Sound and Violence as Spectacle

(this piece was my final paper for a class in Creative Writing through through other art forms.)

It was the third film in the Cremaster Cycle, screened in class, that was my first encounter with performance art. I was watching something whose kind I had not met before.

The experience sent me having a kind of last song syndrome (LSS,) one that sent me recreating feedback (of all sounds) and a strange beat with my voice after class. The performance played like a dream – blurry, foreign, a hidden part of my Freudian iceberg.

I got a headache while watching the piece, a headache I liked, one that sent me craving for a cigarette as if doing so would answer my questions, as addictions went.

During the screening, people around me were asking so many questions and saying so much about the project: how it didn’t make sense, how it was uncomfortable, how it was weird. So many thoughts popped aloud that it became apparent how both similarly we were all raised, how there was this high level of curiosity in reaction to a world around us and the way people asked questions, and the way it usually just ended there. These statements stayed in their interrogative form, as the pursuit to find the answers to them involves too much effort, something not mandatory.

People were asking questions all the way from the primary character’s introduction en medias res until the last level. I call him that, ‘primary character,’ because at that early point, I still was not aware of what performance pieces looked like. Maybe this was also partly because we were only shown one part of a yet amorphous concept. All of us in the classroom were looking for ways to make sense of something we didn’t have to. I had not met the Apprentice before.

I more than liked the film. It made for a diving board when it was finally our turn to think of our own performance pieces. I noticed that there was a violence in Cremaster Cycle which was something foreign to a class of budding artists. It was perhaps there that the thoughts of including a kind of violence into my own performance.

The question, it occurred to me at the beginning, was whether the violence I intended to pepper into the piece would be acceptable to a community that had not seen much noise in the past years, since the absence of a central tambayan (the old fountain we all called the ash tray,) since an unknown time when even music seemed a guilty pleasure. There had been a silence at the atrium that used to be my shelter, one that had become uncomfortable for someone who loved music such as I did.

My concept was spontaneous from the moment I blurted out my concept in class recitation, to the performance itself, to the point when people were talking about the performance afterwards, even beyond that.

I called my performance piece Forms – an attempt to recreate how everyone’s lives have been etched, mapped out, carved, and perhaps also destined and doomed to be recorded in pieces of paper, everything from the moment people are born until the moment they die – including the other pieces of paper that hail us (as Louis Althusser described what Ideological State Apparatuses did) and even beyond that. Another intended pun to the idea was the ice-breaking as a metaphor for how citizens of any society were unknowingly being molded against any will, and that we do not realize it until more than a significant amount of our formative years have passed. We are broken into what society thinks we should be: Filipino, part of a country whose government struggles with a corrupt identity, male in a society that celebrates maleness by the common display of machismo (martial arts, carpentry, manual labor.)

The performance was in a way self-descriptive:
the act, breaking ice, intended to break a frozen barrier in the site for discursive space and artistic creativity. It also referred to that point when one of two parties stranger to each other begins talking.

The performance, I pitched in the middle of the semester, would involve a huge block of ice, a hammer, fast paced music in open air setup, a pair of twins, scratch paper, paper planes of drafts of poetry written by classmates in my other CW major.

Three movements would be involved: someone breaking the ice, someone raising different pieces of paper with signs written on them, and someone else flying paper planes made from poetry drafts.

Breaking a block of ice as a lifetime of certificates was flashed beside the said ice-breaker, poetry paper planes flying towards the audience in between these displays – it seemed a perfect description of how the artist lives. What is always noticed is what makes the most noise, the mundane task of breaking a block of ice in this case. Anything routine is ignored. I have not heard of someone talking about the word-text signs, other than my teachers, which reflects the critical focus of the average observer in a world where attention spans have reached all-time lows thanks to the high speed media of television and the world wide web. Not that that's a bad thing: it is simply an observation to what perceptions occur, given the spectacle in the site where audience and performer interact.

I asked my batchmates Pearl and Rose to help me and also begged them to perform with me. They said I didn’t need to, they immediately agreed to the plan, even in its primordial form.

I didn’t admit to anyone how jittery I was about the plan: I had already submitted my concept I would be making noise in a community that had become so disappointingly hesitant to make these kinds of noise in the past few years. I was actually half-expecting that someone from the nearby office building would scream and ask me to stop because I would be interrupting something, with the art I was trying to create reduced to noise. This had happened before, I heard. There was once talk of someone stopping a sound-check (a prerequisite of any production that involves sound systems) in the past because of too much noise. This is unconfirmed, but this idea is a bit daunting.

For the first time, I was actually afraid of performing. It wasn’t the kind you get with stage fright, what I mean is a kind of fear that may have resulted in having higher up’s being perceived to over-reading “texts,” beyond the limits of the written word, which may even involve the performative nature of behavior. But I digress. Maybe I owe this simply to not having performed like this before.

Let’s just say that a bunch of jitters was merely one dimension of it. I didn’t let the mere thought of it stop me. I had been raised to believe that the show must go on. And it did. It had long been that way, even as the performance concept was conceived.

The original idea was for one of us to be in different parts of a set piece which was divided into three: two visible panels partitioned in the middle, and a backdrop with only a hand raising signs as the visible performer behind it.

In the middle of the conceptualization we realized that the set was too elaborate that we were afraid it would call too much attention to itself instead of the concept. The hassle of preparation and cleanups also came into mind.

We decided that we needed to let everything else in our worlds dominate us for a while: there were other deadlines to beat, jobs, internships, and a thesis defense to prepare for. We chose not to panic and decided we could actually go with what we had. This left the search for a block of ice to me. We were ready – sort of (I’m sure Pearl would agree.) We let the idea ferment for a while.

I had always been fascinated with how words were manifestations of hegemony. A presidential pardon from the head of state, for example, functions similarly with a jeepney signboard – both signs direct and control, both signs identify, both signs produce endless discourse that doesn’t stop with the one who places said words to the medium, not even at that point where the reader gets to consume the said words for the reader’s own purposes. Both are texts, these ones explicitly written. Discourse is not limited to the written text.

I wanted to show several things. First of which was the story of a nameless citizen of any state. I wanted to prove that the citizen’s story could actually be told with the different documents that act as footsteps in his journey towards death, with birth as the point where it starts and death, the destination. The birth certificate begins this, a more recognizable dive-board, assuming everyone is familiar with it.
I also wanted to find out which kind of text people would notice – whether it was the performed kind, or the written one, or both.

Pearl and I decided that I should not see the words that she would write on the pieces of paper that served as the narrative device of the story we wanted to portray. Besides the available pictures captured by members of the class, those photos that captured the process of breaking the ice and showing the signs, I still have no clue what she wrote and showed the audience.

At the performance crunch time – that part of every production when the performer wants to pull all the strings that move the universe just to make everything right, that race to the minutes before the performance itself – I spent the entire morning imagining how the concept would look like, playing the background music over and over while doing it. In my mind was an image of the performance itself, repeated several times.

I managed to find a block of ice and borrow a cooler to transport it with.

This part was something I found amusing: the part where I had to reconfigure the language that was in my mind so that for a different audience, the negotiation for the individual elements of my performance would be more recognizable. Case in point: as I was borrowing the cooler, I almost wanted to explain the art concept to the cooler’s owner Ate Ling. I decided against it, and offered her a cooler full of crushed ice afterwards instead.

She agreed, wondering why I was dragging a block of ice in an old rice sack.
I think that a huge part of the adrenaline rush that every performer feels is there at the last moments in the waiting to perform, those few minutes every performer should endure. After all the signs were written, after all the paper planes were made, after the sound system was set, all Pearl and I had to do was wait for the other performers to finish their turn. Rose had to cancel at the last minute, owing to the thesis defense schedule that coincided with the performance date. We understood, Pearl and I were graduating students ourselves.

I placed the hammer on top of the block of ice and waited for my turn. The hammer began melting into the ice, almost buried halfway laterally as our turn to perform approached.

For a moment I thought that no longer will anything go wrong as soon as my turn began. All I had to do was break the ice, let Pearl do her thing, and wish that the sound system was working the way it should (which I asked somebody to make sure for me.) The performance would speak for itself, I hoped.

The walking audience approached us, signaling the beginning of the performance. I got a bit nervous when the music didn’t play at first, but got fixed within a few seconds.

Then it began. I began to calm down when the music started playing. I felt invisible, the way I pictured the audience disappear with the first bash to the block of ice with the hammer. I bashed it with an angry energy that served me a double purpose, energy for the performance as well as stress reliever for the stage fright. Every bash was therapy. I was, at that point, in between feeling relaxed, with an adrenaline rush that resembled rage, perhaps my blood pumping that much blood into my veins that I could not feel any sensation in the palm of my hand.

In between the performance the hammerhead flew loose – at a trajectory that almost hit my head had I not dodged it at the last instance. Surprisingly, I just stared at the heavy piece of metal in midair as it floated in midair. I finally know what bullet-time feels like.

The experience of performing something spontaneous changed my perception of that moment. The thought of being injured was still there. It was, after all, a hammer bashed at full force that was recoiling towards my head. But I didn't mind.
What I appreciate until now is the way it added a dimension to the experience. On the table in front of me was a block of ice I was bound to destroy within two minutes of the length of the music track. On my hand was a hammer handle that no longer had purpose, the head flying off to some unknown part of the lawn behind me. Life, as the performance had shown to me, wasn't perhaps as “scripted” as I thought it was – there was an element of randomness to it.

The performance aspect of every life was still there.

There were other ways, I figured, still in the spirit of the go-on principle. My frail arms held the block of ice at its side – the way one would carry a child half the carrier’s weight – and dropped the block to the table, creating a ruckus of a more noticeable kind.

So much can happen in the span of two minutes. The accounts I gathered after the performance and online gave me access to other angles which had been blocked by my intimacy with the performance, the block of ice to be specific.

Apparently, the noise I was creating disturbed a class that was held right across the area where I was performing. I was told that one of the professors stopped his class to look through his window and watch us. While the class watched the performance I was looking for ways to break the ice. The most immediate means was to break it on the wooden table itself.

Bea, a friend of mine, was a student from that course. She told me through an online forum that that there was someone in that class who found the performance boring who was wondering why everyone else was staring outside. I didn’t quite mind. I wasn't trying to impress anyone. The comment was actually useful as examples of reactions from various angles. There was not much intention to collect as many people in the audience but an amount of reaction useful for critical analysis.

As the block disintegrated into smaller and smaller pieces, I turned to the tiled floor where I was standing for more solid breaking points.

And then Professor De Veyra called my name.

I wasn’t sure what he was saying at the time, but the years of college had trained me to recognize that kind of hailing, so to speak. I thought he asked me to stop, so I did, no longer asking why.

It turns out that all he said was not to hurl the chunks of ice too hard to avoid breaking the floor tiles, I would learn later. But it was fine. Those two minutes were enough to get a point across.

That instance reiterated the locale, setting, and context of the performance piece. I was an artist performing within the limits of a constricted space – which was a contradiction in itself, something that my instructor shared, in her blog, didn't like herself becoming.

I think that instance was an illustration on the negotiations that occur between art and society, in this case, my course and my campus, happening art versus building administration, which may dangerously be compared to chaos and order, respectively, if we must adhere to that kind of thinking.

There is, I think, a lot of negotiation necessary for artists in a space such as ours. Aside from this, all actors in the area fulfilled multiple roles. I was not only a performer who was producing a concept in public, I was also a student. My professors were not only artists, but also employees and administrators (who had administrators of their own.)

There was a limit that I had not foreseen. At the same time, there was also an uncertain definition to my concept where labels, something that any society and ideology needs, are concerned.

I was trying to accomplish two things: one was to find out how a concept such as mine would be perceived by an audience within an area, and how a locale that was disturbed by some mundane actions would react.

Khareen, one of my classmates, was sitting around with other classmates at the atrium as I was pushing the cooler with my legs (I couldn't carry it alone.) She was smiling when she said this, “I loved your performance. You really caused a racket.” It was at that time when I slowly began to piece together several reactions to a story that I was performing.

All performance pieces begin with concepts and theories. Mine tried illustrating a lifetime of certificates with three mundane actions. From the point of conception itself, the performance piece concept turned Pearl, Rose, and I, into body and text simultaneously, those two minutes morphing us into stimuli that the mind perceives in more ways than one – visual, kinetic, an auditory anomaly within a confined space that discourages noise and, perhaps accidentally, creativity.

At the end of my performance my body was trying to go back to normal, the adrenaline rush slowly subsiding as we were walking towards the next performance piece. Sir John, one of my teachers, said that it was interesting that the hammer flying off from its handle became part of the concept piece.

My instructor seemed scared as Sir Nino was making fun of my “almost breaking the tiled floor.” She then told me that there was no video documentation for the performance and that we needed to perform this again for another project.

I intend to, hopefully in collaboration with other performances.

It is on that project where I hope to be part of another production of texts, a site where creative writing and other art forms cooperate and co-exist, consolidating the art forms in campus, proof that art is getting us somewhere, as others may find hard to understand.

photos from adamsreef