The Making of Meniscus: Dust that accumulates. People who come together. Events that collide.
By: Ghost
Tags: Contemporary Art, Art Activism, Dance, Performance, Theatre

“Meniscus” by Ghost and John. Photo: Dominic Farlam

Allow me to start this article with an image:

Peeling the tissue apart, starting from one corner, the man separates the plies into three thin separate sheets. Sitting on the ground with his legs crossed, wearing a white costume, he is laying out the three sheets on the ground in front of him. He then picks up the one on his left. Starting from the corner again, he tears the square into a single long strip, then does the same with the other two. He ties the three long strips into one, stands up and holds up the strip by one end. He is a very tall man, yet the strip touches the floor even when he holds it above his head. The thin strip cannot hold its shape against the movement of the air, gently brushing the floor with its end. The man walks around the room and the tissue continues as an extension of his arm, leaving a trace of movement in the air. This fragility of the strip, working in reverse, flows from the contact between his fingers and the end of the strip into the man’s whole body. Slowly, he starts to run. His footsteps mark the ground with his weight as his feet slap the floor repeatedly.

My gaze follows the movement of the man and the strip of tissue across the whole room. I then see more people joining in, men and women with different hairstyles, different heights and different eye colours. All in white costumes, they hold up a single ply of tissue, then tear the square into a long strip with great caution as if they are demonstrating a very dangerous task. As they approach me and squeeze through the gaps between people in the room, the tiny sound of the tissue fibre is amplified through our gaze at the fragile white piece of material.

This is an event about how we occupy space, with movement, objects and sound.

Ghost and I started devising this new multimedia ensemble work in March 2019. The project was originally titled Gallery of Liminality. An experimental session was done through a platform called The Playground at the Rambert Dance Company studios in London in May 2019. We invited the audience to digitally react to the performers’ task-based movement through Telegram on their mobile phones and to rove around the space as if it was a gallery, except that in this case the exhibits were human bodies, transformed into different scenarios through movement and performance states.

The challenge we set for ourselves was to aim at providing a new experience for the audience, theatrical yet also real. By incorporating different media in this performance event, we built layer upon layer of sensory understanding towards the subject matter that we were investigating.

“Meniscus” by Ghost and John. Photo: Dominic Farlam

In the end, the project (now called Meniscus) involved twenty-six artists across four continents: twelve devising performers, one costume designer, one lighting designer, two musicians, one rapper, two photographers, two illustrators, three videographers and the two of us, Ghost and John. There were actually more: production assistants, costume fitters, producers… It was big yet manageable. That is what we intended it to be. We intended to direct a project that challenges the borders of time and space in performance production, that brings people of different backgrounds together, that gathers emerging artists from different art forms together, that makes the audience an integral part of the event. I remember staying up late at night to facetime with Hong Kong videographer Michael Mui to get the narrative of the video right. I remember a long email conversation with Japanese musician Meitei to get the mood of that one section right. I remember hunting visual references with Vietnamese-French photographer Nhu Xuan Hua to get the right colour for the background of the poster. I remember the long discussion, nearly an argument, with Ghost about how the audience should be instructed when they come into the performance.

I see a ball, a ball of shirts, a ball of checked shirts in different colours. It is being thrown around by a group of people. They run round and round, in white clothes. As soon as one of them catches the ball, they throw it across the circle to another. When I look up, I see a ball of checked shirts being thrown here and there. Soon, the ball gets smaller as it loosens up into individual shirts. One by one, people get checked shirts to put on over their white clothes, slow down from running to walking.

This is an event that drills us to collaborate with one another.

“Meniscus” by Ghost and John. Photo: Dominic Farlam

In 1960, lunch counter sit-ins by black college students took place in almost the whole Southern USA. The black students sat down at white-only lunch counters after ordering, physically occupying the space with their bodies, in protest against the racial segregation of that time. This non-violent protest of merely sitting in ‘whites only’ seats evoked a variety of responses from enraged white people: a policeman observing them and hitting the palm with his billy club[1], other customers spilling and throwing drinks at them, dragging them to the floor, punching and kicking them. The black students remained passive and silently absorbed this aggression with their bodies. However, their actions and non-reaction were not silent. The sit-ins were being seen and recorded by many people, including the white Presbyterian minister and college professor Merrill Proudfoot. In his book, Diary of a Sit-in, he described the reaction of the white bodies surrounding these black bodies and how the white bodies became awkward, agitated and outraged. At the Knoxville sit-ins, the white lunch counter manager became increasingly agitated before he finally exploded. “Well, why don’t you go home now? You’ve proved your point, haven’t you?”[2]

In the late 1980s, during the AIDS crisis in the USA, a group of activists formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), in response to how the government was being slow to react, or was even ignoring, the pandemic. There were friends dying, families losing members, lovers witnessing their partners passing. An organization with an urgent call to political action was needed. ACT UP activists went on the street, rallying and marching. They made posters, decorated the windows of the New Museum at lower Broadway, New York with photographs of ‘AIDS criminals’, data and figures about the loss of AIDS and a pink triangle. These images faced outwards, projecting their voices loud and clear to the communities of lower Broadway, telling the public about the urgency of the AIDS crisis and the incompetence of the government. They also performed the famous ‘die-ins’ and ‘sleep-ins’, where they physically occupied streets and buildings with their own flesh and blood. The approaches they took were radical, direct, well-rehearsed and without hesitation.

In December 2017, Ghost and I decided to make ourselves into artists. I was working as a research assistant at a marine biology laboratory at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Ghost was an analyst programmer, mainly building Android mobile applications. We came to the realisation that we were both probably not doing what we were ‘made for’. Hence, we embarked on a journey to rediscover who we were. We came to London in September 2018. Nine months later, our understanding of ‘making ourselves into artists’ reached a pivotal point, where it was no longer only about what kind of work we were making, but also what kind of experience we were providing to our audience, our collaborators and ourselves. In this age of great political, social and environmental instability, how can we do things with art?

In late August 2019, Ghost and I were in a studio at The Place, London. Our minds were overwhelmed with the images we’d seen online through our iPhones, iPads and Macbooks. Neither of us was talking, but the room was filled with noise, anger and horror. An hour later, our dancers Lauren, Jim, Claudia and Annie arrived. We passed them each a square mirror, then turned on a projector that was placed on the floor aiming into space. The mirrors were ones from IKEA, slighter larger than A4 size. As they danced with the mirrors, fractions of the projected images were reflected and shone onto the walls of the studio. They stared into the light on the wall, attempting to comprehend the visuals and understand the context.

Perhaps it is the coexistence of all these historical events and personal episodes of objects and bodies occupying spaces, resisting and fighting for the essential meaning of their presence, that are lingering in Ghost and my minds. Every little object that has its place in these events. Everyone who has been struggling in these spaces. We are in absolutely no way trying to say that history and art have the same value and weight, but what if art could be a poetic analogy of history which can have a real function and bring purpose to our society now?

‘Art does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be recognized, fostered and supported.’ — Douglas Crimp, 1987

[1] Cited from the chapter ‘More than Hamburgers’ from Choreographies of Protest, where describes the behaviour of this policeman in the Greensboro incident, which marks the emergence of the sit-in movement.

[2] Cited from from p.58 of Diary of a Sit-in, from Merrill Proudfoot’s first-person narrative.’’

Writer’s note:

Meniscus — a multimedia ensemble work directed by Ghost and John. Premiered at The Place, London, on 1 Nov 2019, later presented at Rambert, London on 29 Nov 2019.

References:

Crimp, D. (1987) AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. October, Vol.43, Winter, pp.3–16, USA: MIT Press.

Proudfoot, M. (1990) Diary of a Sit-in, pp.58, Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Foster, S. L. (2003) Choreographies of Protest. Theatre Journal, Volume 55, Number 3, pp.395–412. USA: Johns Hopkins University Press.

This article is originally published on Dance Journal/hk on 10 February 2020.