency to transform non-theatrical spaces inside out to make theatre. (Amine 2011: 21)

Site-specific, environmental performances, like Fissure, not only renounce the idea of Diderot's ‘fourth wall’ (1994 [1757]), but literally of walls altogether that would block natural light and weather conditions from the scenes in order to produce fully controllable spaces and settings. Yet, almost ironically, in regions all around the Yorkshire Dales, dry stone walls are a distinctive feature of the landscape, an old cultural technique to demarcate property and subdivide the landscape. Built without mortar, these walls combine stones in such a way that they become self-supporting, stable structures, which are not necessarily meant to prohibit trespassing as one could think – sometimes gates or wooden steps and stairs encourage wanderers to walk through or across the stone constructions.

Leaving behind the controlled conditions of the theatre building and going into the open, site-specific performances like Fissure need to establish different dramaturgical means in order to structure their development in time. Neither do they offer a fixed perspective to their audience, nor do they use curtains or artificial lighting to mark beginnings and ends, thus requiring a different dramaturgy to create scenes, entrances and exits. Accordingly, it soon becomes clear that the dramaturgy of Wilson's performance, the sequence of its scenes, is far from being sharply cut but rather introduces slow transitions, following a meandering path, literally, without a map, guided by a team of mountain leaders, remaining in close relation with the topography of the landscape, sometimes drawn to specific sites, for example, quiet, less windy ditches, on to hills, into caves, leaving these sites behind us again as the path continues.

While the producer's request on the first day, still at the train station, to turn off our cell phones clearly marks the beginning of the performance, during the course of the walk, the role of the audience and thus a ‘proper’ behaviour feels less clearly defined. In a constant negotiation between being an individual, self-relying hiker and a guided member of an audience, we slowly try to figure out what seems appropriate in each unfolding situation. Interestingly, after the first few ‘scenes’ by the dancers, it becomes an unspoken agreement among the audience members not to applaud after individual dances and songs. Perhaps, because they seem intricately related, interwoven with the landscape, it feels inappropriate to clap hands – after all, who would applaud a landscape? Occasionally, the group members begin to chat with one another, to exchange their perceptions, their interpretations, their individual discoveries. However, the audience members seem to notice and respectfully accept Director Louise Ann Wilson's mostly silent presence during the course of the walk. Still, slowly we begin to have little conversations with the producers, organizers, mountain leaders and experts who walk along with us, asking them various questions about the surroundings and sharing our impressions. Then again, for long ‘stretches’ of our walk, nobody talks; we are silently taking in the surroundings and concentrate on our meandering path.

DIFFERENT LINES/LINES OF DIFFERENCE

In his comprehensive study on the history of Lines, anthropologist Tim Ingold critically scrutinizes the (predominantly Western) assumption that the ideal line has to be a straight one. ‘[T]he straight line has become an icon of modernity’ (Ingold 2007: 167). Re-tracing a history of ‘how the line became straight’, he shows how the imperative of straightness is connected to imperial ideology: ‘A ruler is a sovereign who controls and governs a territory. It is also an instrument for drawing straight lines. These two usages, as we have already hinted, are closely connected’ (160).

He thus distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of lines, pointing at two oppositional systems of knowledge: a line as a straight, linear connection between two points on the one side and, on the other, a line that ‘goes out for a walk’ (73) – to borrow the poetic words of the painter Paul Klee. Within different modes of walking, Ingold makes out a similar difference: ‘We are inclined to reduce the activity of walking to the mechanics of locomotion, as though the walker were a passenger in his own body and carried by his legs from point to point’ (76). He juxtaposes this ‘transport’, point-to-point type of movement to a different form of walking, closer connected to the environment through which it moves, which he refers to as ‘wayfaring’: ‘As he proceeds … the wayfarer has to sustain himself, both perceptually and materially, through an active engagement with the country that opens up along his path’ (ibid.). Thus, between these modes there is a ‘fundamental difference not only in the dynamics of movement but also in the integration of knowledge’ (84).

LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER AS DRAMATIC ELEMENTS/DRAMATURGICAL MEANS

During the second day's 12-mile hike through the Yorkshire Dales, it becomes clear that our walking will create its very own kind of dramaturgy in combination with the changing landscape as we go along. The slow unveiling of the topography in front of us has a highly theatrical quality; there always lies a certain suspense in the discovery of new perspectives unfolding in front of us while the weather, clouds in the wind and various sounds have their own, constantly changing, dramatic quality. Landscape and weather in this performance not only function as a mere backdrop; rather they are acting as co-players. The dancers’ choreographies seem to be shaped and co-created by the rocky, bumpy, uneven surfaces, as the dancers investigate and discover with their bodies the movement possibilities and limits of the landscape; they dance with/in the cracks and fissures in the limestone that were created and shaped millions of years ago. Fissures in the ground will hide and slowly reveal dancers; they will literally come out of the openings in the ground, appear from some underneath caves and potholes. We follow the performers below the surface deep into caves, where at times neither dancers nor audience members can stand up straight. The dancers squeeze their bodies into the giant cracks in the stones so that only the upper body can move freely, and later stand on top of it, one leg on each side of the gap, raising arms in the air (fig. 1).

Figure 1. ▪Dancer on top of a fissured stone. Photo Holger Hartung

The unevenness of the ground prevents dancers from being completely in-sync; one of the dancers, still dripping wet after having just appeared from a subterranean cavern, continues to dance a duet with a dry dancer – how different their movements appear even though they are using the same choreographic material. The outside conditions influence the performance to the degree of preventing individual scenes from taking place altogether, for example when the strong winds on Ingleborough Peak literally take away the singers’ breath, making it impossible for them to perform, forcing the audience to crouch together on top of the hill and to leave the top of the mountain after only a few brief moments of ‘catching breath’. It is a landscape that demands a lot of attention from dancers, performers and participants, as we move through this windy, unprotected openness and across its rough, fissured or slippery surfaces.

EPISTEMOLOGIES

With regard to its methodology and epistemological implications, it seems interesting to compare Wilson's site-specific walking performance to another kind of ‘field trip’ as described by Bruno Latour in his article ‘Circulating reference: Sampling the soil in the Amazon forest’ (Latour 1999). With the eye of an anthropologist, Latour follows an interdisciplinary group of geologists, pedologists, botanists and geographers on an expedition into the Amazon. They decide to pursue together the question of whether the forest border in front of a terrain of savanna is advancing or retreating – a movement that is too slow and too vast in scale to be observed directly. Latour describes in detail the individual scientific approaches and different methodological steps in the collection of ‘data’ and the translation of information into maps, schemes, text and archival material. Central for Latour is the question ‘how do we pack the world into words?’ (Latour 1999: 24). What is gained and lost during these transitions? What kind of references are implied in the codified acts of translation? Can these translational steps be reversed? Arguing that indeed they can, leads him to the essay's title ‘Circulating Reference’ even though he mentions on several occasions that there are small ‘ruptures’ in each translational step: ‘There is, as I have said, a complete rupture at each stage between the “thing” part of each object and its “sign” part, between the tail end of the soil sample and its head’ (60). Analysing the scientific methods and processes partly in form of a photo-essay, he is looking also at different tools the scientists are using as well as the implications of their poses and gestures. Especially interesting are those methodological steps that aim to bring order into the ‘chaotic’ environment of the Amazon. Different types of measurements force pieces of forest as specimen into ‘pedocomparators’ (24f.), and then into rectangular charts, schematic profiles and other forms and devices that translate aspects of nature into metric systems: ‘Lost in the forest, the researchers rely on one of the oldest and most primitive techniques for organizing space, claiming a place with stakes driven into the ground to delineate geometric shapes against the background noise’ (41). The ‘production’ of knowledge lies in the collection of information and data as well as turning qualitative observations into measurable and ‘clean’ results. While Latour's observations remain mostly on a descriptive level, he is hinting at some of the ethical implications in relation to the scientific methods: ‘How does one pass from ignorance to certainty, from weakness to strength, from inferiority in the face of the world to the domination of the world by the human eye?’ (30) It becomes quite clear that the scientist's approach in the Amazon is much closer to a logic of a straight line, as described above by Ingold.

Looking at the performance Fissure from an epistemological point of view, we find ourselves not only in a ‘borderland between ecology and the arts’ (Giannachi and Stewart 2005: 19), an ‘in-between of the human and nature’, which focuses ‘on the idea of the possibility of a relationship of opposites within a given environment’ (20) but in an even more complex ‘territory’ in which geological, medicinal and neurological discourses are woven into the setting as well as dance, poetry and song. While it seems true that such an interdisciplinary ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2007: 80f.) is ‘fraught with epistemological uncertainty’ (Giannachi and Stewart 2005: 20), this, on the other hand, allows us to consider possible cross-connections and parallels between various systems of knowledge and possible (as well as impossible) relations between different ways of knowing (and not-knowing) – explicitly including the different movement practices as forms of body knowledge. The central question I would like to pose would be how far can the concept of ruptures and fissures open up a specific set of relations, asking how these concepts may help to draw the separating lines between discourses and practices differently, that is, to re-conceptualize the dividing lines, borders and gaps themselves. How can an attentive (bodily) awareness inform such a theoretical concept of ruptures in order to challenge and productively destabilize epistemological boundaries, or to bring new dynamics into ‘petrified’ constellations of knowledge?

‘I discovered, in my conversations with the neurologists and neuro-scientists concerned with my sister's care, striking analogies between geography and neurology’, Director Louise Ann Wilson explains in the programme notes (Wilson 2011: n.p.). Accordingly, the title Fissure on the one side refers to the phenomenon in the landscape, resulting from the Ice Age pushing massive rocks and glaciers across the surface, and, on the other, describes a bodily phenomenon, namely the ‘long deep groove separating the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain’ (ibid.). This double meaning of the word splits the notion of ‘fissures’ itself in two – a double line, a divided division that at the same time separates and connects, splitting apart the seemingly homogenous grey matter of the limestone forming a connection with the other equally split grey matter of the brain.

This analogy, the paradoxical connection through two disctinct dividing lines, produces tensions and resonances between the different (geographic and neurologic) discourses. Via the accessibility of the landscape we begin to develop a sense for the inaccessibility of our body. Fissure thus raises an awareness of a number of different chiasms (other than primarily referential ones, as indicated by Latour), including the seeming gaps toward and within our own bodies. In his study The Absent Body Drew Leder describes in detail how the human body has a structural tendency toward self-concealment, that is, escaping from our own attention. Setting the concept of a lived-body against the Cartesian dualism of a body–mind split, Leder draws the dividing lines differently. He argues that the lived body as a perceiving body most of the time escapes our attention (except when the body is in pain), due to our perception's tendency to be primarily outward oriented. Partly this is caused by the relative inaccessibility of visceral organs, especially the brain being hidden below the skull, invisible, impervious to touch in a complete ‘interoceptive withdrawal’ (Leder 1990: 114). The brain itself, on the other hand, although and because it is connected to all other organs, is forming ‘a microcosm of the whole body, participating in its chiasm of surface and depth’, resulting in a ‘microchiasm’ (ibid.).

RE-TRACING THE DIVIDING LINES BETWEEN LANGUAGE, FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS

The brain, connected/disconnected from the body, part of the perceptive process but simultaneously withdrawn from it, is itself affected by another chiasm – the longitudinal fissure, the division between the brain's two hemispheres. As the Italian neurologist Antonio Damasio recollects, a ‘neuroanatomy of emotion’ was discovered toward the end of the nineteenth century, suggesting ‘that the right cerebral hemisphere of humans was probably dominant for emotion, much as the left was dominant for language’ (1999: 39). In the following time, however, brain sciences lost the interest in making emotions part of their agenda:

Throughout most of the twentieth century, emotion was not trusted in the laboratory. Emotion was too subjective, it was said. Emotion was too elusive and vague. Emotion was at the opposite end from reason, easily the finest human ability, and reason was presumed to be entirely independent from emotion … In the end, not only was emotion not rational, even studying it was probably not rational. (Damasio 1999: 39)

Raising awareness for this neglected side of brain activity as well as the resulting blind spot in the sciences, the aim of Damasio's study is to ‘understand the very different biological impact of three distinct although closely related phenomena: an emotion, the feeling of that emotion, and knowing that we have a feeling of that emotion’ (8). Given the premise that feelings are ‘inwardly directed and private’, while emotions are ‘outwardly directed and public’ (36), he underlines the important role of the body in these processes and its intricate connection to various brain activities:

All emotions use the body as their theater … , but emotions also affect the mode of operation of numerous brain circuits: the variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion. (Damasio 1999: 51f.)

While in Damasio's terminology a kind of emotional theatre (1994: 155ff.) and landscape seem to be situated within the body, Fissure, on the other hand, unfolds these relations, in an act of reversal, spills and spells them out by dispersing (dancer's as well as audience's) bodies into the landscape. The questions of the role of feelings and emotions in connection with (dys)functions of the brain – this strange organ that seems connected and separated from the body at the same time – are literally brought into the open. Without being explicitly verbalized, these strange and complex relations are rather made felt.

DEEP DESTABILIZATION

In this regard, perhaps the most striking moment of Wilson's performance for me occurs all of a sudden with the overwhelming impression, or rather a paradoxical feeling – we could perhaps call it a theatrical moment of an overwhelming ‘as if’ – that instead of fissured limestone suddenly we are walking on a brain's surface. The image above (fig. 2) can to a degree give an idea of the striking similarity between the surface of the fissured limestone and the surface of the brain. What the image cannot reproduce is the deep irritation, the incomprehensible feeling of a rupture that seems to occur in this moment, which ‘takes place’ in the body or rather between the body and the landscape. What to do with such an ‘irrational’ thought, such an irritating, contradicting feeling? How does this confusion between body and landscape, this deep destabilization of one's own body concept, affect the question of thoughts, feeling and emotions (and of sharing them)? Which map could possibly register such conflation of thought, feeling and emotion? Haven't we somehow stepped into a strange borderland between inner and outer world, an inside turned outward (and vice versa), resulting in a sense of a strange, petrified, ruptured landscape-as-threshold, to bring back the image of Heidegger and Trakl? From this point of deep uncertainty and via this detour through body and landscape, I would like to re-approach the proposed connection between the rift and the notion of pain – our own as well as the pain of others.

Figure 2. ▪Fissured limestone in the Yorkshire Dales. Photo Holger Hartung

PAIN

When one hears about another person's physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person's body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. (Scarry 1985: 3)

From the perspective of Wilson's performance it seems plausible that Elaine Scarry uses the image of the landscape with its visible surfaces and invisible layers underground to describe the human incapability of sharing physical pain verbally.

Taking the notion of landscape and fissures quite literally (and seriously), we find that these traces of former – possibly still continuing – movements, have opened up the landscape's surface almost like a fold extending the surface into the depth of what formerly has been a hidden underneath. While fissures and ruptures in this way tangibly negate inside–outside, or above–below dichotomies, Scarry notes how pain similarly troubles the perceptual distinction between inside and outside of the body:

At first occurring only as an appalling but limited internal fact, it [that is, pain] eventually occupies the entire body and spills out into the realm beyond the body, takes over all that is inside and outside, makes the two obscenely indistinguishable, and systematically destroys anything like language or world extension that is alien to itself and threatening to its claims. (Scarry 1985: 54f.)

This extensive and all-embracing nature of pain, this eliminating totality, therefore has a tendency of cutting us off from the surrounding world: ‘Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language’ (4). While Scarry stresses the link of sharibilty and (verbal) language, Fissure, on the other hand, seems to address just this question from another angle – asking not only about the sharing through language but quietly bringing the emotional side into consideration. Taking into account the personal background of the piece, the question of physical as well as emotional pain seems to be close at hand, however, these aspects are not addressed explicitly, that is, through language. Still, in walking through the landscape together as a group, one can somehow sense that the notion of pain plays a crucial role, as a constantly moving force – ‘so to speak’ – underneath the surface, subcutaneously. Accordingly, through the process of walking together, the idea of sharing itself is approached from another, non-linguistic, angle; perhaps we could say, rather than sharing the sense of pain it is concerned with a sharing of a certain unsharibility. This seeming contradiction, finally, leads us back to Heidegger: ‘But what is pain? Pain rends. It is the rift’, and, as he continues to explicate:

But it does not tear apart into dispersive fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates, yet so that at the same time it draws everything to itself, gathers it to itself. Its rending, as a separating that gathers, is at the same time that drawing which, like the pen-drawing of a plan or sketch, draws and joins together what is held apart in separation. Pain is the joining agent in the rending that divides and gathers. Pain is the joining of the rift. The joining is the threshold. It settles the between, the middle of the two that are separated in it. Pain joins the rift of the difference. Pain is the difference itself. (Heidegger 2001b: 201f.)

Heidegger's conception of pain comprises two simultaneous forces or directions, a drifting apart and a drawing together, similar to what he has described in ‘The origin of the work of art’ (Heidegger 2001a: 61ff.) as a strife or rift between the hemispheres of world and earth, which are different but not clearly separable. This double movement, the tension caused by the simultaneous drawing together and drifting apart, is perhaps what determines the affective relation toward the rift/fissure/rupture and the striking quality of the described analogies. If, provisionally, cautiously, we were to agree that a) the notions of rift, fissure, rupture or crack challenge existing categorization and destabilize existing dichotomies and b) that there is some fundamental, perhaps hidden or latent, co-relation between the notions of landscape/body/theatre on the one hand and fissure/rift and pain on the other, the main challenge in this discussion then perhaps takes on the form of a rupture itself. The main question from an ethical point would become, how could we indeed understand pain – through processes of rupturing – not primarily, not exclusively, with regard to human experience: ‘we should not imagine pain anthropologically as a sensation that makes us feel afflicted’ (Heidegger 2001b: 202). However, from the perspective of Fissure we may add, how could we include an other-than-human surrounding in this sense of pain and still, simultaneously, acknowledge and feel empathetic toward the existing pain of others (explicitly including humans)? The red thread (literally and figuratively) that returns again in Fissure as a different scenographic element (fig. 3), highlighting the cracks and gaps in the stone, almost as if they were bleeding, seems to pose such kind of questions.

Figure 3. ▪Fissure stuffed with red wool. Photo Holger Hartung

ANTHROPO(S)CENE

Looking back on intersections of the various discourses, neurological and geological, biological and ecological, asking for similarities and differences not only from a rational but also emotional and bodily point of view, through dance, through movement – and, last but not least – through fissures, ruptures, as long-durational movements in the landscape, we could begin to question and re-consider their borders and their specific relations, understanding them not as something fixed but essentially dynamic:

That the border between animate and inanimate matter, or between pure subjects and mere objects, is in no sense a natural given is demonstrated by the simple fact that in different cultures this border is perceived and conceived of in highly different ways. Consequently, there can never be an ultimately ‘objective’ designation of the ‘correct’ division – in order to illustrate this in terms of one's own culture one only has to think of the imponderables in the debate on the point of death and the definition of so called ‘brain death.’ (Franke 2012: 7)

Considering the suggested parallels/divisions between and within brain and landscape, or, likewise, between industrial human activities, such as quarrying (likewise all kinds of fossil burning and nuclear fission) and the uncontrollable growth of a tumour, may lead to a different awareness of the environmental changes that have increased tremendously especially since the era of industrialization, to the degree that human impact on the ecosystem is considered a geological force itself, as currently debated under the term ‘Anthropocene’ – and the ethical issues arising from this anthropocentric nomenclature. From here, we may begin to ask how these human activities are embedded in other changes and transformations of much larger scopes, like the shifting of tectonic plates. In this sense we are forced to consider how we can at the same time be part of an economic system that causes the world climate to change and face our individual helplessness when exposed to wind and rain in the open landscape or being confronted with our own mortality. We could understand fissures and ruptures as reminders, a surfacing of (material) forces, which exist invisibly but leave their traces, their signatures, in the landscape and somehow, due to a complex interrelatedness, in the bodies.