Rick Yamakawa｜ashleyho+domeniknaue last portrait (VECTOR #5: Psychogeographies – Exhibition of Performance) [Part Two]

Dates: 2024/09/27 – 2024/09/28
Venue: Esplanade Annexe Studio [Singapore]
Curated and directed by Dance Nucleus
Participated artists: Gabriel Pietro Marullo, Pat Toh+Jenni Large, Transfield Studio, ashleyho+domeniknaue
Official website: https://www.esplanade.com/whats-on/2024/vector5-psychogeographies

（日本語記事はこちら：前編／後編）

[Continued from Part One]

In the first half of the performance, the two recalled words from their families in various languages and demonstrated gestures of care. Then came the “dance,” which presented them as individuals in the present. Their touch grew increasingly violent as the performance entered its second half. The “dance” was clearly the turning point of the piece★8. A German monologue by Domenik’s grandfather then plays from the speakers. Soon after, Domenik grabs Ashley’s hands; Ashley steps on Domenik’s hands; Domenik pushes his legs against Ashley’s chest as she sits in front of him; Ashley, with her knees, presses her weight onto a supine Domenik. They grab various parts of each other’s bodies, shaking them forcefully in four-four time. The chair that was once used for massages is now used to intensify this physical exchange.

Each object on stage—letters, chat logs, notes, photographs, boiled apples in a pot—carries its own story. None of the performers’ movements around these objects is meaningless. While the performance is structured according to a timeline, their intentions can also be followed through spatial gestures. This violent scene stands in contrast to the massage sequence, and yet, I felt compelled to witness the unfolding story of these two individuals.

Once more, the two take their microphones and alternately speak one or two short sentences—about forgetting memories, being together, being present, and the possibility of presence. Their voices begin to echo, words overlapping to create a circular flow of meaning. As they arrange their words in space, they lie down on the soil and slowly begin to cover themselves with it, performing gestures of mercy—toward each other, and toward the soil.

Ashley, lying on top of Domenik’s knees, reads out a letter to Domenik. The two stand up and dust off each other’s dirt—then the performance closes. Letters are efficient documents in this performance, but in the end, finally, the two exchanged words as themselves, not as the carriers of the family narrative. They were not writing and reading on behalf of someone else, but had finally come back to themselves, to two bodies that have lived for twenty-five, six years.

[Photo: Rogan Yeoh]

They came back—that is what I thought at the end of the performance. But in the first place, they had never left; they hadn’t been acting out some other character, they had been playing themselves from the start. What I had been seeing was probably a combination of the two of them, and what had been overlaid onto the two of them.

What had accumulated upon them was layers of repeated time, and nothing more. This performance has been staged more than ten times in three different places. If you include their practices, that would count more, meaning that these gestures and words have been repeated more than we can imagine★9.

What influence did this repetition have on the collected documents and performances created by the two? What is happening when an audience witnesses a moment of someone recalling their memory over time?

This is an excerpt from Antonio Tabucchi’s essay “Un universo in una sillaba” (A Universe in a Syllable) from Autobiografie altrui: Poetiche a posteriori, in which he reflects on his novel Requiem★11. Requiem is a Portuguese-language novel (Tabucchi was also a scholar of Portuguese and its literature), set in Lisbon during the summer. He explains that he wrote the novel in Portuguese because of a dream he had about his late father. In his final years, Tabucchi’s father lost his larynx and had to communicate through writing. However, in the dream, Tabucchi conversed with his father, who could only speak Tuscan, in Portuguese. His father appeared as a young man in his twenties, while Tabucchi himself was already in his prime, reversing the real father-son dynamic. This dream becomes a significant scene that adds layers towards the end of the story in Requiem.

Why did his father, who could no longer speak and appeared at the age of a son, speak to Tabucchi in the unfamiliar language of Portuguese? Upon waking, Tabucchi only vaguely remembered the dream. But later, while sitting in a café in Paris, it suddenly came back to him. When he wrote it down, he noticed that his notes were in Portuguese. That was when he realized the dream’s conversation had taken place in Portuguese. Through this act of remembering, and by way of several other stories, his thoughts eventually converge on a single syllable: pa.

The syllable “pa” has two meanings in Portuguese: one is “father,” and the other is a familiar way to address a young man. The difference lies in the intonation. Tabucchi and his father would have called each other “pa,” but with different intonations. This single syllable was their expression of intimacy throughout their lives. Tabucchi does not try to find meaning through dream analysis, but rather unfolds the memories and emotions intertwined in this single syllable. In the accompanying note to Requiem, Tabucchi writes that the novel could only have been written in Portuguese: “I required a different language, one that was for me a place of affection and reflection.”★12 I have read this line of the Japanese translation many times.

last portrait’s multilingual dynamics carries a different kind of complexity compared to Tabucchi’s works, as the work is both a performance and an installation. Yet it shares similarities in the way it weaves through complexity and expanding narratives—particularly in how Tabucchi engages with the continuous text, and Ashley and Domenik engage with temporal and spatial relationships in their work. Requiem was born from a dream about Tabucchi’s father, but in the novel, the scene inspired by that dream doesn’t appear until the fourth of nine chapters. All artists, I suppose, need to follow this kind of long path in order to unfold their narratives. It is the same for Ashley and Domenik. What we saw in their performance is the process of the two attempting to trace back their thoughts. The intimate call then becomes the beginning and the end of the narratives. Opposite to the long-toned voice leaking from their mouths, the plosive phoneme of intimacy opens another beginning—“papa” in Ashley’s voice and “Opa” in Domenik’s voice. (“Opa” means “grandpa” in German.)

Ashley and Domenik perform without a character name. On stage, they appear simply as themselves, and yet, not entirely★13. In a work without a story to be acted out, their real names function as their artist names. But their duo name, ashleyho+domeniknaue, can also be considered a heteronym. Yet from time to time, glimpses of their true selves appear in the performance—a shared gaze, a warm smile, a gentle touch. In Japan, many may hesitate to express intimacy in public. Showing that on stage to a certain degree, thus, could elicit different reactions from people. And so the more Ashley and Domenik leaned into their roles as professional performers, the more their moments of intimacy—perhaps intentional—felt precariously balanced against their “real” selves.

When intimacy becomes something private between two people in this way, it risks alienating the audience. As Ashley points out at the end of her monologue, “we could think we’re making this for them / but we know this is not what they need / we are the ones who need to teach ourselves to grieve.” However, there must be meaning in performing this intimacy on stage over time—and in allowing an audience, outside of their family trees, to witness it.

In Ashley’s words, at the end—“my father becomes a garden / my mother, brother, me? the gardeners”—two things overlap: the connection to other people’s bodies, and the daily life of Domenik’s grandfather (and grandmother), who cultivated the soil and remained deeply tied to the ecological cycle. It was at the beginning of this performance that Domenik’s father decided to close the garden, due to age. The gestures within the cycle of birth and death, the repetition of those touches, will return to the “stage,” regardless of whether the “garden” is closed.

To put it in Tabucchi’s terms, Ashley and Domenik were not performing their families’ narratives; rather, it is these narratives that made Ashley and Domenik as themselves. Their gestures embodied these narratives.

After I have witnessed the narratives, am I the same person? What kind of temporal and spatial path have I been through? One could say that it is the “stage” that poses this question, and that we begin to answer it only after leaving the venue, or perhaps even before we arrive. Either way, one can only witness the things that have already happened. The installations have been removed from the venue, the objects packed into Ashley and Domenik’s suitcase, and all of it went back to Amsterdam. (Their travels are always entangled with these narratives!) We, perhaps, don’t forget everything, even the ways things were placed in time and space, and yet, recalling them is always difficult. The time and space of the performance last portrait, reveal that our past is very much still here before us, while also pointing to the possibility that it still exists, somewhere, somehow, out there.

Artist talk before the performance. [Photo: Rogan Yeoh]

Like two performers dressed like kids going out for an adventure, Ashley Ho and Domenik Naue will continue to go up on “stage.” Each time they go up on stage, they will recall that they are just themselves, but will also carry out other people’s narratives. Maybe they will slowly lose their true selves. Far beyond repetition, I find myself hoping to witness whether the two will remain themselves.

Even if the objects arranged on the “stage” remain the same, the narratives surrounding each object refuse to let go of the two of them. From the outside, they appear like a knot, but at the same time, they stand in a place where they can observe the expanding narratives around them. In the end, perhaps it has always been a story that returns to Ashley and Domenik’s bodies, but perhaps something similar could have happened to me—or might still happen in the near future.

It might be just that I haven’t remembered yet.

★8──Note that this sixty-minute performance was a continuous performance without a break. In contrast to the complexity of narratives arranged in the space, the timeline was structured clearly.

★9── This was reportedly the first time the work was performed in a black box theater. In the past, it was performed in places such as a large storage room. The impression of the performance would have depended on the space in which they performed.

★10──Antonio Tabucchi, “Ichi-Onsetsu no naka no Uchu,” Tanin-makase no Jiden: Atozuke no Shigaku, trans. Tadahiko Wada and Tomoko Hanamoto, Iwanami-shoten, 2011, pp.26-27. Original essay Autobiograpie altrui -Poetiche a posteriori was published in 2003. (Translator’s note. Since this essay has not been published in English, the following excerpt was translated from the Japanese edition.)

★11──Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: Aru Genkaku, trans. Akihiro Suzuki, Hakusui-sha, 1999. The original novel Requiem was published in 1992.

★12-1──Tabucchi, Requiem: Aru Genkaku, p.3. (Translator’s note. Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: A Hallucination, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, Penguin Modern Classics, 2021, p. v.)

★12-2──It is well known that Tabucchi first encountered the Portuguese language through the poems of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa famously wrote under multiple personas, leaving behind numerous poems with different pen names for each persona (heteronym). Raised in South Africa, he spoke English outside his home and Portuguese with his family. In Tabucchi’s Requiem, the protagonist, clearly a projection of Tabucchi himself, has a conversation with a figure who is unmistakably Pessoa (though this is never explicitly stated). When Pessoa is speaking with the protagonist, he stubbornly speaks in English even though they are in his home country, Portugal─although the protagonist, Tabucchi, also can speak Portuguese. In the Japanese translation of Requiem, Pessoa’s lines are kept in the original English to emphasize that Pessoa is the only one speaking that language.

★13──“My father was around twenty years old (…) and he looked exactly the same as the photograph of when he was young. (…) I appeared as my true age, so it wouldn’t be strange if I were his father. But that does not mean a simple reversal of roles. Because when I recognized that he was my father, I also felt that he was my son. In the same way, I knew that I was his son, and yet, I was his father.”
Tabucchi, “Ichi-Onsetsu no naka no Uchu,” p.19.

★14──An extract from TBS Radio Ijuin Hikaru: Nichiyoubi no Himitsukichi (Hikaru Ijuin: Sunday Secret Base) aired on March 2, 2008, features a conversation between comedian Hikaru Ijuin and writer Kenzaburo Oe. Based on their personal experiences, the dialogue explored different themes such as the difference between what it means to write or rewrite, and to talk or to revise your words; how different styles and expressions emerge through rewriting; and the act of trying to recall a story through someone else’s memory. What is particularly noteworthy about this dialogue is that, just as much as the content itself, the way Oe and Ijuin speak embodies the very act of remembering. The fact that it was a radio broadcast from the past, and that I myself have listened to it repeatedly—makes it one of those things I can always remember.

Date of viewing: 2024/09/28 (Sat), 29 (Sun)

Translated by Mitsue Kitagawa
Proofread by Erika Dreskler
The original Japanese text is written in Nov 2024.