The concepts of “resilience” and “agility”, and various attempts to translate them into Hebrew (lit. capacity to recover quickly, endurance, fortitude, adaptability, quickness, flexibility), also evoke physical, bodily presence. It appears that the collective association evoked by the word “resilience” is standing vertically, firmly, and statically, maintaining uprightness in the face of the changes shaking society outside (or from the inside); whereas concepts like “quickness” and “flexibility” propose a more horizontal way of moving – rolling, becoming more flexible, adapting to changes on the fly. In this text, I seek to think about the physicality of these concepts, and perhaps also open up a somewhat different possibility in our relationship with the vertical and the horizontal through a discussion of two physical images: one, from a film that serves as a source of inspiration for me, and the other from a performance piece I recently created.
The first image is a terrifying scene, that is at once also terrifyingly entertaining, towards the end of the 1928 silent film Steamboat Bill, Jr. featuring Buster Keaton.
About fifteen minutes before the end of the film (minute 56:10), a slide announces rough weather conditions: “Storm clouds in the offing”, immediately followed by a raging storm that leads to a series of catastrophes: collapsing or flying walls, entire buildings disintegrating, objects flying through the air and crashing to the ground, crashing ships, a pier breaking up into the water, and a port in danger of collapsing. The world is in the grip of incessant, frenzied, terrifying, aimless movement, and in that turmoil, as expected, humans, like rats, people who have lost their place in the world, scurry in all directions, because, really, where is there to run to?
The (almost) one hundred years that have elapsed since the film was made have not diminished its relevance, and it seems that a whole hour of film led precisely to this moment at which, in a particularly complicated and expensive production, Keaton (with great pleasure?) wrecks and destroys everything that has served as a tranquil backdrop for the stormy temperament of humans, in other words, the painstakingly built film sets.
We meet Buster (as Bill Junior) when the entire hospital building flies into the air, and almost magically rises up to the sky. Only the floor remains intact and in place, and on it a handful of hospital beds arranged in rows. Absent walls, it seems as though this is not the “real world”, but objects on a stage, and serving as a backdrop in the background is the Public Library, which has remained intact (for now).
While the whole world is ravaged, Buster, the man who frequently falls down and gets up, actually appears in a horizontal position, resting in his sickbed (after being struck in the head by the local sheriff’s gun). This horizontal position suits the idle and delicate bohemian student he portrays. Buster is surprised to discover that he is in a hospital without any walls or a roof, that is, on an “exposed stage”. The outside penetrates the inside, yet he still maintains his deadpan expression – Keaton’s trademark. He rushes out, but does not forget to nonchalantly toss his jacket over his shoulder. Neither does he forget, even in those fearful moments, his famous hat. He perches it over the hot water bottle strapped to his head, as if it is the hat that will protect him from the forces of nature. Or perhaps it is his second nature, his “human beingness”, the fact that he is a civilized human being complying with social cues and conventions, which are even more powerful than the raging force of nature, more powerful than him. And yet, he starts running towards the Public Library behind him, but just before Buster enters it, the library building also collapses and falls down.
Buster reacts by running back and jumping back into bed, into a horizontal position. He covers himself with the bed sheet, as if what is going to save him from the ravages of nature is to ignore them, to employ his denial mechanism. Lying horizontally also invites the sweet and healing possibility that this is a dream, but here it is reality itself that is a dream (nightmare) in which Buster is required to function and to be fully present. The wind gusts forcefully, and his bed starts rolling off of its own accord, as if it has come to life, and now seems more like a four-legged animal. And, indeed, it transports Buster straight into the stables.
When he peeks out from under the sheet, several horses, confined behind bars, gaze at him indifferently, or possibly in astonishment. The horses (who have been left behind) seem less upset by the storm than the humans, yet it stands to reason that it would be them galloping in all directions if given the chance – and not only during a storm. The bed continues its journey, coming to an abrupt stop against the hard concrete curb of the sidewalk in front of a building that is still standing. The force of the sudden stop sends Buster rolling and falling over, and then crawling under the bed, which for a moment serves as a roof. When the bed itself also flies up into the air, leaving him exposed and vulnerable, but standing on his two feet, the film’s most iconic scene of all takes place (which also received famous homages, such as that of the artist Steve McQueen) – the façade of the house in front of which Buster is standing, collapses around him, but as luck would have it, he escapes unscathed when his upright body fits precisely through an open window. Even Buster seems surprised at his good luck, looking at the smashed façade again and again, as if wondering about the possibility of relying on the relationship with luck and fate, as buildings continue to collapse at his feet (incidentally, a 1921 film of Keaton’s is called Hard Luck).
Between collapsing walls and a hurtling bed, the question regarding the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions arises all the more strongly, since Keaton so masterfully reflects it as he falls down and gets up, jumps, rolls, and gets beaten down to the ground; and every time he gets back onto his feet, he strokes the back of his neck, as if to say, “Oh, it’s just a slight tap on the back of my neck”.
In contrast with the horizontal dimension, which is the axis of four-legged animals and the dream, standing upright opens up an additional axis: the vertical dimension, the axis of the movement and existence of two-legged humans. When standing upright, the hands are free to use tools, opening up the possibility of conquering and subjugating nature itself and using it as a tool. Interestingly, after Buster’s stroke of luck and being granted a “reprieve from fate”, an additional axis opens up, between the vertical and the horizontal, between nature as fate and nature as a tool, the diagonal axis. Like a roly-poly toy, the little man stands in the deserted street, battling against the wind and the mud, trying again and again to remain upright, but then, for a few moments, he finds himself standing in a perfect diagonal angle between vertical and horizontal, and he even seems to steal a proud glance at the camera. And he does not forget to do the splits in conclusion, from which he stands up with magnificent ease. This new possibility of being in between leads him to the theater of all places, to the intermediate spaces of art, spaces that perhaps signify flexibility and openness that are absent in the normative binary division between nature and culture.
The door Buster comes to at a run bears the inscription “Stage Door”, but the frame zooms out to reveal that the door is standing in the midst of the colossal destruction, as part of the stage set, a kind of theater-in-theater in a world destroyed in a film. Buster shuts the door behind him, as if the theater is a savior, but this door, too, falls down on him. Again, he manages to escape, but the theater, too, turns out to be a dangerous place: a weight falls onto his head when his foot becomes entangled in the rope to which it is attached. In the theater, the threat of nature is not outside, but inside, in Buster’s personality that shifts between being a schlemiel (inept, bungler) and a schlimazel (unlucky in the extreme). Buster jumps straight into a representation of reality in the form of a theater backdrop depicting a tranquil and bucolic scene, but it seems that Buster can no longer distinguish between reality and representation, and there are threats lurking everywhere. This is evidenced when he finally realizes that it is a theatrical backdrop, and simply passes under it, but it, too, falls down on him. In the next scene, we forget for a moment the storm raging outside because the theater itself, with all its small and illustrative details (a ventriloquist’s dummy that looks like Buster, a horn that makes a horrendous sound), is no less foreign, strange, and frightening than the world it represents. When Buster comes out of the theater, the façade falls down on him once again, echoing the iconic moment he was saved from that “other” wall, and again he steps through the doorway unscathed. And it is repetition and buildup that are the very heart of comedy and horror alike.
The second image draws on a series of performance pieces I created, which engage with the direct, unmediated encounter between body and world, and in the body itself between vertical and horizontal. In Walling, I move, naked, along the connection between the wall and the floor, the body seemingly “suspended” between horizonal and vertical, intimately marks the borders of the space. It is a slow durational piece whose time is dependent on the dimensions of the space in which it takes place. In a sister piece, Move Like a Body, the naked body is folded into a locker, one door of which is alternately open at any given time. Here, too, the movement is slow but constant, and the resulting image is of a truncated, fragmented body.
Further to these two pieces, and inspired by William Pope.L’s Crawls, a series of performance actions, which were also perceived as acts of protest in which the Black American artist crawls in the streets of New York, I co-created Land Slugs together with Noa Dar.
Land Slugs takes place in a space customarily designated for the feet of people and animals. A bodily practice built from choreographed “crawls”, a series of different states of progression, sitting and lying down, and common to all of them is that they are very low, in constant contact and friction with the ground, sidewalk, road. Our point of departure was actually walking together down the street, shared progression towards a particular destination and goal, an action usually performed without a second thought. But instead of the expected vertical, upright position, we decided to change perspective, and especially bodily relationships, and the contact and friction points with the conventional space around us.
Land Slugs begins in the theater, ostensibly in the protected, but framing and normalizing, space of the spectator-performer relationship. It then moves out of there, continues onward, and goes out into the open, boundless, dirty, and at times dangerous street. If there is drama here, it is actually at the moment of exiting the theater into the prosaicness, the anti-drama of life.
In the space of reality and “real life rules”, from its low perspective, Land Slugs relinquishes uprightness from the outset, and thus challenges conventions and perceptions of body in public space. In contrast with the lone man standing and struggling to stand upright in the changing world, falling down and standing up, here two women bring their bodies into close, intense, at times merciless, contact with the texture of the surface we step on, usually absentmindedly, without a second thought: concrete, asphalt, pedestrian crossings, vehicles, dust, glass, cigarette butts, insects, and vegetation. From this unmediated friction, the real world sometimes seems like a stage set, or perhaps it is the other way around, the body is merely a backdrop for the world.
I feel like concluding with the words of Boaz Neumann in his book Being in the World:
As being-in-his-world, man is not in between – between “here” and “there”, between “what has been” and “what will be”. On the contrary. Being-in-his-world, as the embodiment of openness, man is the in-between (between-in) that actually enables the emergence of “here” and “there”, of “past” and “future”. Being-in-their-world, humans know how to do one and only one thing – to make room for a whole world.
