Spectacle of Endings: In an “Endless Present”

Abstract

This Introduction to the special issue on “Creative Endings” thinks across intensities and temporalities to consider the force of “endings” in the contemporary political moment: the multiple timespaces within them, endings as temporalities in their own right, experienced forcefully, unequally, and as generative of dynamic emotional resonances. Whilst often stated, endings remain under-theorised in the discipline. Yet endings are a central form through which the assemblage of representations, materialities, structures and the more-than representational are organised in the orchestration and deliverance of political work. This introduction, and the various papers that follow, begin to address the gap in thinking, by introducing intensities and temporalities as ways to work with both the representational and more-than-representational forces of endings, drawing upon examples from contemporary politics. From here, we propose the creative arts, in occupying the threshold of the representational/more-than-representations, as well placed to intervene on endings. We think the creative arts can help us to know, represent, and intervene in various ends within the current political moment, through their attunement, specifically, to liveness, form and feeling.

Chinese

本文是“创造性结局”特刊的引言。本文通过强度和时间性, 思考了“结局”在当代政治契机中的作用：结局的多时空、结局的时间性、强迫和不平等的经历、动态的情感共鸣。尽管我们经常提及结局, 但是缺乏对结局的理论化。在政治工作的组织和实施中, 结局是衔接表述、物质性、结构和超表述的核心形式。该引言和特刊的各篇论文, 借鉴了当代政治实例, 通过强度和时间性, 研究了结局的表述和超表述作用, 旨在解决理论上的缺陷。籍此, 我们提出的创造性艺术, 是表述和超表述的关键, 也可以影响结局。创造性艺术的调节作用(特别是对生活、形式和感受的协调), 可以帮助我们去理解、表述和影响当代政治契机的各种结局。

Spanish

Esta introducción al número especial sobre “Finales creativos” reflexiona sobre las intensidades y temporalidades para considerar la fortaleza de los “finales” en el momento político contemporáneo: la multiplicidad de tiempos–espacios dentro de ellos, los finales como temporalidades por derecho propio. Fuertemente experimentados, con desigualdad y como generadores de resonancias emotivas dinámicas. Aunque con frecuencia se les menciona, los finales siguen afectados por la escasa teorización de la disciplina. Con todo, los finales son una forma medular a través de la cual el conjunto de representaciones, materialidades y estructuras, y aquello que va más allá de lo representacional, están organizados en la orquestación y realización del quehacer político. Esta introducción, y los varios escritos que se presentan a continuación, empiezan por abocar la consideración de la laguna del pensamiento, introduciendo intensidades y temporalidades, como los entornos para trabajar a la par con fuerzas representacionales y los más-que-representacionales entes de los finales, basándose en ejemplos sustraídos de la política contemporánea. Desde aquí proponemos las artes creativas para que ocupen el umbral de lo representacional/más-que-representaciones, como situadas apropiadamente para intervenir en los finales. Creemos que las artes creativas pueden ayudarnos a conocer, representar e intervenir en varios finales dentro del momento político corriente, a través de su sintonía, específicamente, con vivacidad, forma y sentimiento.

Key Words:

• affect
• creative methods
• endings
• performing arts
• popularism.

 :

• 影响
• 创造性方法
• 结局
• 表演艺术
• 流行主义

 :

• afecto
• artes escénicas
• finales
• métodos creativos
• popularismo

AN ENDLESS PRESENT

“Bert and Nasi dance the end of their relationship, imagining what a future without each other might look like. Above the stage and projected onto a screen two parallel narratives run alongside each other, the end of the earth, and the end of their collaboration…” (Lesca and Voutsas 2019).

This Introduction to the special issue on “Creative Endings” thinks across intensities (Massumi 2015) and temporalities (Bastian et al. 2020) to consider the force of “endings” in the contemporary political moment: the multiple time-spaces within them, endings as temporalities in their own right, experienced forcefully, unequally, and as generative of dynamic emotional resonances. Whilst often stated (see DeSilvey and Edensor 2013; Graham 1998; Mitchell 1995), endings remain under-theorised in the discipline. Yet endings are a central form through which the assemblage of representations, materialities, structures and the more-than-representational are organised in the orchestration and deliverance of political work. (By form we mean “how power relations are arranged into specific shapes or patterns”; Anderson 2017, 501). This introduction, and the various papers that follow, begin to address the gap in thinking, by introducing intensities and temporalities as ways to work with both the representational/more-than-representational (see Anderson 2019 on the interrelated forces of both) forces of endings, drawing upon examples from contemporary politics. From here, we propose the creative arts, in occupying the threshold of the representational/more-than-representations, as well placed to intervene on endings. We think the creative arts can help us to know, represent, and intervene (Hawkins 2015) in various ends within the current political moment, through their attunement, specifically, to liveness, form and feeling.

Before we go on to examine what creative practice might have to say about “endings” let’s think for a moment about what we mean by “endings” in the history of the present and why we think they are significant. Recent cultural analysis has considered the intersections of intensity and temporality by pointing to an “endless present” (Fisher 2009; see Berlant 2011). For many, amidst a 24:7 news cycle, social media and streaming platforms, there is no structured time to “switch-off” and further, technologies are designed to encourage ongoing continuation (Coleman 2018). This echoes a broader diagnosis of an “endless present” in socio-economic terms, as boundaries between work and home are corroded, as opportunities for upward progression are foreclosed, as precarious workers respond to day to day challenges in order to survive but without opportunity to flourish. Here the sense of a definitive start or ending, of a life in employment, is lost. Instead, as unstable, temporary and zero-hour work is endured, hope for progress is replaced by efforts, invested just to keep going (Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar 2019; Pettit 2019; Raynor 2017). Scrutiny in the social sciences has been given then to feelings of “impasse” which describes how institutions, individuals and societies become stuck as they circle a cul-de-sac present (Berlant 2011) and to forms of “stretched-out present” shaped by ways of life that endure repetitively and the impossibility of imagining the world beyond them, beyond, capitalism (after Fisher 2009). This work provides a vocabulary for thinking about how materialities, feelings, and the socio-political life of time, intersect (Bastian et al. 2020).

And yet, we argue that against the felt backdrop of endless continuation, endings are everywhere. Beyond dystopian visions of the climate crisis and nuclear fallout (Barad 2019) and a diagnosis that we are all living in “end times” (Dittmer and Sturm 2016; Zizek 2018), endings become events, through which the time of anticipation and the time of delay become politically forceful. In fact, fractious and contested endings are, we contend, central to the emotional politics (after Ahmed 2013) of contemporary life, at least in an Anglo-American context. “But them’s the breaks” Boris Johnson finally conceded the end of his premiership after months of slow demise and high-profile members of the Tory cabinet resigning and demanding that Johnson leave. But returning to the beginning of this discussion we were also reminded again of the extended ending of Boris Johnson’s leadership, which was punctuated with calls that he must go, starting with Johnson’s intervention when Owen Patterson broke the rules on lobbying, questions around procurement of PPE, rules broken and an accusation of lying in relation to “partygate;” the Chris Pincher affair, and so on and so on (Amos, 2022). At each point there was a stumble forward, it felt as though Johnson’s premiership could not survive and yet he continued on, until the ultimate ending. On the one hand these events were marked by increasing intensity in the present, and on the other hand it could be argued that repetition and delay led to forms of emotional disengagement whereby it became impossible to believe that the end would come. These different relations with the event of Johnson’s end formed a disjointed collective mood. For so long, even as his end appeared inevitable, he held on.

What became fascinating about this moment was the pattern it repeated. A spectacle of endings which are heavily contested, and/or which include periods of delay or suspension, are notable in the present. In recent years we have seen many endings named and performed. 2018 saw a claim to the “End of Austerity” (see Raynor 2018). More recently, “the End of COVID-19 restrictions” were announced meaning that enforced public health measures would no longer determine everyday life. But perhaps most notably, Brexit was the end of a particular relationship with the European Union, and prior to his demise, Johnson’s election success was built around “getting Brexit done.” This was a divisive response to the political impasse that had surrounded the complexities of the UK detangling from Europe. The June 2016 vote for Britain to leave the EU was (and continues to be) stalled by years of disagreement on whether and how exactly to enact this ending (Anderson et al. 2020). And as a stalled Brexit dominated media and public interest in the UK, it perhaps came to stand-in for all those other kinds of social and cultural stucked-ness that play out in the contemporary. This would explain the success of Johnson’s campaign to end the stalemate. We can see through the case of Brexit, through Johnson’s delayed departure, how intensities of public feeling build around these moments of suspension, when endings are keenly anticipated and when momentum towards resolution of the ending is delayed (we’re drawing here on Anderson’s 2017 work with intensity which describes how the effects of power come to form). Power circulates, builds, emerges in relation to the form of the social, political and/or cultural event, in this case the time-spaces of the ending/non-ending. It’s for that reason it becomes useful for geographers to think across a number of different temporalities and intensities of endings.

If Johnson’s premiership speaks to the contested temporalities of endings (and their influence on intensities), we also see the significance of the contested intensities of endings in the US context, where the escalation and acceleration of feelings on both sides of the political spectrum followed the presidential defeat of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021. Rumblings of political uncertainty and fractured public mood rapidly came to a head with the “spectacular” storming of the Capitol, illustrating how display of public emotion becomes entangled in a protracted narration of Trump’s end: as he encouraged his supporters to “stop the steal” and “… never concede” (Spring 2020). This emotionally charged ending was performatively staged as Trump refused to concede, unsubstantiated accusations were made of voting fraud and recounts were ordered. “The simple fact is this election is far from over” Trump asserted (Breuninger 2020). Indeed Trump’s legacy continues on, as we see him claim responsibility for the over-turning of the Roe vs Wade case through his appointment of three supreme judges (Chrisholm 2022). This move sees another fraught and contested ending—the end of the assertion of an absolute right for a woman to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy at any time (Legal Information Institute n.d.).

Endings, and the period of suspension prior to their (perhaps never quite) resolution become spectacles when they are fraught, and embattled, they are public, performed, troubled and complex. There is a disconnect between the act of naming the end (and the emotional political work such naming achieves) and their materialisation. This speaks to multiple and complex temporalities of endings: repeating, suspending, protracting and so on. As we see, in reality, the Brexit withdrawal agreement has not been fully implemented, the ending enacted by the Roe vs Wade decision in 1973, was returned to and re-written in 2022. That endings are named so frequently and prove so politically forceful, we think, says something about public desires for ends to be delivered (or rewritten), for stories to be resolved against the scenography of an “endless present.” We question whether a desire for resolution is being galvanised for political gain, regardless of the actualisation of the end.

There are a few connected things going on here in relation to endings, emotion and affect. The first is the deployment of a public desire for resolution against the backdrop of an endless present. Against the backdrop of an endless present, endings have a force in the world. Once an ending is suggested—but not yet enacted—then an element of uncertainty is introduced which creates a drive for certainty. This certainty becomes attached to the act of the end, whether that is material or imagined (think again about the dynamics of Brexit). This gives intensity and momentum to the second: a binary dualism that largely becomes established around endings. They are rarely felt ambivalently. For some they become place-holders for long-standing atmospheres of belonging or exclusion related to, for example, identity and/or nationalism (Closs Stephens 2016, 2022) for others they impact security, home, life and death (see Calkin and Freeman 2019 on abortion, Barnard, Butlin, and Costello 2022 on the lived experience of the EU Settlement scheme). Endings are felt and lived, unevenly. This relates to the third affective dimension, where endings are not yet resolved, there is the always temporally unfolding potentiality of the ending. These dynamics take place exactly because an ending is ‘a threshold between the known and the unknown” (Raynor 2018). This creates space for speculation, anticipation and imagination. Endings can hold promises or fears, and in doing so have intense emotional weight in the moment of uncertainty. This “feeling work” (see Richards 2007 on emotional governance) is what contributes to making endings so significant for understanding how lives are governed in the contemporary.

It is vital then to think and theorise “the end,” the manifold punctuations within endings, the moments of suspension, the repeat, the disconnects and interplays between naming, feeling and materialising endings. One avenue that offers promise for this thinking and theorising, we suggest, is the creative arts. It is not only the performative, spatially-temporally choreographed, and “spectacular” nature of these contemporary endings outlined that matter to the creative arts. Nor is it simply that they are iterated and rehearsed, tried out as part of efforts to gauge public opinion of the form in which the end will be delivered (although these of course matter). Rather, it is the ability of the creative arts—and the performing arts specifically—to know, represent and intervene in endings; both are deployed widely for their critical and creative effect, and of course, are part of the process through which endings are delivered. Through performance, temporalities and intensities are explored for both their representational (discourse, text, narrative form) and more-than-representational (aesthetic, embodied, multi-sensual, affective, emotions) force, but also as operating in-between representation and non-representation. The performing arts can mediate audiences’ access to an encounter of the end and can evoke and/or generate profound feelings of the lived, felt, embodied experiences of these ends. Discourse and narrative form operate in relation to performative, emotion, and affect, exaggerating the endings playing out within wider socio-political milieus. Below we outline three lenses through which the creative arts contribute conceptual and methodological thinking and theorising to endings: liveness, form and feeling.

CREATIVITY AS AN APPROACH TO ENDINGS

Before doing so, it’s worth mentioning that the call for contributions to this special issue was sent out after the first UK lockdown in 2020. We were struck, at that time, by the various types of endings—from cancellation and postponements, to withdrawals and disinvestment, restrictions and foreclosures—that the creative industries were facing as a result of the pandemic (Bradbury et al. 2021). On the one hand, the creative arts industries have been deeply vulnerable to, and impacted by, these wider socio-economic and political contexts and precarious labour markets. And on the other hand, the creative arts have been variously celebrated in policy and political contexts (Hawkins 2016) for their potential to resist, challenge, push back at and expose the unequal and exclusionary impacts of many contemporary endings (some of which are outlined above and written about by us both; see Raynor 2018 on austerity; Veal 2017 on urban change). We could see the evaluative and experimental potential of geographies of creativity, and the performing arts specifically, to speak to endings not only on an empirical level, but also through various theoretical and methodological interventions. In performance and the performing arts endings are explored both in their content and form. Whether it is speculative works that imagine the world beyond humans following climate crisis (e.g. Superflex 2019) or tender accounts of actually unfolding ends of life, bereavement, grief and loss (see the Grief Series an ongoing project by Ellie Harrison), there is a capacity to rehearse, feel, and experience endings even as they have yet to materialise. The form of endings—the tension between suspense and a desire for resolution—are experimented with too, for example different versions of the end are decided upon “in the moment” (see A Matter of Life and Death a stage adaption by Morris and Rice 2007), durational performances take place over a number of days (see Roaring Girl Productions 2015 by Liz Crow which examines the relentlessness of austerity for people with disabilities), and we see through that as well as other performances, how technology, recordings, notation and forms of archiving stretch and extend creative endings (Veal 2017).

Both geographers and scholars and practitioners of the arts have had a keen interest in endings, the various forms and contexts in which they take place (see for example negative geography literature on climate crisis, speculative fiction, species loss; in performance see Richardson 2011). But the end as a theoretical problem has been largely overlooked. We suggest that the performing arts offer three key contributions for thinking through the intensities and temporalities of endings. The first is interrogating endings in relation with liveness and experience. The second is questioning the form that endings take, and how performance can, through narrative structure—and experiments outside of narrative structure—speak to a tension between speculation and the desire for resolution. Here, intensities build in relation to the temporalities of the ending. Relatedly, the third is performance’s manifestation through, and manipulation of public feelings, and how this might offer insight into the contemporary socio-political epoch as endings unfold. We will demonstrate these three lenses through the performance The End by Bert and Nasi. This production both thinks experimentally with form, evokes feelings, resonates with public moods of the time and enables audiences to imagine various “endings” from the intimate to the macro-scale end of the world. The End was performed at the Gateshead International Festival of Theatre in April 2022. This was the first “live” festival for two years and closely followed the end of legal COVID-19 restrictions in the UK. Returning to the opening vignette, Bert and Nasi dance the end of their relationship, imagining what a future without each other might look like.

Liveness: Experiencing the Present

At one point in the performance both men tried again and again to balance on two legs of a chair, leaning back with arms held wide. Often these attempts failed immediately, but when the balance was successful, there was a moment of joyful suspension. We were together in the present, always knowing that this could not be sustained; this would inevitably be followed by a stumble, forwards, only for Bert and Nasi to try again. The knowledge that the end of the balance is coming, but the uncertainty about how and when the end will come, creates drama and suspense in the moment.

Cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1977) suggests that performance art is more often than not concerned with the “active,” “flexible” “temporal present.” Performance scholars have asserted that live performance intensifies our experiences of the present by connecting us with live-time and the immediacy and animation of live action (see Auslander 2008 for a critique); of being in “the moment.” Performances alter experiences of spatial and temporal distance (speed up, slow down, expand, suspend, protract). We are presented with a range of temporalities that connect us to the “now,” a present with no fixed form where bodies interacting once-only receive and respond to an ever-changing real-time audience/performer feedback, and where the affective present is managed. In the example above, we in the audience were willing and waiting for the striving and sweaty performers to succeed, feeling disappointment when they fell, only for the same process to repeat again (always differently). Through the act of repetition, and our knowledge of the inevitability of the end, investment in and intensity of feeling around the moment of suspension would build. But at the same time, because of the expanded times-space imaginaries that had been presented to the audience prior to this activity we were simultaneously compelled to question the purpose (or indeed futility) of the activity and our feeling towards the activity (in the context of the ends of the world). “The End” then, was present throughout the piece, giving new feeling and form to the activities performed in the present. Their weariness by the end of the exercise appeared to speak to the repeated acts that punctuate everyday life within the “endless present,” but enacting these against the context of “the end” compelled us (the authors), as audience members, to reconsider our own ordinary mundane everyday through the lens of the inevitable end. Performances’ attention to temporality—of the immediate, the present—allows us to think with endings in new ways. The anticipation, suspension, expectation, punctuation, and pre-emption of the end always stirs and this becomes associated with different forms of intensity in the present. If there is only the experience of the present, that will one day end, then in performance those two inevitabilities are held together. Performing arts show the liveliness of time. They can extend, puncture, disrupt and suspend the present (political or otherwise).

Form

Later, as Bert and Nasi skipped around and around the vast playing space, becoming tired, sweating (in the present) the narrative strayed beyond the moment, imagining a future of loss: the breaking of the friendship. We learned that they would lose touch, that one would be bereaved, that one would try to reach out. This story was so detailed and so real it was hard not to believe that we were watching these men’s lives unfold before us in accelerated time. These personal stories echoed a moment earlier in the performance which projected forward to the end of time, the end of the world. And in drawing these endings together, the artists showed us the potential for performance to anticipate endings, to rehearse them, to imagine them, and in doing so to think differently about the present as it actually unfolds.

An ending is a threshold between the known and the unknown, the sleep and the wake: the life and the death. It is the line that gives form to the shape (Foucault 2005 in Raynor 2018). As we’ve illustrated above, creative arts practitioners experiment with the different forms endings can take, their various temporalities and their intensities. And we have spoken about the opportunities for creative practitioners to give (imaginative, speculative, rehearsed) form to endings that have not yet emerged. They can do this through words that are spoken, the shapes bodies make, the darkness that falls at the end of a performance, the applause that follows. Within certain genres of performance, we are encouraged to anticipate the end, as an audience to shape the end, while performance devices including sound, lighting, sets, storyline, tempo and crescendo are put to work in the service of marking the end (see Richardson 2011). We argue that in the space between the apprehension of the ending and its realisation, speculation, rehearsal, and imaginaries take form. So, we see in the example by Bert and Nazi time and space expanded in such a way that draws forth an inevitable (but not yet material) end, into the present. We know that one day that the pair will be departed from one another, but we don’t know how that end will manifest, whether the breakdown of a relationship, through death, or geographical displacement. By presenting one of these possibilities to us, the audience, the piece opens the question of the politics of ending and draws attention to ways in which the not yet fixed nature of the ending can be given form through performance. As we engage with Bert and Nazi’s futures we believe (feel) them to be unfolding before us in sped-up time, and then, they hold hands and bow and we remember that what we are witnessing, and feeling, is just one possible vision of the future. But through performance, we also see an echoing or reverberation between the form of the ending and the theme and content of the ending being discussed. The punctuated endings as they lean back on the chair mirror the mundane and everyday, the epic endings which we will go on to describe in the following sections echo the magnitude of the global crisis that is at the heart of the work. And at the end of the performance lights do not go down, but instead a google maps image pans out from the location we currently inhabit (we will explore the impact of this in the section on feeling). Through this device Bert and Nasi subvert the usual conventions for an “ending” and in doing so give fresh form to the end of the performance. These devices give shape to the challenges of the present, leading us to question what does a future loss make us feel about relationships in the now. There is a radical possibility or promise to performance precisely because the ending can be rewritten and re-envisaged—given new form—in each staging and production of the play.

Feeling

At the end of the production a google maps image of the building we all shared in that moment, was projected, accompanied with music—“Together in Electric Dreams” (Moroder and Oakey). The image slowly panned out, until our building disappeared into the city, then the region, the country, and finally the globe. This echoed an expansion in time that had opened the performance: reaching back 4.5 billion years to the moment gravity pulled swirling gas and dust together, and then forwards to the end of the earth. Both devices created a feeling of connection drawing focus to the reality that we “are all here, now, together, in this one place, in this one time against the odds.” The person I was sitting next to turned to me with tears in her eyes and said—“that was always our song as kids in the car, it reminds me of my dad” And we hugged, and it was the first time I had been a room with so many people in a very long time, and you could feel in her words the tension of joy and loss together—those days are over but they were beautiful. The joy and magic in the futile, was brought into sharp relief by sadness, by loss, by the Ends of things…

Endings are felt in different ways (optimistically, fearfully). As we have noted above, there is something in the emergent nature of the ending in-process which invites intensity of feeling. For example, feelings of nationalism and belonging were intensified through Brexit (Closs Stephens 2022; Anderson et al. 2020) and the more recent death of Queen Elizabeth II. People are invested in endings because they make and shape our present and because they affect everyone. Performing arts allow us to explore how endings are felt. Endings in performance mirror the work that endings in everyday life can do—in the intensity that they draw to the present—providing a container to it in space and time.

Why do we feel things when we watch a performance? Is it because we feel for another and for ourselves? The Bert and Nasi performance asked us to rehearse the feeling of the end. To sit (often uncomfortably) with the reality that we will all eventually end; that our actions may have consequences on the ends of others; to connect with those feelings; and whilst those endings were imagined, roleplayed, anticipatory, the feelings they evoked were lived in the present of the performance. The condensing of events into the present of the performance opened opportunities for empathetic encounters with otherwise unimagined, immaterial, not yet realised lives (see Johnston and Bajranje 2014 on street theatre and empathetic encounters; Veal 2020 on dance and empathy). By encouraging us to imagine and feel their own endings, and the ends of people they loved—we were in turn able to reflect on and feel our own possible, or already realised endings. This happened when the person next to me mentioned her dad, I (Ruth) wondered if he was still around, and thought about my own dad, who had died suddenly three years prior to this event. The music, and the connection and the mediation of endings created both a combination of intense joy—at the happy memories that we had shared, and great sadness at the loss, the hole, the emptiness of him in the present. Endings remind us that continuation is impossible, that loss is always inevitable (Harrison 2015). Performance, if only temporarily, can provide opportunity for thinking about the emotional mobility or slipperiness of endings and by reflecting on “The End” by Bert and Nasi we scholars of geography and the GeoHumanities to look closely at “eventfulness” (energy, atmosphere, affect, emotions) of ending, interrogate the complexities therein of that which remains, that which is lost, destroyed, of things that exist in liminal space, of the ephemeral, as well as incoherent fragments which are held on, to toiled over, and accepted and let go.

CONCLUSION

In this introduction we have argued for endings as central to understanding the current political moment and for the potential of creative arts (performing arts specifically here) to intervene, know and represent endings. This work matters because the spectacle of ending amidst an endless present repeats across a number of domains beyond the examples that we have explored in this introduction. Claims that something is, has or should end are now commonplace in relation to a range of significant contemporary issues and concerns beyond UK and US politics. For example, we hear testimonies and social claims made about the end of liberal democracy, the end of peace, the end of modernity, species loss, the end of capitalism, the end of secure energy, and the end of the world itself. Within these we find calls for things to end (and or should end): to end the burning of fossil fuels, to stop unsustainable extraction of minerals and illegal deforestation, to end the trade in human life, weapons and narcotics, to end abusive labour practices, to end historic forms of violence and prejudice, and more recently to end runaway inflation. If we are indeed living in “end times” those endings are deeply contested and fractious: endings and claims to endings, questions of how, why and whether endings should happen have become battlegrounds in the contemporary. Often these calls to endings have significant consequences for ordinary forms of comfort and ways of living to which the majority hold deep attachments (see Berlant 2011). The impasse, or suspension that accompanies fractious endings, and calls to endings generate a sense of frustration too, at the inability to enact endings which are deemed necessary for human survival. If radical change must be made for societies to prevent the most catastrophic of “endings,” then one way or another, loss is inevitable. While loss is inevitable, the nature of the loss is not, it is necessary then to find ways to end well, to consider the ethics of endings, and to understand political power within the temporality and intensity of the end.

Creative arts are one domain through which we can begin to explore the different intensities and temporalities of endings and consider how they intersect. As we have shown here through the performing arts there is opportunity to role play/materialise ends, allowing opportunity for reflection on the form that endings take, the ways in which they are lived and felt in the present. Performance offers opportunities for acknowledging the inevitability of endings, this can help us to accept and thus explore how to end well. Something which we argue is one of the key questions of the political present. We have seen how, through Bert and Nazi’s engagement with endings, the different temporalities that endings can take (anticipation, suspension, expectation, punctuation and pre-emption) and the ways in which that shapes experiences in the liveness of the present. We have seen reverberations between the form through which an ending is presented and the content of the ending being explored, for example when bodies lean back on a chair, or when a digital image zooms out to represent the vastness of the world, and we have seen the intensities of feeling that can accompany acts of drawing forth the inevitability of particular endings. These feelings matter to our understanding of the contemporary political moment, as this compels us to (re)consider relations in the present, as well as questions of “which ending” and “how to end well.”

This special issue begins to think and theorise the geographies of endings with specific emphasis on the creative arts. Industrial chimneys become a lens through which Rosa traces the city’s rapid erasure of its industrial heritage and entangled memory politics, raising questions about what can remain under design-driven urban development. Turning to live music venue Maverick’s, a core space of Ottawa’s punk scene, Gelbard’s paper underscores both the material and speculative impacts of the beautifying-come-sanitising agendas that leaves no space for the “noise, filth, and disorder” of punk counter-culture. While lamenting Maverick’s inevitable demise, Gelbard finds hope in speculative futures. In Odds and Ends, Jellis turns to those archival remains (diary entries, miscellaneous drafts, off-cuts of grant applications), that escape being formalised into an ending within academic research. These unfinished fragmentary remains pose opportunities for interrogating the thresholds of endings; when things fall by the wayside, and if and when they might be returned to again. Roger’s autoethnographic reflection on the 1990 Cambodian National Dance Company UK tour examines how performance is galvanised and re-envisaged through the act of engaging with its recorded components (memories, experiences, a black diary, records, video, newspapers and photographs) and that these are also sites of affective and embodied performance. Veal draws on Hannah Ardent’s assertation that “action has no end” to propose dance choreography as opening opportunities to deepen thinking on endings, through a sense of their contingency and openness. Richardson-Ngwenya et al.’s paper curates videos, photos and graphics to illustrate how academics might facilitate more open and sincere reflection and sharing at the end of a research project. And finally, Williams’s paper examines the creative possibilities of cut-ups (of collage and poetry) in thinking through dementia friendly communities.

Taking the lead from the papers in this collection, we invite further thinking around endings with and beyond creative practice, including work which attends to their specificity and work which makes connections across and between a range of different endings. Scholars might ask—where do endings take place, what are the geographies of endings? How do the geographies of endings matter—how are endings lived and by whom, for whom do endings matter, what are their different temporalities and intensities, how are they lived and encountered publicly and in everyday life, what are the ethics of endings, and how are endings deployed as forms of political governance?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the authors of this special issue for their thoughtful, critically creative contributions as well as their patience as this collection was brought to fruition. Thanks to Nick Rush-Cooper who co-organised “Starting with the End…” at the RGS-IBG in 2019 and thanks to all of the contributors of those sessions. The authors wish to thank Professor Cresswell for his on-going guidance and support throughout and Professor Anderson whose generous comments have helped to improve this article. We wish to dedicate the collection to Josie Jolley.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Raynor

RUTH RAYNOR is a human geographer and Lecturer in Urban Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Ruth’s research involves the study and practice of performing arts for social research, feminist theories of emotion and affect, specifically loss, grief, precarity and hope and lived experiences of policy change.

Charlotte Veal

CHARLOTTE VEAL is a human geographer and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Charlotte’s research investigates the cultural and political geographies of performance and practice and the intimate embodied experiences of geo/political forces.