The following was written in 2002 after our first workshop performances of "eixam" and describes some of the initial thinking about the piece. Since then, it developed significantly, although the essential questions addressed here have remained the same.
Introductory letter and Artists Statement
"Eixam" began over a year and a half ago as a conversation in a park in Barcelona about beauty and violence - the point at which the very thing that attracts us and spurs our desires tips and begins to overwhelm and ultimately harm us. In the subsequent weeks the conversation was refined and images emerged as vessels to contain what was initially a gut feeling; an uneasiness that we both shared. The primary picture was that of a swarm. A dark enraged cloud. Inhuman, violent and almost surreal in scope. Absolutely enormous and loud. Dumfounding in the sense that it confounds normal understanding and destroys one's capacity to speak.
Over the course of rehearsals and improvisations, a story and characters began to emerge.
Two scientists alone in a desert researching a special species of desert locust. They begin to sense that they are close to discovering an untapped source of power. With the isolation, heat, fatigue, and the new possibility of fame and recognition, mistrust and competition set in until they realize that the very thing they are studying and fighting over has the power to destroy them - and nearly does.
With this - a violent swarm/storm - as a central occurrence, we wanted to investigate and juxtapose two distinct responses to having ones' understanding of the world "turned inside out". Our basic question has become this: once faced with a radical shift in how we perceive the world and our place in it, how do we continue to live?
The more we rehearsed and researched; it became clearer just how apt the image of a swarm is to our present day and age. Much of recent social theory has focused on this image as both metaphor and model to provide new ways of describing organizational phenomena as diverse as the Internet, global economy, the biosphere, warfare, urban growth and decay, memory recall, and a swarm of locusts, or colony of ants.
We have narrowed our focus to two men in an extreme situation. They are scientists, seekers of truth in a world where the dimensions of truth have become slippery. As Kevin Kelly writes in Out of Control, "The Atom is the icon of the 20th century. The Atom stands for power and knowledge and certainty. The Atom is the past. The symbol of science for the next century is the dynamical Net. Out of it comes swarm being[It conveys] power beyond understandingit is the banner of non-control. Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control."
As we continue to work we realize more and more that it is from this basic shift from control to non-control that our initial uneasiness was born. Our conversation in the park can be traced back to something we are all experiencing that our actions seem to have little clear and discernable effect. We are at the whims of forces greater than ourselves, and yet somehow we sense that these forces emerge from our daily behavior; that we are somehow invisibly linked.
There is a disconcerting sense that perhaps by simply living our daily lives and following our desires, by trying to ³stay true to ourselves² and act in accordance with some sense of personal truth, that in fact we are just like so many locusts preparing to lift into the air, to raise up as a collective specter reeking havoc on the earth and one another. Could it really be that harmless and life-affirming appreciations of beauty are the mechanisms by which terrible things can happen?
Being that one of the responses to facing the unknown and potentially horrifying is to laugh, Eixam seems to be becoming a sort of comedy. Our way of approaching these issues is to rely on our sense of the ridiculous, on the fun we have in playing with one another, on living the extreme situation we have set up, and on our desire to move fully through space, attempting to ravish it or be ravished by it.
We have been experimenting with different ways of telling different parts of our story for some moments we use film-like realism, for some moments something like slapstick. We are using dance sequences and moments in which we talk directly to the audience. All depending on what seems to be the best means of expressing the moments we want to convey and the best ways to draw shifts in space and time.
Last November we had the opportunity to present a forty-minute version of this work-in-progress at the tanz_haus festival in Salzburg. And in May we completed a workshop version of the entire piece in residency at Companyia Krampack in Barcelona. The piece has been very well received. We have a complete structure and full text that we continue to refine and develop. It has been an exciting adventure.
- Jeremy Xido
