wwWoyzeck brain-matters and mind-stuff_ part one: Indianapolis

Charting out the map of a creative process.

September 2002. It is impossible to say where ideas come from, just as it is impossible to define creativity or consciousness. It's true though, that once the idea enters the mind, it seems to trigger a series of fortuitous coincidences: the un-replaceable excitement of being in a journey of discovery. The journey has parallel roads, streets, motorways which at times intersect in a massive spaghetti-junction.

When, over a year ago, I started my correspondence with John Green about creating a project in Indianapolis, I went down one of these roads. We discussed the possibility of finding a performance site that would have some kind of historical and cultural resonance for the City. Shortly after, I started my research into the brain and urban maps tracing the correspondences between the two. While these journeys were in progress, I searched for a text that would provide a concrete starting point and metaphor for my exploration. Büchner's Woyzeck appeared on my table in four different languages: A legacy of four fragments: short, film-like, interchangeable scenes, snatches of dialogue (sometimes one liners) which seemed to be infinitely rearrangeable. A structure-less text, un-moulded, unshaped, fragmentary, hallucinatory- like the functioning of a deranged mind. At the beginning of this year, I had a message from Indianapolis: "We've found a very interesting place, I think you will like it. it's called the catacombs.

This piece is an attempt to chart out the map of a creative journey, trying to preserve its erratic progress as faithfully as possible.

Part One: Indianapolis: Endangered Species, Endangered Land

Sunday, May 12, 2002. Grangetown, Cardiff, 5am. The journey starts here. My house. A house full of people. People in movement, people in contact, people with tickets for an unknown quest. A close-knit community reaching out from Wales to the world. A small convoy of 2 cars, 6 artists, 32 bags, and 1 spinning-wheel, Pat's travelling companion. Worlds and sub-worlds carried in small bags. At Heathrow, a long queue to check in and go through the X-ray-ritual of post-September 11th security precautions. (Flashes of Gate 49, the Belfast-bound shuttle in the eighties, came back to me: a long corridor leading to war-zone-Northern Ireland). All three films on the plane deal with the real and the different tricks the mind can play: Harry Potter, Vanilla Sky, A beautiful Mind. What do we dream, what do we really live? I'm excited and my own brain is playing strange tricks too.

November 2001, London, The V&A. Staring at the map designed on a phrenology head I've often wondered what it would be like to enter the mind. Fear, Joy, Melancholy, Love, Madness, , Paranoia - and many, many others "States" of Mind. What does it feel to be physically inside all of them, I wonder? To hear their different voices, a mechanical sound overlapping with the music of the spheres? Their sensual or chilling breath on the back of the neck? Is the journey dark or light? Is it straight , tortuous, intricate? Is it black and white or full of colours? Is it sensuous, soft on the skin- or harsh and angular, with sharp edges, tricky levels, and fugues of corridors that make your mind spin? What is that space: is the mind like a labyrinth or it is like a perfectly rational grid of perpendicular lines like the map of Downtown Indianapolis.

Giusi's journey runs parallel to us but on a different route: from Rosignano Solvay to Bologna to Munich to Chicago to Indianapolis. For all, Indianapolis is looming after a long wait in Chicago.

Monday, May 13. We are taken on a tour of Butler University then to downtown-Indy to check out the "catacombs". Jolted from an American Airlines jumbo to a jumbo-corn-dog in the City Market, I then descend to the catacombs by an elevator. I'm stunned, disorientated, ost and peaceful at the same time. The space is both visceral and virtual. It has no centre, no story, no ghosts. Infinite red brick arches and vault corridors shone by flash-light. There is no electricity down there. You can cut the darkness with a knife.

I went out like a light
And woke up at half past one with my neck on fire

Tuesday, May 14. We are presenting the project to the media, academics, VIPs, fledgling performers and veterans, all sitting at large round tables like at a wedding reception. The title of the project on Indy publicity is Endangered Species, Endangered Land. John Green had suggested Endangered Land. I added in Endangered Species, referring to the performer slowly disappearing from the face of the earth. It seems convoluted but after seeing the catacombs it feels absolutely right. The tables are mixed and like quirky infiltrators, ELAN performers sit in amongst them. They wear vintage clothes, strange yet perfectly possible attire. There is something timeless about them: they could be pilgrims, vagabonds. Or even dinosaurs. They are in fact, the Endangered Species. I just gave the performers brief instructions. A simple language of runes and landmarks for them to accompany the thought-process in my paper. Then we all started breathing a new exciting atmosphere. The atmosphere arising from a new way of working taking shape: performance-in-progress seamlessly and effortlessly weaving its way into the written words of my paper and the new ones making their way from the spectators' gaze to my lips. At 2pm the workshop starts: twenty-five bewildered yet excited faces transfer from the round tables to the Drama Studio in Butler.

I encounter the group of performers I will be taking this journey with: they are my endangered species, in our endangered land. Each one a microcosm, a world and underworlds. All the different roads have now come to a massive junction. The meeting point is a dark, underground grid underneath Indy city market. We can now start the process of creation.

It's no easy ride. We go straight into generating and controlling energy. Then, the Barrier, where the performers simply exist in space with no text, no tap-dance, no character, no physical sequence. The Barrier is just being, breathing. Sometimes, cleansing. The dirtiness of emotions surfaces. One of the performers is in floods of tears. "I'm a professional" she says, "I don't usually do this. It's embarassing."

Wednesday, May 15. In the afternoon we go to the catacombs with the whole group. The performers have the task to "find a home" and create a physical sequence that would claim that space. Naively, I thought I was just going to walk along reading their actions like the unfolding of a book: from left to right. Instead, I stop and start. The maze-like nature of the space makes it impossible to predict who will be next. I felt that the place rejected the concept of a journey. There is no centre; no right, no left. There are no escape routes and no boundaries. I kept thinking I'd moved miles but I always found myself in the same place. How do we take the audience through? What kind of experience will they have?

Thursday, May 16. I still can't find my way in. I can't find the key to unlock the space because the space is so completely open and yet treacherous. Like the mind.

I mention it to Pat. She knows exactly what I'm talking about.
She gives me her own experience of "finding a home".
"I went down there" she says "I walked about trying to pick up something: a trace, a scar.
But it was peaceful, not scary, not dark, not invasive
Just clear.
I had an easy time.
I went down there and It was just like going into yourself,
Like going into a meditation- didn't have to find "it"
I was walking around by myself, bumping into people-
It all looked the same
I couldn't find a structure, a pattern-
In the end, I came to this corner at the back
And thought to myself: this place is as good as any
I will do my sequence here
So I took down there the movements and the laughter I'd created in the studio but
I felt I was losing control because I had nothing bouncing off me
Normally, spaces give you their own boundaries to bounce off. But the only things that exist down here is thoughts.
You see, If you haven't got boundaries you can lose control,
You just get bigger and bigger. Out of proportion.
Max came. I said: Do you have a place?- he says No- I said,
I have a room in the back, if you want. He says: Okey.
When Max came there, in my space,
he created a bit of a boundary for me and changed my laughter"

In the evening, Alli gives me a hand-drawn map of the catacombs. I place it over the square map of downtown Indianapolis and hold it up against the light. I turn it round and round to find a matching pattern. A way in. Eventually, I see it. It's a diagonal line cutting the space right through.

Even in a church, there are centuries of prayer and devotion
There, it is easy for me to rest

Friday, May 17. I stand in the ante-room of the catacombs and point my torch forward. There it is! the way in: a long diagonal stretching out before my eyes. I watch Heidi walk the diagonal and disappear in darkness at the other end. Is there an end?

The place is virginal.
What we are doing here is too much for it.
We are bruising it.

Saturday, May 18. We create the waltz in the studio. Then we go down to the catacombs. The waltz doesn't work at all there. The movement is circular and the place is angular.

The energy in the space is untampered with.
It's energy painted on a canvas, for the first time

Monday, May 20. We test the performers' and audiences' journey. We work on the notion of fore-grounding and back-grounding. Like in a film. It's difficult down here to hang on to their stories. I feel I don't want to know the story or their whole stories. All I need to know is what I see-

A stooped figure doing and undoing a brick wall
as if she's had to apply herself to her life
A Girl washing her hair in a bucket
A woman at a spinning-wheel
The Idiot knitting on an pipe above our heads
A Girl singing in a dark cupboard
The sound of scratches on the wall
Woyzeck-David running in the dark, like a rat
A Barker child-like figure on a mechanical horse
A Marie making circles in the sand to reveal a broken mirror
A female figure working at a sewing machine
Woyzeck-Rob sharpening his razor on a leather belt
Marie and Drum-Major embracing in a pile of metal junk
Marie-Constance beaten and scrunched up in a windowless alcove.
Two elderly women in black suits walking the space like blind seers
A young woman climbing a vault like ivy.

Tuesday, May 21. Alli has rigged the whole space with all kinds of junk-lights. A string of Christmas lights slowly fades up to highlight the way in. The place has become magical.

Wednesday, May 22. Not one, but two upright pianos (one white and a blue) have been brought down from the upstairs market into the catacombs for Giusi to play. The sound of a live piano down here feels unreal. There are no piano stools. She plays her music standing up and bending into it as if folding inside a lover's arms.

Friday, May24 & Saturday, May 25. The new performer appears. The audience. As always, there are the ones that will enter time and space and the ones who will just cross both to get to the other end.

And Time? Is time timeless down here? An endless flow of images appearing at regular scansions, sparse and cool like perfect poetry, like a Tarkovsky film; is it chaotic, dusty, dirty, crowded and populated by strange creatures like a Fellini film? Or is it just the whirring of Pat's spinning-wheel?