Last Fire At Watermill<br>Assia Turquier Zimmerman

Last Fire At Watermill
Assia Turquier Zimmerman

REAR WINDOW

Eulogy to happy indignation

..Born with just enough years on the other side of the fence to inherit the 
nostalgia for the past and its future, 
“Too late for that” as modus operandi 
taught to inhabit this post-ness 
like we missed the flight and only realized after dancing to the round sounds of 
the announcer’s speakerphone

…the important thing are those 900 something days
spent in the 20th century, within which were drawn maps of consciousness 
to guide us through the rest.
It is in childhood that we meet, not as an escape plan, but as the only space in 
which we can remember what to expect from the real.


In 2018, Némo Flouret and I graduated. Him a dancer-choreographer, me a social anthropologist. I had just completed a thesis on radical imagination and the Occupy Wall Street movement, (“To carry this raging thirst into eternity”). He was working on an eight-dancer choreographic piece that had yet to find its title. Our preoccupation was the same. It was an attempt to take stock of the discrepancy between the world promised and the world delivered, the discrepancy between the future projected in childhood and the one discovered soon after.

We wrote a text to introduce his work (above). “900 something days spent in the 20th century” was born and continues to tour six years later. The next performance is at the Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris, December 2024.

Last Fires, April 2024.

TIDE has given us the opportunity to meet again, in the foil of the moment, in anticipation, during and in the aftermath of Nemo’s new project Derniers Feux, starting with a first residency at the Bob Wilson center for performance in Watermill, Long Island, New York. Derniers Feux is elaborated in the wake of 900 something days, revealing the continuities and discontinuities of Nemo’s practice.

Watermill Center is a two and half hour bus ride from Manhattan. On one of my trips, I board behind Laurie Anderson. Nobody believes me. Why would Laurie Anderson travel public? The center is Bauhaus architecture in the middle of a rapidly waning woodland. Bob Wilson doesn’t own the land and the people who do have started to cut down the trees. By the time I get there, the buildings are exposed where they used to be ensconced. There is a tension in the space between the desire to welcome creative chaos and the hygienic minimalism of the design. A striking statement when I arrive, finding a collection of chairs, stools and benches: “Bob doesn’t believe in couches”. Nemo and his long-time collaborator Tessa (Hall) have been working there for about a week. On the wall of their studio, they point me to the post-it note map of their vision. 

N.F. : The title, Derniers Feux, arrived when we were working on Forêt at the Louvre, from a divinatory structure. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and I were working with the Yi Qing to draw dramaturgy for a two-and-a-half-hour performance in one of the oldest and most visited museums on earth. The Yi Qing gave each segment of the choreography an element (water, fire...) according to the golden ratio. I was put in charge of the segment right after the eye of the cyclone, which was the last fire. The way we were speaking about it left a mark on me, I heard it all the time, in almost technical terms. “We’re going to work on the last fire, we’re going to start the last fire, damn, the last fire is late, what’s going on with the last fire…” .

A.T. Z. : There’s a translation ambiguity: Derniers Feux can be last fire or last light. What kind of ignition are we talking about?

N.F. : I’m not going to answer that directly, but I can say that contrast is important to me and the way I work with dance: Friction, between large and small, silence and volume, breathing and apnea, cold and hot aesthetics…

T.H. : Derniers Feux is a lot about nostalgia, specifically nostalgia for Nemo’s childhood, the bi-centenaire of the French revolution fireworks, fanfare music, postmodern dance – which is our education – it is about bringing the tools we’ve accumulated over eight years of working together with a new group of people in a new context and seeing what new worlds emerge: new approaches to costume, to movement production, to the use of scenography elements and materials as dangerous as fireworks…

N.F. : One of the starting points was a memory of my first cassette tape (a central material in the 900 choreography) which was a recording of Jean Paul Goude’s parade for the bicentenary of the French revolution, on July 14th 1989. The idea that you are the most powerful when you show your joy really stayed with me. Of course, it also played into clichés of multi-cultural France, multi-cultural revolution, in some way it can look naïve today in failing to address the history of colonization and French abuse. In any case, this is what gave me an appetite for the trumpet, a central object of this new piece, which carries both the call to war and carnivalesque celebration. Similarly with fireworks: It is a thrill to use weapons for recreational purposes rather than military ones. To operate on this spectrum fascinates me compositionally, to move between the hyper-conciliatory and the hyper-tragic…

The other thing I like about fireworks is their relation to the rendezvous: An evening, on the edge of a body of water or an esplanade, the show is free, anybody can come. It’s often an offering to a civic body, something a political body organizes for its citizens. There is something archaic in how gratuitous that exchange is. It’s really like burning money, it’s super expensive. So, there’s something obscene about the uselessness of it.

A.T. Z. : … which is an interesting tension with the “utility” of explosives in martial use.

N.F. : Exactly, a firework show retains some of that excitement of proximity to danger. This is another important zone of reflection for us. The question of risk in theatre. Theatres used to be places of freedom but now they are highly regulated security spaces. Filling in the paperwork for firework use, we see that the show must be “zero risk”. If we really wanted to use the American space in a fun way, we would tour insurance companies. The kinds of scenarios that we have to envisage are absurd. Like what’s the dramaturgy of having to evacuate 700 people in ten minutes? 
Joseph Couturier, our pyrotechnician, inherited his family business and now is thinking of selling it. He says we are witnessing the last of the firework industry for both ecological and safety reasons. So, it’s a last fire in that sense too.

The anticipation of the fire show starting is also a return to a childhood experience: everyone looking out into the dark sky, waiting for the bang. This is the relationship to the spectator that I’m trying to find with this new show. We’re thinking about the merger of safety warnings and theatre protocol. On the one hand you have the ritual with which we integrate theatre space. For example, in Avignon, Jean Villar created this “dun dun duuun” sound that resonates thirty minutes before the start of the show, so everybody orders a last shot, coffee, dessert. Everybody hurries toward start-time when natural time is abolished, or, when we arrive at the differentiated time of fiction. This interested me a lot, with the sound of trumpet as a sign but also the sorts of pre-show announcements: “Please take a seat. Please turn off your cellphones, the show is about to start”. But then they would devolve into the safety announcement that would become increasingly absurd. We started collecting warnings: “This show is using pyrotechny, so please stay seated… In case of a fire, please find your nearest emergency exit… If you feel a buzzing in your left arm, this may be a sign of an oncoming heart attack”, etc. It becomes a tragedy of norms. And maybe, it never really starts, the announcements loop on for the whole show. An endless preamble.
A.T. Z : …So the tension of anticipation diffuses…

N.F. : Yes, which is another axis of our research. There’s a book on Yvonne Rainer’s work called “l’Ennui Radical” (Radical Boredom) and like her, I really like the notion of working with boredom and the general postmodern attitude to the stage as world: I walk on stage as I would in the world, there is no more fictional temporality of the theatre. I’m a body, neutral, and all my conditions are equally material: time, emotion… all material. This non-emotive (or cold) body can’t express anything anymore, it cannot speak for itself, cannot dance, it needs to be given a score, a protocol, a task. This body is a body in shock state, it has become distant from what it couldn’t describe anymore. It may fall asleep… So, in this work we play with this spectrum of “cool” aesthetics, which boredom belongs to, and “hot” aesthetics, which the spectacle belongs to.

A.T. Z. : In both cases, it sounds like you are interested in the “end of suggestion” or representation. With the fireworks, or its anticipation, you think about what might occur as real danger, real excitement. In the same way as with duration of the anticipation never delivering, you are not suggesting boredom but making it happen.

T.H. : We were talking the other day about how with 900 something days we always spoke of a machine of production that overproduces to the point of implosion… But we’ve never actually got there. We were representing chaos but never got to the actual moment of dysfunction.

N. F. : I think we got there in the process of making the piece…

T. H. : In the process, yes, but the performance was always more of a representation of that…

N. F. : Thankfully!

T. H. : What I’m trying to say is that I think we couldn’t get to actual dysfunction for the same reason that this highly dysfunctional world also hasn’t entirely broken down yet… There’s still a stasis that we can’t imagine our ways out of… We can’t represent that which has not happened yet, or only as suggestion… Which makes me want to think about desperation, the desperate desire to…

N. F. : Fight for imagination.

A.T. Z. : Do you know the Diane Di Prima poem?

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination

it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else (…)

…There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self-home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself

N. F. : Yes, you read it to me about five years ago and it has been with me since. Another feature of this “hanging in the balance” is the desire to inscribe the ephemerality of the piece in its scenography. We’ve been drawing inspiration from a variety of autonomous spaces and temporary structures. From the circus tent we keep this desire to belong only to what we have, to be independent of the theatres… and to build a sort of antenna or crane, some kind of pillar as both a totem and a mirador.

T. H. : One day Nemo said “it’s as if there’s a circus lost on the moon” and from then it felt like this scenography and use of text all had to be about emitting up to them.
N. F. : Right, and from a distance, from “their perspective”, our show could be anything from a campfire, to a carnival, to a firework, to a wildfire, to a war zone, a funeral pyre…

A.T. Z. : But wouldn’t it all be from near or far some emulation of war zone? I wonder what kind of primal fire isn’t somehow a repetition of the possibility for war. Though I suppose there’s the cooking fire. But I have found myself, recently and since October 7th, incapable of sitting through theatrical expressions of angst. I recently saw a dance piece where a dancer came up to our side of the audience and screamed, both a shriek and deeply uterine plea, and in that moment, I found that it was déplacé (displaced, as in inappropriate). All her scream produced was to highlight the theatre space as politically sterile and my own entrapment in my spectatorial position. In the past, in the midst of what our childhoods has been, such expressions seem to serve as reminders and remainders of that which hides under the ontologically gambit of placated reality but…

T. H. But now we don’t need a reminder.

A.T. Z. : We don’t, we’re reminded on the daily and have little to contribute from within an artistic space that isn’t more about our own feeling of relevance than our solidarity. Since we don’t know what to do with the reality of the scream, it feels like its representation should be banished, at least screams of…

T. H. + N. F. : Pain.

A.T. Z. : Yes, effroi, like someone who would have lost a child, or… I’m wondering what you feel about that, or about sobriety in wielding affects of danger for entertainment and in…

N. F. : In representing war… Of course, even working with fireworks and detonations, some people will struggle with that, and like we’ve been saying, the trumpet, the drums, the snares… All of this is part of a military vocabulary. They directly image what you are speaking of. The last fire can be the last war before annihilation, that’s definitely present. And come to think of it, what’s the difference between “cease” and “last”? Of course the first is a verb, a demand, the second is timekeeping, a temporal marker. In a way it’s a date-title like 900 was your birthdate.

The residency ensued. The dancers arrived in Watermill and were given the score Nemo and Tessa devised: a series of mini-dances, small patterns of movement initiated from the feet, collected from various sources from the Bi-centenarial parade, to the feet of a pianist playing Beethoven, to a construction worker’s weight shift dance. These are then filtered through another list of disposition (broken neck, holding breath, as formal as possible, drunk, watching an eclipse…), articulating the performance’s blueprint. The work in progress was shown to the friends and donors of Watermill center on the 27th of April 2024. Back in Paris, Nemo concludes the chapter.

N. F. : This work is an opportunity to break from my habits of creation, to move away from the academicism of my methodology and to exhaust the tools I’ve been given. There’s a return to an instinctive naivety in this, a permission. Philippe Quesne (who will be the scenographer for DF) and I had an enlightening conversation about how Derniers Feux is beginning and what is left of 900 something days in it. He made me realize how much of what I aspire to do inscribes itself in the tradition of Arte Povera, of the Avant-Modern, a kind of nomadic anticapitalism. To work as low-fi as possible, without hierarchy between materials, assembling iron and wood indiscriminately. In a way it is interesting to have discovered this out of the Watermill center because Bob Wilson is one of the figures of American danse aesthetics imperialism, in the cleanliness of his aesthetics, the geometry of light and set which has become his stable, a sort of Maximalist minimalism... That touched me a lot while we were there. Arte Povera is less conceptual, more contestation. It seems to articulate de-growth before its time. So, as this first chapter closes, I want to imagine the next steps of the work to be as autonomous and temporary as the result is trying to be. For example, since it is becoming apparent that pyrotechny can no longer exist in the zero-risk theatre space, it may be that we use the performance as a preamble to invite the audience to meet us at a given location later that night, to see the fireworks. Then, the theatre goers and passersby will mix, rallied by the sound of the trumpet…

1. In collaboration with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, performed and destined for the first floor of the Musée du Louvre’s Denon Wing as part of the 2022 edition of the Festival d’Automne.

2. An appropriation of Yvonne Rainer’s cool aesthetics, the post-modern body as affectless shock state vs. the hot body as emotive, meaning-making organic stuff.

3. JPG concerted with historians to create a three-hour march down the two and half km of the Champs-Elysées. It was estimated that there was nearly a million people in the audience, more than on this same avenue during the Liberation of Paris on July 27th 1944. Processions were in homage to revolutionary struggles around the world, with for example Chinese students walking with bicycles, bells ringing; North African and West Indian valseuses parading adorned with Palestinian keffyiehs; West African tirailleurs march; Soviet dancers from the Bierveska ballet; the American University marching band in Tallahassee playing James Brown and Michael Jackson…

4. These ambiguities seem to be supported by the author of the work itself who refuses, to the great annoyance of his contemporary commentators both on the Left and on the Right, to give the parade a “message”, as one of the curators said “We must stay clear of the trap of the message-protest. No world peace, à là Third Republic or Franco-French cuckoricoo” (Christian Dupavillo, Globe, Huillet-Aout 1989, my translation) or as the president of the Bicentarianial Mission Jean-Noel Jeanney writes, “Celebrations aren’t to be a history lesson or a civic instruction” (Le Monde, Aout 1989). JPG: “Neither patriotism, nor propaganda, but métissage, mixity of sound, people, colors” (Elle, 10 aout 1989).


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