Dear Ligia or Some Thoughts I Would Have Loved to Share With You

We were supposed to speak with each other right after the second showing of Still Not Still at TQW last Saturday. I left the performance on Friday vibing with the fresh energies I had soaked up. Most of all, I considered myself lucky (a) to have seen you on stage and (b) to get the opportunity to have a conversation with you on the following day. Unfortunately, things turned out differently, the show had to be cancelled.

One week later and Still Not Still has not left me. I am writing down some of my thoughts, connections, and loose ends here. Let me start with one layer, a possible entry point: the word ‘still’, and the continuous going in and out of stillness.

How you approach and circle being still/stillness on stage made me think of Christina Sharpe’s intense meditations on the word ‘still’ in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). Particularly Chapter 4, when she describes her engagement with the photographs of Delia and Drana commissioned by Louiz Agassiz. Sharpe returns to what might have been the scene, the way in which Drana and Delia stood still for a prolonged period of time in order to take the photographs that would later become witnesses. Or the little Haitian girl with the word ‘Ship’ on her head – lying on the ground, still, motionless – who appears repeatedly in Sharpe’s text. Still as in standing still. Still as free from noise or sound. It clicked during the loop of a scene in Still Not Still. You are all in the front of the stage, addressing the viewers as witnesses (I will come back to this thought), asking for help without uttering a sound. Again, still as free from noise or sound, still as in not done yet, ongoing. Always in relation to time and temporality. Still as anagrammatical in relation to Black life.[1]

In Listening to Images (2017), Tina Campt encourages us to not solely focus on the eyes of the subjects of ethnographic photographs – she refers to a specific set of photographs from the 19th century connected to the Trappist Mission (led by German missionaries) in South Africa – but to turn our attention instead to the “embodied postures […] as visible manifestations of psychic and physical responses […] to colonization and the ethnographic gazes it initiated”[2]. When thinking about your performance last Friday, I was reminded of Campt’s definition of stasis, her insistence that stillness is not the same as motionlessness but a holding of “forces in suspension [and] unvisible motion held in tense suspension or temporary equilibrium; e.g., vibration”[3]. These movements, the in and out of stillness, are related to an understanding of the human. This is not a category to aspire to – I sense this when seeing your work – and I leave the performance thinking about death, exhaustion, and the ways in which we keep on keeping on[4].

Everything I have written up to this point can be rendered into a circle. Here, encircling is a central motive or methodological approach. Scenes in Still Not Still loop/are looped, poses and gestures repeat themselves/are repeated, the performers circuit each other, just to be thrown back on themselves. Again, I am drawn into thinking about temporality and Black life in the here and now. I became aware of my presence while the performers acted out repeated cycles of violence against themselves and others. I was caught, addressed, not as a viewer but as a witness. There were several scenes in which I wanted to jump up and run onto the stage and do something. I haven’t seen your other works, so maybe I am generalizing here – if so, please correct me – but I was wondering what role I/the audience play/s, and if addressing us or getting at us by forcing us to witness what is going on is something you conceptualize and consider in advance.

As we shift in and out of the darkness and back to the light, which is repeatedly repositioned by the performers, I become aware of the accentuation of specific gazes, the ways in which you direct the audience’s gaze. Isn’t this how History and History writing with a capital H (Glissant) works? You know, the proverb with the hunter and the lion… History is*was not an antidote to violence. The act of History making is in itself violent and dark. Still, darkness offers protection, spaces to plot, to commune, to observe, and improvise. While writing these lines, I come across a quote of yours that beautifully points to what is at stake: “To produce something that goes beyond meaning is what I am sincerely interested in. I sincerely mean it when I say that I am interested in what emerges out of nonsense, not as an escape, but as another possibility out of reason. What the theatre allows me to do is to dream – but my dreams also hold on to the nightmares of what we call reality.”[5] Still Not Still. Still as in not done yet, ongoing, always in relation to…

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a Vienna-based writer, artist and scholar.

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 118.

[2] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2017, p. 51.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Curtis Mayfield, ‘Keep On Keeping On’, Roots, 1971. – I am indebted to Nicola Laurè al Samarai for pointing me to Curtis Mayfield’s poetics.

[5] Ligia Lewis in Astrid Kaminski, ‘My Dreams Hold on to the Nightmares of What We Call Reality’, 2021, https://berlinartweek.de/en/magazin/autor/astrid-kaminski-en/, 17.02.2022.