Bird Call (London, 2020)
In 2020 I created a collective performance experiment called Bird Call. This is a written piece I put together a year later, based on the experience of it and culled from other preparatory writings which preceded the event:
What is listening?
I think one thing it isn’t
is just “hearing”
I think hearing happens inside the borders of what you think is around you
Whereas when you listen, you go to, or come from, somewhere outside those borders,
or you meet yourself at some moving point between the coming and the going
listening is an “opening” of hearing,
is maybe what I am saying, though no, that’s not quite it...
a reaching for something, but not arriving
an ear blooming like a flower with a question outside its own reach,
a blossom-ear of light in the dark, behind the head...
and I think it’s part of what makes us...
not robots.
In the beginning,
Keitsuke and Arran’s flute and guitar were animal questions,
askingish voices in wood and metal, spare cymbals, bend of piano key, screech string, whisper and
forest foot-step bongo pitter patter,
Mai answered with her own question, her body question, in white—Butoh dress and skin-paint—
shimmering, silent music.
Sid, Heloise, Hermione, Franzi, Conrad, Nuha, Daisy were ready to speak
around the darkened perimeter
The air was ready to speak
They all were ready to speak, Does listening mean readiness? To speak?
Beings in the crowd seem to wonder if they ought to speak,
propped elbows on the floor, chins jut the air, antennas spectrally outwards
Something quietens, tightens—body open, eye defogs, quieter and quieter quietness
Andrew’s projector captures us and casts us back to the walls - live, enlarged images of ourselves,
reflecting around us,
Pulse of chaos.
Settles. Pulse of oneness
flickers, Quick, unsure, go. Spotlight
on Arran and Keitsuke, I amplify their first Bird Call with my big ear of light
Listen for what might be next...
I made Bird Call because I wanted that feeling of meeting myself from somewhere further outside, or
deeper inside, my own hearing, and I wanted to bring everyone else with me. I wanted to find out more
about what humans are, by thinking about birds.
In London, on the 30th of January, 2020, we tried our first fledgling Squawk at the Old Baths, a
reconverted Bath House in Hackney Wick. People performed across disciplines, in back-to-back
sequence, in one continuous flow, passing the gathering attention of the room as with a baton. Different
artists used different modes of performance (Butoh, sound art, music, theatrical performance, poetry) to
Call out to one another, as if performance itself were a way of speaking. As if “performance,” the
expression of creative identity, was the human form of a bird Call: meaning indivisible from sound,
answer indivisible from question.
What is listening?
I’m not sure, but one thing that comes to mind is listening could be about not breaking the attention of
your heart
about staying with something, following the events of an experience like the lines of a song - even the
silences—the rests—are full of something. The beat does not stop.
If you are in the room, you are still in the song, and the song ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and it is taking you
somewhere else beyond where you started—
But what is listening?
I’m not sure, but in listening there seems to be a relationship to the unknown, and a change in the
perception of what we usually Call “accidents.”
That night, both what was planned and what might unfold were woven into the concept of what was “part
of” that song. We had a map for the experience, but the map was very much not the lived territory of the
experience. Our particular map had lots of gaps for the brambles and undergrowth of reality-left-to-
chance to break through.
The experience was a big and complicated undertaking. It required not only mass coordination, but mass
willingness to lose coordination. Tacit agreement to embrace mistakes, failures, and chance errors as a
part of what is meant to happen. A group is an organism in conflict with itself, moving through the
hitches of leaderlessness, challenged to hold space for what comes up—like the discomfort of varying
conceptions of and relationships to “imperfection.”
What is listening?
Maybe listening is activated by a kind of blurriness—by making definitive choices in the face of an
unclear, or limitless sky-path. Sometimes the Bird Callers took direct, literal inspiration from actual birds
when they shared their Calls (like the animal sounds Arran and Keitsuke made in the beginning).
Sometimes they riffed with word play, like Conrad’s ‘bird Call sex hotline’ improvisation. Sometimes they
explored the Calls made by human tools - like Nuha’s play with the toy telephone. Sometimes Calls were
made from a deeper ocean of shared sounds and thoughts, or from the silences between breaths, like
when panting Butoh Sid rode his bike in place until, through the conversion of his kinetic energy, its
headlight turned on like a distant newborn star.
What is “supposed to be” and what is “accident?” On the edge between our resistance and our
willingness to try, are our ears bigger than usual? What is it like to trust a great order out of seeming
chaos? Does it open up another the secret ear at the back of your head?
What is listening?
I think listening shows up when the body registers a groups instability, its lack of hierarchy. If at any
moment the flock’s formation might start to align behind you, if you must be ready to be the boss bird,
what new kinds of information enter your ear? There were subtle disruptions of presumed passivity on
the part of audience members—invitations, for those who may have otherwise considered themselves as
“viewers”, to re-cast themselves as Bird Callers too. Sometimes the “audience” was more explicitly involved
along the way—at one point they were given simple household items as tools to create animal Calls.
(Hermione Spriggs, the facilitator of this moment, did not use speech to convey her instructions, but
merely began the experiment herself, simultaneously playing a video projection whose sound,
fortuitously, malfunctioned). At all times, the boundary between performer and audience was challenged,
or at least blurred to the point where everyone, not just the planned acts, might need to fly or squeak at
any time.
But what is listening?
I’m not sure, but birds make me think that listening might even have something to do with
everyone.With more of everyone, showing up in the room. More of you. More of me. Not less. I hear the
geese flying overhead, and they are cacophonous as ever. They are speaking loudly, all at once, and they
are listening loudly. When I am more awake to myself I am more awake to you. I feel more of what I
want, don’t want, what I fear to take on, what I will dare myself to try on—the Calls of others whose
timbre I might weave into my own stream, the Calls of others for which I might change my own stream’s
course.
That night, we had distinct bird Calls, one act after the other, and then, mimesis: taking each other’s
“Calls” on, overlapping with each other, as birds do, chirping all at once and yet listening all at once, as
birds do. Imitating one another just as the birds now are reported to imitate our cell phone ringtones, or
the sounds of the chainsaws that are destroying their habitats.
Imitating, and yet still remaining distinct of voice. Imitation, or mimesis, as a way of hearing with voice—
whether that “voice” manifested as sound, movement, words, song, glances, or even the way our presence
speaks when we hold space for others without losing ourselves—hearing while speaking. And because
each voice is as unique as an invisible fingerprint, resonating from the insides of each of our distinct
bodies, it could be both a way of acknowledging how we are one, and acknowledging how we are each
distinct. It could be a way of integrating polarities, of holding paradox, and thus, perhaps of connecting
to a greater, embodied wisdom: a deeper knowledge of the sky we share even as we honk discord.
oh what is listening? and who? What Listens?
what should this really be about?
there will be more poetry,
we will do a different show than we thought
no time anymore for specialism
and my thing, versus your thing
get in a room
listen to the others
build something, now
there isn’t time to plan or control
prepare your part and come
urgency, urgency
everyone get together
make your offerings for the sake of our spiritual survival
for the sake of life itself for the sake of love for the sake of beating what threatens to tear us apart
no more comparison
inclusion radical inclusion
no more outside
nothing is outside anymore
“i didn’t bring enough socks
or maybe warm clothes?” i’ll be fine
moving between things
and i do not need to explain
and no one does
ever
again
let this be a mess
i never have to explain again
let this speak
let it speak
just this
right now
it speaks
there was so much suffering then
like you couldn’t imagine
and the belief that that was life
if you make the robot lose its train of thought
occasionally...
if you make the robot need to stop, and rest, occasionally...
will it find the song?
does our confusion make us beautiful?
does our imperfection introduce chance?
does our interaction with the universe have gaps
so the light can seep through?
because if you’re all light no holes
if you’re the light that comes through the holes
if you are perfectly en-light-ened
how can you list-en from the dark?
have compassion
make beauty of our history of confusion
to err is human
to suffer is to be confused
and the unerring robots heard listening speak
“what’s happening is, i’m not doing anything
i’m watching, i’m watching it happen
from somewhere else
to watch with curiosity
what the human is doing
how its process moves, the moving shapes of it, the shifting models
like loose pearls through the sewer grate
they make a road map and then miss the territory
but i don’t know the real reason”
no more of the old guard way,
now you must invite everyone to try
there’s no time anymore for specialism and my thing versus your thing
everybody has a bird Call
it’s different from talking
“i feel like a...
my...i don’t have my...”
you make a distance in your speaking and your trying
and you can be in a hole that moves dark and away, head first, yes
you can go away if you like, through narrow dark cylindrical air, and it’s cold, and has room for only one
or you can look behind you at sunlight
without even turning around
reach for the jolly ranchers
crinkle the plastic wrappers in the bowl and wait wide
puzzle pieces
leave yourself puzzle pieces,
watch the models shift
with time as your medium
come back when you have nothing to do but move pieces around
and perform your unfinished document, transmit it, in space
light, shadow
the subtlest score
micro sounds
vocal whimper
a moment of broken apart, deconstructed speech
some combination of these
some silence
a “shhhh”
a listening is what
and what
are the Calls that follow
the last Call:
everyone, Listening for what might be next, for what
we cannot hear
the first Call has the job:
establish this, this conversation beyond speaking
and the other birds just Call
i made a distance in my speaking and my trying but so what? everybody has a bird Call and it’s different
from talking
to crinkle the plastic wrappers in the bowl and wait wide
to break the logos legos apart so there’s the space
for them to be a part of...
some language that undoes itself
by starting
i want the conversation beyond the speaking, i want to listen for what i cannot hear
and the other birds Call