We enter an elongated room with a PVC dance floor. To the right of the entrance is a technical setup, to the left a camera on a tripod. The rest of the room is lined with chairs, pushed up against the walls. Opposing rows face each other at a distance. Feels like an arena. Paper slips with printed words are stuck to the floor; in the center stands Chloé Chignell. Every gaze directed at Chignell automatically falls upon the audience on the other side of the room. Since I can only see Chignell from behind, I perceive everything that is happening through the gazes of others. Chignell begins with a slow, almost mechanically precise execution of a sequence of gestures.
AMAZONS
In the beginning, if there ever was such a time, all the companion lovers called themselves amazons. Living together, loving, celebrating one another, playing, in a time when work was still a game, the companion lovers in the terrestrial garden continued to call themselves amazons throughout the entire Golden Age. Then, with the settlement of the first cities, many companion lovers disrupted the original harmony and called themselves mothers. Thereafter, amazon meant, for them, daughter, eternal child, she who does not assume her destiny.*
About 60 years earlier, Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig meet in Paris, where Zeig studies mime and leads a feminist karate group that Wittig frequents. They become a couple. They travel to a Greek island. They write a book, a dictionary for Lesbian Peoples. They redefine historical terms. They speculate about a mythical past; a memory of a future that never existed. They envision a utopian, matriarchal world. They are ghouls, vampires, lamias, sirens.
Amazons were banished from the cities of the mothers. At that time they became the violent ones and fought to defend harmony. For them the ancient name amazon had retained its full meaning. From now on it signified something more, she who guards the harmony. From then on, there were amazons in every age, on every continent, island, ice bank. To the amazons of all these times, we owe having been able to enter the Glorious Age.
Like Wittig and Zeig’s dictionary, Chignell’s performance unfurls word by word. It is a martial folding. Fragmented definitions, repetitions; an elaborate choreography translating language into bodily memory. A text is a series of letters – signifiers – that link together to form repetitive chains of meaning. A dance can be a series of gestures; almost like writing. Guided by the system of paper slips, words taped to the floor, to be read aloud, slowly, each time the sequence begins again. Chignell bends the arms. Instead of meaning, I/one can discern only chains and repetitions.
ANIMAL
To please a companion lover, one works with gestures to become the animal or animals to whom she feels close. It is an easy thing to do in a hypnotic state. One must cast aside one’s most habitual gestures to find those of one’s animal or animals. It is not imitation but mime.
Chignell is wearing jeans with large Velcro patches, a gray top, and silver leather dance shoes. The movements come slowly, like a Trakehner horse pulling its cart – power and strength. An androgynous gelled hairstyle. The violent thud of dance shoes. I think of the intersection of ballet and horses. The choreography almost seems like dressage, a freestyle routine that fills the arena with tension, the multiplicity of the counterpart [C/C’;A/C;A/C’], the ever-present counterpart audience/audience [A/A]. A supposedly different gravity prevails here; an effortless balance. Executing and pausing the movement, hindered by the weight of their jeans.
The sound of the shoes becomes a drum; the Velcro rips, a secondary percussion; I like the way their hands move. Chignell’s gaze is empty, infinite. Is this erotic? The slowness, almost painful; the inability to look away. And yet looking nowhere in particular, because the gaze – the attempt to read the chains of signifiers – is faster than the slowness of the gestures. In between, the beats, like a count; martial gong strikes; a warlike straightening and realignment in tense slowness and concentration. I think of Wittig’s long, endlessly restarting sentences.
HALLUCINATION
They become able to exchange their hallucinations. Or better yet, they combine them with those of their companion lovers. Two companion lovers together can make new constructions and move without discomfort in their mutual worlds. They incorporate hallucinations into tales which are long, repetitive, monotonous for those who lack the patience to remain attentive to the distortions introduced each time into the repetitions.
The silence of the gestures is washed over – and at times overwhelmed – by Steph-Holl Trieu’s ambient electronic soundscapes. Occasional voice-overs. It is a work of fiction, accompanied by modern trappings of the epic. The work of Zeig/Wittig [Z/W], written by two hands, is here overwritten by two more hands: Chignell/Holl-Trieu [C/H]. Knowing that they are companion lovers… The music and gestures envelop one another like lovers in endless conversation.
At some point I become aware of the camera; its eye pointed at the center of the room, where Chloé performs in a direct encounter between gazes. The intersection of this axis – Chignell/camera [C/C’], which forms a sort of straight line – runs diagonally through the audience’s gazes. Again and again, the alignment in front of and toward the camera; the alignment in front of and toward Chignell – the vector [C/C’]. The vector audience/Chignell [A/C’] becomes almost incidental; the vector audience/camera [A/C’] is uncomfortable. Although I attribute the least impact to this intersection of gazes, the mere awareness of observation being observed triggers a tension. Chignell’s ring fingers bend inward. Like loading the weapons, preparing to defend. Choppy movements, a staccato of held postures. Loading the weapons again. Sweat beads on Chloe’s forehead. The audience/audience [A/A] vector weakens. Time passes.
GHOUL
Only when she is thirsty for blood is there a Ghoul
I’m starting to lose patience. Time stretches, becomes viscous. The camera looks away; people walk out. You can hear breathing. Chignell is lying flat on the floor in a corner, with two fingers spread apart between the legs, it’s quiet. Knowing that they are companion lovers… I can’t help but surrender to the erotic fantasy of the fingers; and yet the whole scene is cool, un-erotic, tense. Chignell has muscular upper arms. Chingnell bends them, waving the forearms like a radar, fingers curved in an interlocking manner.
At some point, the spotlights come on, stream their golden yellow light like multiple suns into the darkened room. The lids of their eyes open with a soft click. Even more gazes, from above. A light-footed, romantic heaviness sets in; gravity becomes palpable – a heavy lightness. Amidst the intersecting gazes, Chignell persistently performs their precision. We hear:
WINGS / SHIELD / EAR / HALLUCINATION
The whole thing feels like gathering before a battle – getting ready, arming oneself. Defending oneself. As I am searching for the meaning in the gestures, for a narrative, for a connection within the chain of signifiers, suddenly: a pattern becomes clear to me. Followed by another silent breath from the warrior/amazon.
10:07 PM
iMessage from Zack: you shouldn’t sit there it’s durational
However, I don't feel like I can leave; I have a job to do – the chronicler vs. the camera [C*/C’]
EAR
How will the lesbian peoples reproduce? Through the ear. Companion lovers are born from ear to ear.
The dictionary is a drafted score for definition, is a neverending translation. It is the passing on of history, of myth as history. At the center of the room, in its geometry of gazes, Chignell continues to bend fingers in all sorts of directions. Not to tell a story, but to lay out the elements of it, from which any stories of the Amazonian peoples can be generated, revived, and regenerated. Three hours pass. We witness the process of overwriting [W/Z;C/H].
*All quotes from: Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, 1976.
Marie Beckmann ist in Herzberg am Harz geboren. Ihre Praxis bewegt sich zwischen zeitgenössischer Theorie, Konzeptkunst, Übersetzung und literarischem Schreiben. Sie studiert Malerei in Leipzig sowie Critical Studies an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Ihre Übersetzungen sind im März Verlag und Merve Verlag erschienen, ihre Texte zuletzt bei Tabloid Press. Sie hat Abschlüsse in Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften.
