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The Empty Space is a WallPaul CarterPublished online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Paul Carter (2005) The Empty Space is a Wall, Performance Research: A Journal of the PerformingArts, 10:2, 79-91, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2005.10871420

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79

The Empty Space is a Wall The role of theatrical translation in the public re-inscription of the other

PAUL CARTER

PERFORMING RESEARCH

The term 'performance research' is ambiguous. It refers to research into performance, the laying bare of origins, contexts, media and reception in which this journal specializes. But it can also refer to that which performance researches. In this active sense, performances are not outcomes or distillations. They do not synthesize heterogeneous psychological, symbolic and material factors. They are situations producing the conditions in which new concepts can emerge. Looked at in this way, the performance in question does not be long to a performance history formed by the series of productions of which the present one is an instance. Its significance as a site of creative research lies at right angles, as it were, to that history, in the capacity of the work to make discoveries about the material conditions complicit in its appearance. This is not to say that actors and directors are mistaken when they suppose they are already realizing a concept (the actualization of a literary or social text) and do not need to look outside for the motivation of their work. Nor is it to leach out the heterogeneity of performances, characteriz­ing them simply as 'machines for thinking' about our present condition. Performance-based research occurs when the materiality of the work is allowed its heuristic value and material thinking occurs.

A case in point is the recent multilingual production What L6 Your Name/Wie ut de in

Name, a collaboration between the English language theatre group, Prompt! Berlin, Russell West and the English Department of the Free University, Berlin, and myself, staged at Thea­terdiscounter, Mitte, Berlin, in June 2004.1

What I;, Your Name originated as a radio script, first broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1986. I think three features of the original script appealed to us when West and I began discussing its adaptation for the Berlin stage. The work stages the problematic of translation- its twenty-three scenes are in part an arrangement of fragmentary translations of indigenous languages made by white missionar­ies in mid-nineteenth century Victoria. The lines are unassigned, the actors having to decide amongst themselves which are the interroga­tors', which the victim's. And the script exploits the radio medium to posit two 'locations' for the action: the 'square' in the mission station where 'natives' were arraigned and the unrepre­sentable space of catastrophe suggested by its epigraph: 'Mexico City, 6 Dec. 1985- four bodies

Performance Research 10(2), pp.79-91 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2005

1 What Ill Your Name/Wie i.!Jt de in Name was directed by Marieke Zwilling, assistant director Caroline Dundas. The production was financially supported by the Australian Embassy, Berlin, The English Department, Free University, Berlin, The Australian Research Council through a grant to the author and the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. See also http://www.whatisyourna me.comfortlevels.com>.

• Erika Blaxland-De Lange, Erik Schmitt and unidentified alcoholic reveller, 'You play ball with me' improvization, Frankfurt an der Oder, Guben-Gubin Bridge, 1

May 2004. Photo © Paul Carter.

• What Is Your NamefWie ist dein Name, Cell 3, Scene 22, Dress Rehearsal, Theaterdiscounter, 30 May 2004. Actors: Erika Blaxland-De Lange, Nils Brock, Florian Fleischmann, Alina Gromova, Wibke joswig, Rafael Luty, Folke Renken and Erik Schmitt. Photo © Bastian Gorgens and Rolf Kleiner.

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found in the ruins of the building that contained the Mexico City prosecutor's office were not like the thousands of others dug out after the devastating 19 September earthquake. For one thing, they were bound and gagged .. .'

These features are grist to the mill of stage adaptation. Translating the script into another language (or, in our case, three languages, German, Russian and Polish) is just one of the 'translations' that have to be done if a work made for one medium is to be realized in another. In radio, characters are identified by the way they speak. The three actors cast in the 1986 production had class-marked and ethnically-distinctive accents that, in the auditory shorthand of radio drama casting, fixed their relative status and power. When, then, the actors shuffled lines, upsetting the conventional alignments of accent with power (or powerlessness), the radio audience confronted the implicit racism of its listening habits, the sense in which listening can also be a means of silencing the other. Clearly, this kind of effect cannot economically be reproduced on the stage, where characters are corporeally anchored, mu\tisensorial constructions. It's the same with the staging. Set, sound and lighting design can no doubt successfully morph between the post-earthquake rubble of Mexico City and the generic 'square' of a mission station somewhere in Australia. But the ingenuity needed to do this would be foreign to the arte povera of the original script. In any case, these are familiar conundrums of adaptation. The fact is that whatever comes out of the 'black box' of the production process is bound to be an act of invention, representing in part what the original failed to represent.

We were alive to these issues. An important feature of our production process was a series of seminars or translation workshops held in the English Department of the Free University. In these, actors and students pooled their linguistic experience, as well as studying the moral, cultural and aesthetic issues raised by the 'translation' of What !.A Your Name. Yet it

was not this kind of performance research that had motivated us in the first instance. West and I regarded the documentation of technical issues internal to the functioning of the production machine as interesting education­ally. But the real argument for attempting the temporal and spatial translation of a work, whose stylistic and thematic strangeness was marked enough in Australia (let alone in Germany), was external. We saw a convergence between the discursively fragmented and emotionally beleaguered situation evoked in What !.A Your Name and the erosion of the German language's hegemonic status in post­Berlin Wall Berlin, where, as a second language increasingly used by strangers, it was at best made of mistranslations, and at worst the mournful expression of what could no longer be adequately represented.

This was not the only cultural convergence. There was also the perhaps sentimental temptation to see in the open prisons and psychological humiliation and techniques of colonial administration and their intellectual counterpart (the determination of classically­trained missionaries to reduce the speech of the colonized to the rules applicable to the description of ancient Greek or Latin) an anticipation of techniques perfected by the bureaucracy of the Third Reich in its internment, interrogation and eventual extinction of its own 'others'. In 1990 Wie !.At Ihr Name, a German-language radio production of What !.A Your Name made by WDR Koln, exploited this possibility. Auditory signifiers of imprisonment (slamming doors, approaching footsteps), the distribution of the lines to establish two interrogators sharply differenti­ated from their victim, and, above all, a translation that strove to eliminate the semantic indeterminacy of my English original: these interpretative strategies effectively neutralized the strangeness of What !.A Your Name, its intention to interrogate the conventions of radio drama. In the 1990

production, my work found itself neatly

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recaptured in the 'prison house of (radio) representation'.

The first German production of Wie I.M Ihr Name overlapped the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Nearly fifteen years on, the cultural, as well as physical, topography of Berlin had changed. In our translation workshop, Wie I.M

Ihr Name did not read as an authoritative contemporary translation: its drive towards clarity expressed a cultural program that, in the wake of a decade of immigration from former Eastern Bloc countries, could no longer be sustained. The majority of actors and students involved in our project were migrants, living double lives both geographically and linguisti­cally. They lived in Berlin as I lived in Australia: no genealogical basis existed for my interest in the cultural genocide of the peoples of the Kulin nation (first peoples of the Melbourne region); no blood lines linked these young people to the deeds of the Third Reich. Far from exculpating ourselves from a collective responsibility, we wanted to affiliate to it, recognizing that, even if we were not witnesses, we could through the medium of theatre bear witness to the eyewitness. Reflecting on Antigone and the 'politics of the witness' in Greek tragedy, Marc Nichanian writes that, in the wake of catastro­phes that leave no-one alive to bear witness (the Mexico earthquake anecdote is an instance), 'there is no possible location, no possible stage, on which she could appear and present the limit she represents'. The logical corollary is that 'theatre is not theatre anymore (I mean theatre as the other politics that it used to be in ancient times)' (Kazanjian and Nichanian 2003: 141). In this context, the desire of Wie LM Ihr Name to save representational appearances exemplified the kind of theatrical nostalgia we wanted to avoid.

PLAYING BALL

Not to save representational appearances does not renounce the theatrical medium. Rather, it recognizes that, as the self-reflective locus of a variety of representational practices, theatre

can enjoy a privileged role in the contemporary critique of the category of representation. Nichanian's not theatre describes a performance practice not predicated on the eyewitness illusion. It corresponds to a recognition that eyewitness history colludes in the terror it purports to report. For the 'criterion of verifia­bility', as Nichanian calls it, not only captures the victim 'in the logic of the executioner' but brings about the 'immediate transformation of memory into archive for the sole purpose of providing proof, that is, of dispossessing the victim of his own memory'. This 'substitution of the image for the object', as Emmanuel Levinas puts it (2004: 78),2 also implicates the empty space of theatrical representation, whose perspectival construction and point of view correspond, as Carlo Ginzberg has pointed out, to 'history's practice of putting past events "in perspective"' (2001: 140). The not theatre anymore is- following Nichanian's suggestion that Greek theatre housed the politics that could not find expression in the agora - found not inside the theatre but outside, in the public space said to be cognate with the emergence and maintenance of democracy.

The performances of everyday life witnessed here are perspective less. They are 'not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn'. These situations, while not entirely novel, cannot be old: like memories, they are, as Ginzberg says, 're-actualizations' (2001: 142).

2 Levinas adds, 'the image neutralizes this real relationship [between concept and object], this original conception of act'.

• What Is Your NamefWie ist dein Name, Cell1, Scene 20, German version, Dress Rehearsal, Theaterdiscounter, 30 May 2004. Actor: Nils Brock. Photo © Bastian Gorgens and Rolf Kleiner.

• What Is Your NamefWie ist dein Name, Cell1, Scene 8, English version, Dress Rehearsal, Theaterdiscounter, 30 May 2004. Actors: Florian Fleischmann, Nils Brock, Erika Blaxland-De Lange. Photo © Bastian Gorgens and Rolf Kleiner.

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These general remarks applied with particular force to our project. After all, What LA Your Name is, in one sense, a dramatic representation of 'the logic of the executioner'. The theatre director who satisfied herself with devising images that represented the meaning of the radio script would, structurally at least, be in the same position as the interrogator insisting that the colonial subject identify himself. The loss of identity involved in demanding the subject verify his identity is clear in the following passage:

Name? Noah? Noah? We've got a hundred Noahs. Absalom. Achilles. Alexander Luck. Sahib, Samson, Solomon Grundy. Jacob, Peter, Stephen Duck. But no nobodies. Mr McGuinness and myself, we'd suggest. You know. Nobody. To distinguish you. Just for the record.

The names in this passage are not invented. They derive from early nineteenth century name lists compiled by missionaries in Australia in the course of censusing their Aboriginal charges. Special 'Naming Days' were even set aside for these rituals of administrative initiation. As this passage also suggests, the capture of others and the erasure of their social identity is not only thematic but structural. It resides in what, following A vital Ronell, we might call the telephone logic of the interview (see 1985: 5). For the victim, seduced by the echoically-plausible (Noah ... Nobody) rhythm of a question-and- answer format that..~>ound.A like a dialogue, there is no 'off' position. This fact also touches on the director's responsibili­ties: were she to rationalize this passage, and to represent it as a scene of psychological conflict, she would merely recapitulate the rhetorical techniques originally used to make the colonized complicit in their own capture, internment and disappearance.

In other words, What !..A Your Name represents a challenge to representation as such. More particularly, its translation from radio to stage poses a challenge to create a kind of 'not theatre'. And, to repeat, this situation was not just a matter of technical challenges internal to the production process: it enabled us to think about our situation at large and the 'politics of mourning' in general. Our translation workshops, for instance, did not aim at producing workmanlike Polish, Russian and German versions of the English script: they studied what was untranslatable, using the lack of equivalences as a pretext of creative improvization. Instead of carrying over meanings from one language to another, we actualized the distance between different linguistic and cultural frames of reference. Instead of clarifying the enigmatic, we dramatized it. Different versions were put into dialogue with each other, generating a second circle of phonologically-stimulated semantic associations. Generating a new performance text in this way was not only a means of reproducing, without representing, the mechanisms of non-communication used to silence the other in What !..A Your Name, they also modeled techniques which, according to Nichanian, should characterize remembering in a time when the eyewitness can no longer be our authority. What is needed now, he reflects, is a plurality of testimonies, a host of experiences that exceed what can be bound and archived. In the face of limitless death, translation (the mediation of others) is not a choice but a necessity. But, as no original text exists (by definition), there can be no authorized translation. In remembering catastrophe, as in translating What !..A Your Name, there can only be versions.

Our multilingual encounter with Scene n of What LA Your Name illustrates these points. It also shows how the ambition to produce 'not theatre' could not, in the end, completely break out of the representationalist paradigm. In the English version of this scene - and it seems

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proper to speak of a 'version', as the phrases composing the scene are in the main 'transla­tions' for which no originals exist- the tragedy of colonization is encapsulated in a play on the word 'bat'. The interrogators qua white colonizers understand an essential item of cricket. However, the object of their interroga­tion appears troubled by an entirely different association: in his tradition 'Bat' is the winged creature of death, Bon-nel-ya. The mutual incomprehension of the parties may be comic, but, for the colonial subject at least, it also presages disaster. Unable to avoid playing cricket with his tormentors, he finds himself obscurely reenacting a primary trespass. He finds himself coerced into an act of translation that cryptically discloses the death sentence hanging over him. When he is pronounced 'out', it is in a double sense.

You play ball with us ... Ball? Ball, bull, bowl, bat. What shall we play at first? We will play at ball. The first created man and woman were told

not to go near a certain tree in which a Bat lived. Hit it. Take care of the stumps. Take care now. One day, however, the woman was gathering

firewood, and she went near the tree In which the Bat lived. Out, you're out. Come back. All done play. Dark now. Come on, come on. Sit down. And then the Bat flew away, and after that

came death. Sit down. Yes, all sit round. Stop, just stop. You play ball with us ... And we'll play ball with you. The ambiguity of the first line, in which the

prisoner is trapped in a masochistic double-bind -understanding playing ball figuratively, he finds himself tricked into performing a

humiliating physical ritual -presented at the outset a challenge to translation. In one Russian version, it was rendered (at least when translated back into English) as 'If you sing with us, we will sing with you'. However, this rendering of the figurative sense was undercut when the same translator rendered the line 'We will play at ball' as 'We will play at a ball'. Additional semantic interference occurred when 'stumps' produced, possibly via the German '.Atumpf', a word in Russian suggesting the idea that the debutante should beware of 'dumb blokes at the ball'.

Discussing this spreading web of associ­ations, the Russian speakers in our group could not decide whether it was a misunderstanding of the English, an attempt to preserve its punning logic or a clever and ironic joke. We concluded that the case was undecidable. All that could be said was that, in refusing to take responsibility for his translation, the translator had successfully concealed his identity. These Chinese Whispers effects generated the material of improvization. They even suggested the possible mise-en-scene of the action: for instance, the 'stumps' of the cricket match suggested to the translators chopped-down trees, whereupon they perceived a connection between an imagined woodcutter and the 'woman ... gathering firewood'. This line of association disclosed another physical relation, potentially useful in staging the scene: the structural identity of the stumps and the tree -as the object of the batsman is to avoid his stumps being hit, so the object of the Creator is to avoid a certain tree being visited. As for that 'Creator', he, too, was an artefact of the translation process. In all three languages (Polish, Russian and German), 'Bat' was translated by a word meaning 'snake', the Indigenous story being assimilated to the biblical story of the Fall. This mythic sleight of hand uncannily perpetuated the nineteenth­century missionary's view that Aboriginal people were doubly fallen, firstly through their humanity, secondly, through their faulty

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3 There is an additional suppression at work. The publisher of the Bat (Bon-nel-ya) myth comments, 'This story appears to bear too close a resemblance to the biblical account of the Fall'. In other words, in fitting it for English telling, the difference of the story had already been largely eliminated (Brough Smyth 1876: 428n).

4 There is a subtler point. The injunction to 'play ball' occurs in the context of denying the victim either food or water. The implication is that the victim will be fed in return for handing over information about himself. But what would it mean to hand over one's true name in return for food? Among the Dadidadi people, a Murray River tribe culturally related to the informant from whom the Bat story was obtained, 'the bat is revered by the men and is never killed by them'. In return for the means of life, his captors were asking )owley/Nobody to commit symbolic self­murder. Incidentally, it is these gender-related totemic identifications that explain why the Bat story is not a version of the Fall: among the Dadidadi people, should a woman kill a bat, 'there is a great row, in which the woman sometimes gets hurt' (Clark 1990: 394).

5 Graffito found in Fitzroy, Melbourne, March 2003.

recollection of the biblical truth.3 It was this calculated substitution of Snake for Bat that brought home to me the recalcitrant nature of the representationalist paradigm: however much our translators might want to respect the strangeness of my text, the imperative to acculturate the material to a form that could be plausibly acted was too strong to resist.

The elimination of the mythical Bat from our vocabulary had other implications. If one of the temptations of theatre is the creation of stable characters, then another challenge of 'not theatre' was to preserve the desire of communi­cation which the script staged, a desire directly arising from the fact that, as the lines are not assigned, they constantly look for their speakers. The flight of lines from one speaker to another, and the possibility of their rearrange­ment, indicates that the world of What lA Your Name is not governed by the Hegelian master/slave dialectic. The desire that flows between the performers as they insert themselves at different places into the situation. Usually, desire is imagined as a going out towards the other. In Rene Girard's model, 'One desires the desirable, and the desirable is identi­fiable as that which is seen or known to be already desired by another; hence, the structure of desire is always triangular because it is always mediated' (Chambers 1991: 31). But desire can also be masochistic, colluding in its own repression. This is what De leuze alludes to when he speaks of the 'contract' of the masochist: 'When people in a society desire repression, for others and for themselves; when there are people who like to harass others, and who have the opportunity to do so, the "right" to do so, this exhibits the problem of a deep connection between libidinal desire and the social field.' From this perspective, the presentation of a script as a field of desire lines evokes De leuze's state of 'delirium', one which lies underneath the declaration of 'interests'. None of the figures in What lA Your Name has any interest in the outcome; they are caught up in Imperialism's perfectly rational phantasmagoria, for 'Once

interests have been defined within the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people pursue those interest and attempt to realize them' (Chambers 1991: 262-63).

So, to come back to the missing Bat. What had been lost in the cultural Enclosure Act represented by the substitution of Schlange was, it seemed to me, the figure of loss itself. Even in the bowdlerized English version, the bat totem has moral and spiritual qualities that the biblical serpent lacks. He is not a usurper or rebellious subject; he inhabits his tree home legally. Nor is he a tempter. It is when his place is violated that he takes wing, spreading the shadow of death across the land. In our scenario, in response to theatre's psychological demand for characters, we created four stabilized speaking positions, which we associated with different names in the text. I will come to this in a moment. Here what matters is that, in staging Scene 11, we identified the teller of the Bat story with the figure of Jowley/Nobody. The Bat was the totem of those about to disappear- of those who made manifest the loss that shadowed colonialism's territorial gains. At the same time, as this identification showed, Jowley/Nobody was not simply the victim of death: he was also Death itself, the figure that colonization brought into the world.4 When the Bat flew away (also escaping the grid of our translations), he signified a loss that could not be measured or represented. As the 'face' of the other, he personified not only the prohibition 'Thou shalt not kill' but reAporuibility for the other (see Levinas 2004: 129). Again, these were technical dilemmas specific to the process of translating our script from one medium to another, but they also showed how a 'politics of mourning' could not be divorced from an equally radical poetics.

'1 NEED MY OWN HISTORY'S

The invention of four speaking positions, which I mentioned before, was a device for stabilizing the flow of desire through the text in a way that

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avoided regression to psychological realism. Abandoning the linear organization of the script into twenty-three scenes, we regrouped the scenes into four 'cells'. Celli (focused on the 'victim' called 'Noah') consisted of scenes 1, 6, 9, 11, 17 and 20; Cell2 (associated with the 'inter­rogators' McGinniss and Hatcher) of scenes 2, 7, 10, 19 and 21; and Cell3 (associated with 'Jowley') of scenes 3, 5, 12, 16, 18 and 22. The balance of scenes composing Cell4 were centred on the figure of 'Nobody' (see figs. 2, 3 and 4). This spatialization of the narrative was less violent than it might seem. The twenty-three scenes of the radio script deepen rather than advance the situation. Around a single repeated question, they elaborate a set of dissociative variations. In Fernando Pessoa's phrase, they revolve around a centre that does not exist. In this sense, to cut them into pieces is in the spirit of the free choice given to the actors: it preserves the sense that all in What l.A Your

Name, victors and victims, are plunged into one delirium, the 'universal condition' of imperially constituted, socially enforced relations, from which there is no escape.6

The arrangement of the twenty-three scenes into four acts, each with a nominally different 'victim', was a way of staging the dehumanizing repetition characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Benjamin refers to the same historical nightmare when he writes of the catastrophe of things going as before (1969: 257). But, as the term 'cell' implies, it was also a proposal for spatializing the action. More specifically, it gestured towards the empty space of the stage. It eased the translation of a radio work into theatre. But here was the rub: in the context of a work whose drama was translation itself, this attempt to set the stage for its theatrical presen­tation was at the very least open to question. To envisage the action occurring in a prison cell or interrogation room might represent the Mexico City mise-en-scene -although, following Nichanian, this would be another misrepresen­tation as it reinstated the eyewitness where (in truth) no eyewitness had survived. But how

could it convey the 'open prison' of the nineteenth-century mission station? More profoundly, the assimilation of the action to an architectural schema recapitulated the precon­dition of theatre - that actions can be represented inside the four walls (one admittedly transparent) of the stage. Obviously, not theatre doesn't take place in that empty space; like Kantor's impossible theatre, it questions the 'panopticon' design common to prisons and auditoriums (Kantor 1993: 99). Of course, theatre can .At age what might be called a post-panopticon sensibility, making the audience active participants in the process of representation, and we discussed a variety of configurations that would have done this. In one the four cells were physical structures that faced inwards, enclosing the audience. In another, the four cells faced outwards at right angles to one another and the audience walked round the set, possibly accompanied by the interrogators, Hatcher and McGinniss. In this version, the back walls of the cells were backlit to suggest a fifth cell within, which could not be accessed, a kind of present but unrepresentable space. But these devices were technical strategies belonging to the internal history of

6 The source from which the names McGinniss, Hatcher and lawley were derived illustrates this lack of individuation. contemporary theatre set design. They once Historian Terri G. Allen

again confined the speech of What l.A Your Name tells of a well-known

to the empty space, 'sterilized and immunized' for art and its reception (Kantor 1993: 99). If our attempts at translation had shown anything, it was that What l.A Your Name/Wie i.At de in Name had to occupy a place connected to what Kantor calls 'real places'.

Thinking about this, I was brought back to the affecting conclusion of the correspondence between Marc Nichanian and David Kazanjian from which I have quoted before. Reaching the limits of what they can say about catastrophe, Kazanjian alludes to the pre-condition of their own communication: 'we are desperately seeking to re-create a public sphere for a modicum of intelligibility. But look: without a public sphere, how can you imagine that a politics, albeit "another" politics, can ever be

Wotjabuluck personality known in white society as Jowley who 'did not like to be called "Jowley", but if one called him it, he'd call you jowley. If you called him Mr McGuinness, he'd call you Mr Hatcher, and if you called him his most preferred name "Mac", he'd call you "Mac"' (Carter 1992: 188).

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• Set design concepts, April possible?' {Kazanjian and Nichanian 2003: 145).7 2004· Digital drawings© What did Kazan)· ian mean by a 'public sphere'? Paul Carter and Ed Carter.

7 It is in a similar spirit that Ginzberg identifies a reinvigorated public space with the overthrow of a narrowly conceived perspectivism qua eyewitness historicism: the tension between subjective and objective needs to be maintained. Then, Ginzberg supposes, 'the notion of perspective will cease to be a stumbling block between scientists and social scientists and become instead a place to meet­a square where we can converse, discuss and disagree' (2001: 156).

His linkage of it to the articulation of a different politics reminded me of my own call, in RepreMed Space.l., for 'other other places'. When the physical and discursive 'other places' traditionally set aside for the political perfor­mances of democratic life no longer work, it doesn't follow that public space shrivels up. The neo-liberalist fragmentation and privatization of public space can be countered by the opening up of other 'other places'. It's not necessary to go into this argument in detail here, except to reiterate three points: that the discursive space of the public 'sphere' depends for its vitality on the provision and maintenance of real, physically-accessible meeting places; that the design and redesign of these public spaces is critical to preserving Kazanjian's 'modicum of intelligibility'; and that, as orchestrators of the performances of everyday life, artists {including performers) have an important role in

'designing' these spaces {Carter 2002: 165-214).

I am not asking readers of Performance ReMarch to take on these ideas. I am simply retracing a train of association that had a bearing on the problems associated with the 'translation' of What !.f. Your Name from one medium to another. In a very simple sense, their effect was to make us realize that if What !.f. Your Name/Wie ut de in Name represented anything, it was the drama of intelligibility being staged in all our lives. And this drama was not something to be ironed out by good management, clever casting or a pay rise {if there had been any money to distribute). It was precisely the 'situation' that put us in touch with the real place of contemporary Berlin. The implication was that, whatever else it did inside the theatre, our production should be in communication with the public space outside.

In this regard a curious coincidence gave us heart. Before coming to Berlin I made some conceptual set designs. These took the essential furniture of the interview, disassembling and relocating it in a Western Victorian landscape formerly occupied by a mission station. Arriving for the first time at our rehearsal space in Mitte, it was uncanny to discover in the park opposite a Holocaust memorial composed of the same furniture. But I took it as a good sign. As I wrote then: 'These casual discoveries are signs to me that WIYN is not imposed. Far from being an abstraction willfully placed here, it inserts itself into the life of the city. It may identify motifs and reclassify them. It may rehabilitate the overlooked or the forgotten or the overly familiar. Instead of gauchely recycling cliches, it can assume their currency and widespread circulation, and modify them, confident the modifications will be recognized as critically considered. This is especially true of the way we may use graffiti.'

The mention of graffiti brings me to the vehicle that we eventually used to effect our 'translation' of the empty space into an 'other place'- one which, perhaps not surprisingly in

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Berlin, took the form of a wall. An easy way to indicate the relevance of graffiti, or writing in the wrong place, to our project might be by reference to their use in Asturias's novel £l Senor Pre.~:.idente, where, according to Ross Chambers, the crosses, holy texts, men's names, dates, cabalistic figures and so on scratched onto the prison wall are telling because what they represent is unclear: it is 'the very inter­pretability of graffiti, combined with the absence of certainty as to their meaning, that gives them their point.' Under dictatorship, Chambers speculates, where no freedom of speech exists, this 'jumble of interpretability' acquires an oppositional value; where all is dictated 'it opposes the violence of dictation' (1991: 177). This is true outside as well as inside the cell as 'metaphorically, the whole of the President's country is such a prison' (1991: 202).

This last remark bears thinking about, especially in Berlin, a city in which graffiti is the normal and ubiquitous mode of public space decoration:8 evidently the recently reunited Germany is a democracy, not a dictatorship- but does this mean that, so far as the politics of mourning are concerned, the repressed has simply been turned inside out? Graffiti had become an interest of mine in the wake of writing Repre.!:,.!:,ed Space.~:.. In thinking about the forthcoming production in Berlin, I had also noticed that many of the utterances in What !.1:.

Your Name bore an uncanny resemblance to the kinds of exclamation characteristic of graffiti. Spray-canned onto a wall, a phrase like 'You play ball with us' is an ironic commentary on political corruption no different from 'Sorry for the inconvenience', 'We are all terrorists' or a hundred other parodic dicta of this kind. In a sense, Jowley, McGinniss and Hatcher were reading out inscriptions; they were repeating the tags with which the authorities had inscribed them. Taken out of context, their remarks operate like graffiti, not representing a concept but a trace, a mark of ephemeral being at that place. The absence of certainty as to their meaning is of an 'I was here' kind, signifying a

desire to communicate in the absence of any place to speak.

The irony of graffiti is that, in contrast with official signs, they do not belong at that place. It is their appearance out of place that designates the site of their occurrence an event worth remarking. Upsetting the smoothness of a public space that aspires to an agoraphobic lack of purchase, accent or place, their appearance makes palpable the placelessness (the anomie)

of a culture that permits this desolation. At the same time they redeem it by the placing of the mark. So, also, with the fragments of speech in What !.1:. Your Name: they upset the non place of theatre, making palpable the ideological nature of its emptiness. In Berlin these theoretical reflections acquired a heuristic value. In a city now engaged in the conservation and restoration of its best Cold War graffiti art, they were a way of identifying the work's 'situation'. Reflected, like the furniture of the proposed set design, in the outside world, they not only suggested a way of approaching the problem of representation - how best to stage What !.1:. Your

Name- but also a way of reading the city and its crisis of communication differently. In fact, as this extract from my production diary suggests, these two applications went together:

18-23 May 2004. Over the last few days it has become clear to me that WIYN is a wall drama. This is both its connection to Berlin and to the broader question of the constitution of public space. Connections between the original stage sketches and graffiti designs in Berlin proliferate: the line of power, for example, finds analogues in the graffiti at Tacheles. More profoundly, it's clear that the Berlin Wall was never simply a barrier, but always a writing place ... Not 'writing' in the sense of paintings or even messages, but urban inscription in the profounder sense of creating a focal blindspot, a division or line that had to be read. In some way this discovery illuminates the meaning of graffiti. The urge to scribble 'over' walls sterns from a desire to materialize their existence. The symbolic walls that physically isolate us yield to real walls that are places in their own right. As writing places, they are sites of secret

8 My impression is that the prevalence of graffiti in Berlin i-<1 exceptional: Prague and Vienna are almost graffiti-free. Graffiti in London, New York and Paris are occasional, localized and largely lacklustre. Barcelona is another graffiti-rich city, but its graffiti are of a different kind: their public prominence, elaborate composition and finish suggest an official tolerance, even sponsorship, of the artists. D

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performance (writing, reading, passing by). The wall has its thematics (the fantasy of the other side), but it also has its own eidetic reservoir. Graffiti 'unconsciously' transgress the official ornamentation of the surface. They build up visual blocks of colour. They substitute giant letters for columns, doors and windows. They create reading prospects, which they render enigmatic. There is a fantasy of the man in the wall: the Tacheles hunting party, for example, is formally similar to the 'line of power' derived from the 186os staged corroboree photograph (see figs. 9, 10 and n). One is to imagine the wall as the home of ghosts, puppets and doubles. The wall is also the edge of the tomb, the original locus of dramatic representation ... I can imagine WIYN entirely reconceived as a wall drama, dispersed and located around the walls of any city. Via the meditation on graffiti, its migration from radio to a 'nontheatrical' theatre work occurs.

The dispersed wall drama foreshadowed here remains a future aspiration. The impact of these reflections on What 1.6 Your Name/Wie i.l.t de in

Name was twofold. In the hands of our extremely talented set designer, Hagen Brandt, they suggested a way of materializing the production at that place and time and- it was really the same gesture- they encouraged us to regard the walls of the performance space as active surfaces representing nothing but themselves, as Kantor might say. Eight canvas on stretcher 'graffiti panels' were prepared. The title of the play was spe\t out in letters copied from graffiti in the area and applied to the canvases. The whole was spray-canned pink, the name of the work only becoming legible when the letters were stripped at the beginning of the performance. During the course of each performance, the eight panels were used in

various actions, shuffled, reoriented and sometimes discarded. Lines from the play were also spray-canned onto them. After each performance the eight panels, bearing a unique trace of that night's performance, were returned to their original location. As a result, the 'wall' of the set accurately represented the drama of intelligibility which the work staged (see over the page) The meaning of the work was gradually transferred from the actors and their actions to the place where they performed. The empty space became a wall where the other history that is never past, in which what has already happened continues to haunt what is about to happen, found its place.

As I wrote, 'Graffiti are the trace of other histories. They insist on the 'I was here' of those without name. And they do this materially, as much by the placing and character of the marks as by the sentiments expressed. Used in the theatrical space, they gives back to the empty place the ghosts that most theatrical practices seek to suppress. Writing on the walls and floors of the theatrical environment, and letting that writing write back the history of the production, creates a metaphysical theatre, one in which the script is released from the cell of the page and reunited with the streets, where similar ejacula­tions appear and disappear overnight .... As the site of other inscriptions, the space of represen­tation ceases to be a volume with depth, a perspectivally-governed depth. It becomes a wall instead. And the wall thus recovered (thus covered with writing) is also transformed. Instead of having as its primary function confinement, protection or exclusion, it is seen to originate as a writing place.'

• Facing: 'The Man in the Wall', graffiti detail, East­West Gallery, Berlin, May 2004. Photo © Paul Carter.

• 'The Line of Power', original photograph by John Hunter Kerr (c.185os) in Kerr, John Hunter (1996)(1872) Glimpses of Life in Victoria by 'A Resident', Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press. Digital drawing © Paul Carter and Ed Carter.

• 'The Tacheles Hunting Party', graffito, Tacheles Art Centre, Orangiebu rgerstrasse, Berlin, May 2004 Photo © Paul Carter.

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• Hagen Brandt and cast, Production of Graffiti Panels, 2-3 June 2004, Theaterdiscounter, Mitte, Berlin. Photos © Paul Carter.

SAVE THE WALL

As I said at the beginning, the account I have given here of What !J, Your Name/Wie iM dein

Name is not intended as a history of the production. Its object is to show how research generated by the translation process generated

new understandings about the 'situation' of the work. As an ingenious stage property, the graffiti panels warrant a paragraph, but hardly an essay. Their significance here is to materialize a new conceptualization of the relationship between theatrical and public space. They made manifest a connection whose full implications lay outside, not inside, the walls of the production. Through our work we came to a different understanding of the Berlin Wall in contemporary German consciousness. Since its removal, the Wall has been rebuilt in people's minds as a place of writing. The graffiti attracted to its remnants, and to the collective wall represented by the urban fabric at large, reinscribe the wall with a different meaning. Instead of signifying the erasure of the other, it comes to symbolize the place where the other can be represented.

This oscillation of symbolic function is not paradoxical. It reflects a recognition that the wall (but we might also say the nontheatre) is a place. In a precise sense, the nonplace of repre­sentationalist theatre i.J, a tabula rasa- a space from which the traces of place have been erased. Classicist Nicole Loraux reminds us, 'To erase is to destroy by additional covering: they coat the surface of a whitewashed official tablet anew,

and, once the lines condemned to disappear are covered up, there is space ready for a new text; similarly, they insert a correction with paint and brush on an inscribed stone, hiding the old letter with a new one' (Loraux 1998: 89). It is no accident that these remarks occur in the course

of Loraux's reflection on the exclusion of women from Athenian public life. How is it, she asks, that, despite this, the Metroon, where the public archives were kept, was dedicated to the Mother? Symbolically, the Metroon was the womb impregnated with male writings: but materially, as a place, it signified the place for writing without which writing is impossible. Like the democratic chora, or public meeting place, Loraux suggests, the other place of the Metroon materialized those other histories which made the arts of representation possible, but which those arts could not represent (94).

It's in this sense that the graffiti artist who proclaimed 'Save the Wall' delivered a subversive message: asking that the place of writing be remembered, this person reinscribed the presence of those others (women, colonized subjects, gays) that history conventionally leaves out. 'Save the Wall' has now been adopted as the name of a sequel to What Ill Your

Name/Wie wt de in Name. Planned to take place in Australia in 2005, it will have two components: a new production of What Ill Your

Name and a memorial to the largely anonymous native informants, whose testimonies provide the raw linguistic material of the script. In Berlin, the translation of the script into

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different languages produced a plurality of testimonies. It is with the same expectation that in 2005 we will trarulate the English text back into the various Indigenous languages (of which many of its lines are already translations). There is no question of looking for an authoritative original- no native speakers of these languages exist - and such knowledge as we have of the inter-related Kulin languages comes largely from the nineteenth-century sources used in What 1..6 Your Name. Indigenous Victorians participating in the project well understand that in this context 'language revival' means finding what Husserl would call a 'concomitant mode of production' (1970: 360). I doubt that the new version of What 1..6 Your Name will be in a theatre. It is more likely to occur on site. As the sites of the old mission stations have mainly been erased, this will give the trope of the theatrical empty space a new twist. But, because the new performance is dispersed, located around sites that were formerly prisons without walls, this does not mean that the new production will be wall-less. In a sense, we will have learned from the Berlin production to carry our walls with us. Without wanting to anticipate the outcome, I would not be surprised if the performance and the landscape design merge into a single work, in which disciplines whose objects and interests are usually separated. If this occurs, the performance(s) and the built traces associated will be another example of the kind of performance research I spoke of at the beginning: the new production/public space design will be another place where '"another" politics' is possible, not least a different politics of mourning.

REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter (lg6g) 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' in Illuminatioru, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books.

Brough Smyth, Robert (1876) The Aborigine!> of Victoria, vol. 1, Melbourne: Government Printer.

Carter, Paul (~oo~) RepreAAed SpaceA: the poeticA of agoraphobia, London: Reaktion Books.

Chambers, Ross (1991) Room for Maneuver: reading (the) oppoAitional (in) narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clark, Ian D. (1990) Aboriginal LanguageA and Claru: An Hi.Atorical AtlaA of WeAtern and Central Victoria, 18oo-1900, Melbourne: Monash (University) Publications in Geography.

Ginzberg, Carlo (~001) Wooden EyeA, Nine Reflectioru on Di.Atance, trans. M. Ryle and K. Soper, New York: Columbia University Press.

Husser!, Edmund (1970) 'The Origin of Geometry' in The CriAiA of European ScienceA and Trarucendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Kantor, Tadeusz (1993) A Journey Through Other SpaceA, trans. M. Kobialka, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kazanjian, David and Nichanian, Marc (~003) 'Between Genocide and Catastrophe', in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds) LaM: The PolitiCA of Mourning, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel (~004) UnforeAeen Hi.Atory, trans. N. Poller, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Loraux, Nicole (1998) 'Of Amnesty and Its Opposite', in Mother A in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pacher, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Loraux, Nicole (1998) 'The Mother in the Agora', in Mother A in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pacher, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Ron ell, A vital (1989) The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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