Extracts from the much longer "Toolbag of Actions and Notions" in the book.
Processions
Processions should be constructed quickly: Choose a loose theme. March without armies, bleach all flags.
Action: divide into groups, each one to create a different aspect of the procession:
a/ music
b/ objects (burdens or relics) for carrying
c/ chants for shouting or singing
d/ physical actions
e/ banners and placards
f/ a short ritual
g/ (possibly stewards), etc.
Devise some interaction with spectators – collecting money, throwing flowers, shaking hands, whatever. Then assemble all the groups together – do any last minute preparation (teaching chants, etc.) – and then process. The periphery of the march should interact spontaneously with passers-by and street furniture.
(See The Modern Procession, Francis Alÿs and “Theatrical-political Possibilities In Contemporary Procession" by Phil Smith in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Vol 29 (1), 2009.)
“A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them--or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.The Book of the Damned, Charles Fort
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags; they'll go by like Euclid, arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.”
The Swimmer
Devise a journey between a number of generically similar spaces. The Burt Lancaster character does this in Frank Perry and an unattributed Sydney Pollack’s 1968 movie The Swimmer, running from pool to pool across middle-class suburbia in Westport, Connecticut, swimming through a world that is passing him by.
Find your series of generic spaces and then devise an action that can be performed at each of these sites, making sure your action is open and porous enough for the sites to affect and alter it as you go along. Gather an ‘audience’ of participants, teach them the action, then take them on the journey.
Mis-guided Tour (or Twalk)
This is a performance modelled on a guided tour in which the role of the tour guide is fore-grounded and in which the (usual) historiographical mono-narrative is replaced by a series of layers and tangents. These can be autobiographical, phenomenological or critical. This is achieved by rearranging the established narratives of the place, researching and revealing its hidden histories and introducing performativities and Fortean whimsies (both cosmological and irrational).
Action:
Find a route or defined site. Research the site for documentation of marginal or ignored data, unreliable stories of hauntings, accounts of anomalies, previous performances in the site, previous uses, mundane stories about the place, crass statistics, sublime physical information (vulcanology, etc.)
Research the site corporeally (climb on it, crawl over it, hide in it, eat its meals, wash in its showers, talk to everyone in it), sample its textures and tickle up your own autobiographical associations. The various layers so revealed should then be dramatically re-constructed in the manner of a Deleuzian assemblage: reaching a consistency by sustaining their differences.
(An assemblage is the dynamic interconnection of congruent singularities that remove the subject/object interface, yet retain elements of specificity. The human assemblage is a multiplicity that forms new assemblages with existing social and cultural assemblages of material movement, force and intensity.)
As guide/s the manner of your guiding should be fore-grounded and looped back into the narrative, the meanings of which you should express through connections and intervals. Be ready to show your regretted tattoos. The ‘audience’ for the guided tour should find themselves co-opted into the performance (physically modelling events, holding objects, tasting and drinking).
“Every sentence of your tour made sense even though the meaning of the whole thing was unclear - i.e. we three visitors extracted different meanings. That seems perfect.”
(from hard copy of email retained in the files of the Exmouth CPS)
Plagiarism
There was never anything new about détournement (the principle of taking dead art and re-animating it through travesty).
In 2008 Theun Mosk, Boukje Schweigman and Robert Wilson created Walking for the Oerol Festival on the island of Terschelling. (Given the hubristic title this was always going to be a prime candidate for re-use.) Participants walked for four hours in extreme slow motion across sand dunes, sometimes guided, sometimes following marked paths, sometimes their vistas were transformed by arches, gates, dark rooms and corridors and sometimes they followed each other, until (a little before reaching the final, tepee-like construction) they became aware of each other as factors in the landscape equivalent to the paths, dark rooms and tunnels.
Before they acquired their own premises, the early freemasonic lodges would chalk the ritual shape of ‘Solomon’s Temple’ on the floors of rented rooms, wiping away the marks at the conclusion of rituals that “changed strangers into brothers”.
Drifters should make and enact their own versions of these solidarities.
Pseudo-archaeology (after Mark Dion)
Recover objects from the surface of a site, or dig down into its layers. Assemble the finds according to fanciful and coincidental categories or classifications. What appears to be archaeology is a large poem of things.
Turning The Page
Go to a library or charity shop. Choose a book at random. From the book first choose a page and then a word, both at random. Drift until you find the word (or some association with it). Then choose a second word at random and search for that… and so on…
Pixie Signs
In 2000, under cover of darkness, The Interdimensional Pixie Broadcast Network replaced the functional symbols of the road signs in the city of Exeter with punctuation marks, squids, fairies, seahorses, blobs, mandalas and molluscs.(Such infiltrations complement the thoughts - though not necessarily the methods - of the road safety pioneer David Engwicht on ‘intrigue and uncertainty’. See Mental Speed Bumps.)
Replace all functional signs with poetic-biological symbols.
Make Fake
Action: build communities of fakery, model villages, graveyards of modernist sculpture, pseudo-science pavilions – link them all up, until the map threatens to take over the territory.
Audio
Make your own soundtrack to the city.
Grids
Create a journey made from lines, vectors, boundaries, borders, crossroads, centres, crash barriers, squares and plinths; record the strategies of power and their fractures.
Gum Galaxy
Where the pavements are covered, like a rash, in chewing gum, use chalk to draw lines to connect the pieces of gum in stellar constellations. Name them in Latin (if you don’t know any Latin make it up).
Micro-site Performances
First, choose the dimensions of your micro-site: maybe the size of an A4 sheet of paper? Maybe the dimensions of a wardrobe?
Seek out a site that matches your chosen dimensions and explore this site carefully. Pay particular attention to the details of texture. Then re-explore. Then explore again. Repeat until there seems to be nothing more to be discovered. And then explore again.
Is it possible to create a micro-performance or micro-action suitable for your micro-site?
Solo ‘Splorin’ Exercises
You are Cupid. Match people in the streets.
You are a diver. Explore the city as if it were underwater.
You are a mist. Drift through the city.
You are a fox in human skin.
You are dead and gone to heaven/hell.
The city is under occupation by intelligent microbes, Martian bodysnatchers, mind control rays – you can’t tell the resisters from the wholly invaded. Do not attract attention to yourself. Choose routes where the least number of people will see you. Use alleys and back paths. Walk calmly through crowds. Show no emotion. Ignore commodities. Hide your hunger.
Tour
Take your friends on an unplanned tour of front gardens: gnome states, zen deserts, graveyards of fake-classical monuments, displays of frozen cartoon animals, abstracts of neglected concrete, faerie delusions. Enter these worlds by discrete gazing; imagine yourselves as citizens or prisoners or princesses in their worlds.
“On window sills, middle class ornaments face in, working class ornaments face out.”
Drift/Dérive*
* Publishers’ Note: there is some duplication of materials with the The Handbook of Drifting above. However, we are following the provisional editors’ decision to retain this section, given the additional information and instructive contradictions.
Best with groups of between three and six.
There should be no destination, only a starting point and a time. A journey to change space, not march through it.
To drift something has to be at stake – status, certainty, identity, sleep.
In a drift, self must be in some kind of jeopardy.
There may need to be a catapult: starting at an unusual time of day, taking a taxi ride blindfold asking to be dropped off at a spot with no signage, leaping onto the first bus or tram you see.
There may be a theme: wormholes, micro-worlds, peripheral vision – whatever you want.
Be tourists in your own town.
Use the things around you as if they were dramatic texts, act them out.
“…on a ‘drift’ we found ourselves at a Moto Service Station on the edge of the city. In the restaurant they had a guarantee printed on little cards. They’d give you your money back if you weren't “completely satisfied” with your meal. So we organised to meet there on our next drift with about 10 other people; we ate big breakfasts and asked for our money back, because, philosophically, a cooked breakfast could never ‘completely satisfy’ a socially and culturally healthy person, not ‘completely satisfy’ all their desires and passions, not a human being. We got the money, but more importantly numerous staff were commandeered to interview us and we turned a restaurant into a debate about desire and fulfilment.” (Notes, unattributed)
The drift should be led by its periphery and guided by atmospheres not maps.
A static drift: stay still and let the world drift to you.
When you drift, use wrecked things you find to make new things (this is called détournement - using dead art and uncivil signs to create unfamiliar languages). Make situations: build miniature wooden villages, giant insects from branches, ritual doorways from burnt remnants, make a small model shed from the wood of a full-sized one and process it from shed to shed until you reach the sea. Construct things from what you find, enact imaginary searches, bogus investigations, gather testimonies for new religions. Just build!!! Leave stories, situations and constructions for any drifters that follow you, they’ll re-make them in their own ways.
Tool box
Take a ‘tool box’ with you: notebook, camera, torch, bag for collecting things, chalk… make up your own.
Moving Pictures
In your head re-shoot movie scenes using your own city as location. Let your memory of movie landscapes bathe the places you pass through. Hum a soundtrack.
At the Savoy Cinema, Exmouth, a sleeping customer awoke, undressed and attempted to climb into The X Files Movie.
Enter your city as if it were a movie.
On the island of Herm, The Nazis filmed The Invasion Of The Isle Of Wight.
Act as if you were in a piece of propaganda.
Inner Maps
Walk with a conceptual, “inner” map. The point is not to experience this map, but for it to lead you by constraints and prtovocations to interfaces you would not otherwise choose.
In his anti-intellectual, but sporadically illuminating The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson attempts to walk the shape of a Martini in Manhattan and then complains because he can’t see the glass. The point of Inner Maps is that they remain immaterial.
We have walked: North, a straight line, vertigo, a green circle, risk and uncertainty, and possible murder-victim burial sites.
“I’M IMMATERIAL, YOU DOLTS! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME GO WHERE I DON’T WANT TO!”Plotka, Duke of Hell in:
Captain Britain and MI13: Hell Comes To Birmingham
Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk
Stalking
Action: identify a person to be followed. Follow them; but do not in any way menace them. Rather, give up your initiative to them. Never make yourself known or allow yourself to be noticed by them. If you sense that they have become aware of you, cease the stalking immediately.
If your first target disappears, then find a second and follow them.
Spend at least half a day on this, preferably longer. Commit yourself to take buses, trains, etc. whatever necessary in order to follow your ‘target’.
Real, oppressive stalking is fuelled by an intense obsession; here there is no obsession, there is only submission to the other. This should dissipate any intensity. This liberation is what you should aim to express.
Triarchy Press note: The writer seems to be being particularly circumspect here - as if to avoid being sued or stalked by members of the anti-stalking and molesting societies and associations. We deplore this kind of effete, simpering, bourgeois [noun needed].
A Chapter of Quotations*
* Publishers’ Note: despite the heading, the quotation below was the only one collected.
"she's on the horizon... I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I'll never reach her. What good is utopia? That's what: it's good for walking."Window on Utopia, Eduardo Galeano
Year Of Promises
On the island of Guernsey, at the back of a tea garden, behind a small stone tower I found a strip of wood. Attached to it were small plaques, each listing a promise made for ITV’s Marking The Year 2000.
Karen Foss: I will donate a tin of cat food to the animal shelter weekly
Stuart Ferguson: I will become a blood donor
Sarah Hendry: I will learn sign language
Make impossible and wonderful promises. Have them engraved or carved in as elaborate a way as you can afford. Then discard your promises so others might find and fulfil them.
“I will imagine a new planet…
I will redistribute affection…
I will…”
(Extract from the notebook of an XPA member.)
Mobile Machinoeki
In Japan there are stations (machinoeki) where walkers can get a lie down, some food, maps and socks, just as there are service stations (michinoeki) for drivers and their cars.
A Mobile Machinoeki is a small cell of walkers who carry various supplies for other walkers – pamphlets of theory, charms, water, disruptive maps, etc. They may also prepare stories, performances of theatre in their pocket, discreet walking-costumes or rituals for those they meet on the road.
Tilted Ark
Study the work of Land Artists like Walter de Maria, Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mark Dion, Richard Long, Ana Mendieta, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Agnes Denes, Andy Goldsworthy.
Take some aspect of the work of oneor more of them and use it as a means to create a performance or a journey, something about places: Long’s collecting or moving of mud or stones, de Maria’s filming of his walking into the desert, Goldsworthy’s immersion of himself in the transient materials he uses, Holt’s framing and containing of vistas, Smithson’s non-sites, Matta-Clark’s sawing through buildings, Mendieta’s body impressions left in mud, snow, reeds.
Be invasive. Be sensitive.
Pilgrimages To A Future Self
First choose a site that represents where you are now (as a person, as an activist, as a walker, whatever). Then choose a second site that represents the person, citizen, etc. that you want to be. Create a performance or a walk that moves from the first site to the second.
Peer into one of those roadside pools of shattered glass from a car’s wing mirror.
Khlestakovian Inscrutability
This is a means to gain access to otherwise restricted areas, affections and intimacies. It is a kind of self-denying ordinance; a modesty, almost a stupidity; allowing others to invent motives and desires for you.
So, when you next want to get in somewhere, say as little as possible, when challenged look sincerely engaged, say: “I’m interested in here” and leave it at that, staying physically very present, but not overbearing. Given the general human discomfort with gaps and pauses, otherwise obstructive guards, porters, janitors and concierges may fill the void with an invitation.
This, possibly, has wider political significance (for the dispersal of leadership).
There may be a connection between Khlestakov’s inscrutability and Epicurus’s suavity, the elegance of taking pleasure gracefully. Perhaps it even holds a solution to the problem of drama (never before have humans been subject to so much mimesis and its inherently violent outcomes (see Girard’s theory of violent mimesis))?
Performing Sculpture
Create objects or sculptures that require performance to sustain them. For example, Lygia Clark’s Ar e Pedra (Air and Stone) which consists of a stone resting on a balloon held in cupped hands.
Repetition
The postman Cheval stubbed his foot on a stone. He picked it up and was pleased by its shape. Beginning with this exemplary unit, Cheval gathered many similar stones over the decades that followed, using these materials to build his ‘Ideal Palace’ at Hauterives.
Search for a simple pattern, element or unit and create work by repeating that pattern or accumulating that element; each addition creates its own variation of relations with all the other elements. “Repetition” (which is French for “rehearsal”) is a preparation for an original action.
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