Group piece presented at Haus N Gallery, Athens. February 5, 2024.
Contributers:
Minois Bachtsetzi Markidou
Christina Kourkoulou
Angel Malliaras
Ellie Roussos
Chris Tekidis
Nefeli Voutouri
Markos Xenarios
Photos:
Dimitris Gonidakis
Full Text
Notes (processed)
the interrupting chicken is like the interrupting structure
the cell phone ring
But actually it is not structure because the chicken is prehistoric chaos
The chicken is against research or really it doesn’t care about JSTOR
It is just constant
not interrupting but adding
It is plus plus plus
I want feathers, Angelo says no feathers
I want plus plus plus
Prehistoric is so minus it is so back and back and back
If back is subtract is before before before
But really I am prehistoric now
And now I am not anymore
That’s how fast
That’s how plus plus plus
That’s how μποκ μποκ μποκ
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Process
We wanted to define prehistory
First as it really is
Which is - humanity before writing
Which we didn’t all know
Because we think prehistory is just before. Anything.
But what we think is anything is just people writing
People saying put-that-down. People saying fact.
People counting. People keeping score. People guarding. Writing is competitive.
We said, “for people to change–” (because prehistoric is about people, pre-people is something else) we said “for people to change from talking to writing, there must have been–”
And then we disagreed.
Someone said writing is for empire.
Someone said something more romantic. Writing is to pass down, to keep in or to keep with (as in family) and someone said that’s only important if there’s something to keep from (as in empire). We were talking about Egypt. We didn’t have many facts. Some of us became upset.
The rift was: why the change in communication?
The rift was resolved: we don’t need to know.
We said some things about religion. We argued and got tired. Someone was keeping notes.
The next meeting we decided prehistory is personal. Not like on a personal basis, like, what does the word mean to you? But on a personal scale, like, if one life is human history, what is pre?
The two things that settled were:
1. Personal prehistory is what you are before the story of you. Prehistory is to history what personal prehistory is to personal history (which is really a personal narrative, since history is story is narrative). So first the question is (a private question) what is your personal narrative? These are the constructed facts, the things you think you know for sure, things that fit, that have an order like ducks. The “I am” descriptors - tall, fat, anxious. Born in ___ on ___ to___. The little speech. This is not so interesting, and we only care about it as a prop to take away. So now take it away. So now what?
2. Personal prehistory is about a personal need for a change in communication. The transition of prehistory to history is one of speaking to writing. So personal prehistory accounts for a personal transition like from pleasing to confronting, from crying to laughing. Something that marks a new period of how you be. Something that triggers or disables the record keeping. We use the term to help us embody the need for that change, to connect others to a feeling of urgent transition, to instigate a personal and shared exploration into the new writing, the new Kish tablet, to co-invent a way to communicate somatically within the context of performance.
With these definitions in mind, and with a need to create closeness or at least comfort or at least to ease the anxiety about not doing, we propose some exercises. The exercises have two goals. One is to create a “shelter” within the group, which we associate with the imagined prehistoric shelter, a space that makes possible the achievement of immediate needs (to eat, sleep, dream). The group’s immediate need is to create, so shelter is pursued as a shared sense of safety from which can emerge the creation- the “performance,” the thing we can’t look directly in the eye, but can only sneak side glances at by creating anything else. Shelter is secured through talking (let’s make a new shelter), negotiating (we already have a perfectly good shelter), fighting (you lived with your ex in the old shelter), building (put that over there), and painting (I saw this mammoth today, let me show you. Oh, he looks so juicy. Yes, and he has a very silly hairstyle, and a sweet little family, but we have to eat them all). All of these activities are proposed.
The second goal of the exercises is for each person to connect the others to their personal prehistory. This can be their transition point, from non-recorded to recorded memory, from passive to active communication, or to connect the group to an embodied sense of “being” before the description of being takes over, or to spark among others the change in communication that each member needs as of nοw (I need to be yelled at, I need to be coddled), or needed at some point (perhaps when the trauma happened, or when the consciousness began). Group mourning is proposed (grieve together), group sensing is proposed (feel the warmth of each other's bodies), group nonsenseing is proposed (babble over each other). Group confrontation (demand from the group), group devastation (give up on the group), group regrouping (propose a meeting), group pooping (avoid the meeting), and so on take place.
The exercises do not happen.
What happens instead is –
A break from meetings. A winter break. Someone has a mouse in the apartment. Some people show up to help.
And then there is personal research-
About unkown artists. About performance pieces and about keywords.
Shelter
Trauma
Language
Memory
Instinct
Taboo
Research about secrets (how can this be?)
There is tension about the research- maybe it is too researchy. A dialogue is proposed. There is tension about the dialogue- maybe it is theater. A chicken is introduced. There is still so much anxiety to do. There are meetings to write and play like dinosaurs. There are meetings that are canceled. There is group warmth keeping and piano. The exercises that never happened begin to happen, in a half way. Exercises that were never proposed take over. The ice melts. It is someone’s birthday and someone brought a cake but someone is vegan and someone else didn’t know. There is theorizing about the piano: the piano is a recording of experience, like writing, but a recording of the piano is? Material. The pressure is more and less.
People connect to prehistoric selves separately and at random times. They become possessed. They wonder if it’s happening now, or if it hasn’t happened yet. Will it happen in performance?
More questions follow.
When prehistoric selves encounter each other:
How will they interact?
What will be their language?
Are they surprised to find themselves in the presence of others?
Is this their first time being seen?
Are they like babies, all need?
Are they funny?
Do they smell?
Can they be interrupted?
Are they self aware?
Do they feel welcome?
Can we do something to make them feel more welcome?
Are they partial to certain forms?
Are they awkward and unsocialized?
When they see each other, do they feel joy?
When they see each other, do they feel threat?
Is an audience something they can comprehend?
Do they understand each other, do they understand the viewers, or are they self obsessed?
Amid theorizing and anxieties and doings, the interrupting chicken interrupts.
It cancels group calls. It makes the phone die. There’s an event it wants to go to, it needs a ride.
Group members are hungry, group members are giving exams. The interrupting chicken is eternal. It is pre exams. It is pre group members. It is the only one that shows up to the meetings. When group members are not there, it does. It does all the exercises group members planned. It sends cryptic voice messages. It spies on other groups. It steals food. It transforms. It records the piano and deletes the recording. Interrupting chicken interrupts language. Reads theory. Vomits. Does not site its sources. Inhabits. Chokes.
When it is performance time interrupting chicken is there. Crossing paths. Tripping group members, making group members remember memories. Taking group members memories away. It is the group metronome. A broken one. A one that is against time keeping. It time takes. It time lets goes.
—-
Notes on Process
In following discussions about what each one of us wants or needs (to express or to connect to during the real performance, in the days leading up to the event, when suddenly even the skeptics are trying to visualize a plan) the imagined performance began to look something like individual alternative psychotherapies occuring in the presence of one another. An image appeared of every one of us engaged in some kind of primal scream of our own, born from our conceived prehistoric selves, but basically indifferent to the presence of others. Is this what we wanted to present as the culmination of our group's work- a project that involved genuine involvement with one another, many disagreements and discussions, negotiated desires and boundaries, and lots of interactive play?
This is the function of the chicken.
The prehistoric selves that are conceptually trying to be before or outside of “self” as narrative but end up kind of glorifying themselves anyway (in their dramatic performance of themselves as suffering, primal, wounded, loud, etc.) can only be shaken by an unsympathetic interrupter. We use the chicken, either embodied by a group member or simply present in our minds, as this agent of interruption. One that snaps the self out of its wallowing - to prevent the prehistoric non-self from reinventing and becoming a new self-obsessed kind of self just with different qualities. But the chicken is missing its crucial counterpart. Of course - the prehistoric conundrum - there can be no chicken without its egg. So we introduce a second character. One that balances the havoc of its partner (its mother? its child?) by offering fragility and stillness. The egg interrupts the self-indulgent-pre-self in a soft way. It asks the self to self-reflect, to consider its impact. Any action towards the egg reveals the character of the actor, since the egg has no voice and no action, and can only receive. It is something that needs protecting, or at least dealing with, which cannot be dismissed as lunatic or nuisance the way the chicken might.
This is not to say that the pre-selves will protect the egg. They may become enraged by it. They may abuse and destroy the egg. They may steal the egg. They may cry to the egg, lick the egg, kick the egg, whatever. We just introduce it as another challenge in their attempts to be, and to achieve some kind of quality of being, which is not entirely self absorbed.
The chicken and the egg define our range- the site of the performance exists between them, in the question of their hierarchy and in the unknowable answer. We are in the space of unkown order, of external noise and internal stillness, or external stillness and internal noise, and no understanding of which comes first. What we do within that (free) range, who we find, how we connect, when we isolate and when we emerge, is the heart of this work.
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