boychild in Sudden Rise. Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2019. (Photo by Ketty Bertossi)
Difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement.
—Denise Ferreira da Silva (Reference da Silva2016:65)
New performance formats characterized as posthuman or postsubjective allow us to re-experience the blurring of the boundaries of theatricality and to rethink theatricality’s fundamental concepts.Footnote 1 Ferdinando Taviani’s conceptually open term of a “theatrical mind,” which he understands not as a separate social endeavor but as an “aggregate of interacting parts,” a process that also transcends centuries and epochs (Taviani Reference Taviani1988:15),Footnote 2 should be updated to include the aesthetics of nonhuman agency and a corresponding postsubjective communication between performance and audience. An intriguing example of the paradoxical idea of a postsubjective theatrical mind is the performance Sudden Rise by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion. My phenomenological reflection follows on from Christina Schmutz’s contribution in this issue (Schmutz Reference Schmutz2025). While Schmutz analyzes the liberating and transgressive features of Sudden Rise by focusing on the opening and closing scenes, I look at different moments in the show and ask how they open a post- or nonsubjective space of theatricality. Finally, by pointing out its specific “form paradox,” I see in the performance a Ricoeurian metaphor whose creative capacity is closely linked to the way Wu Tsang’s team works.
The 40-minute Sudden Rise opening is surprising.Footnote 3 After two minutes and seven seconds of darkness, during which we hear a live cello, there is a torrent of projected images that flash by for three and a half minutes on the screen in front of us. Renaissance illustrations and vanitas motifs alternate with video clips.Footnote 4 Spellbound by the soundscape of the cello and the electronic tones (during the 3.5 minutes of images), and in sharp contrast to the opening, in the following scenes we experience living and projected human figures in long robes appearing and disappearing in meditative, pensive slow motion. These apparitions, some of whom wear red garments under their bluish-white nightgown-like robes (is it blood?), are succeeded by swirling, dancing, falling, or crawling figures seen against a black background and then later, framed by projected landscapes or cultural-historical backgrounds. The monochrome backgrounds keep metamorphosing and combining. The movements of the performers are accompanied by a soundtrack and the voice of Wu Tsang, who appears in person speaking subtly in a calm, but challenging tone about forms of repression, asking questions like “What is slave language? What does it mean to be published? To be involuntarily on trial?”
Wu Tsang’s gesture of lamentation is in contrast with her proud, self-determined attitude. For example, when she casually sinks to the ground—now illuminated with blood-red light—I experience not resignation but rather a strangely touching grandeur, as if she had come to terms with what is to come. Throughout the performance, the text spoken by Wu Tsang flows so calmly that I imagine one might be tempted to stop listening to the content. As time passes without dramatic action, I feel time itself stretching. But I don’t feel bored. Red lines or stroboscopically projected white grids spread now and then across the raised proscenium stage, emphasizing the virtuality of the figures that now, after the storm of images, are projected in addition to the living actors, and suggest the transformability of all these beings by anonymous forces. A little later, projections of strange patterns appear: ornaments? photos of extraterrestrials? Then, knotted ropes are projected onto a large, bluish projection screen, next to which, offset spatially, is a second rectangular wall on which thin lines appear in a similar form. The juxtaposition of photographs of cords next to stylized diagrams of cords evokes the contrast of older media next to current technology: fragments of a historical world next to its digital variant. Behind, a whitish figure paces thoughtfully. The projections continue: book pages with partly redacted text, old bindings, layouts in morphing color combinations, then suddenly a seemingly real meadow on which the white-clad figure seems to be part of yet another story from the past, and shortly afterwards finds herself in stacks of books. The book covers feature titles such as “Dark Continent. europe’s twentieth century,” and “thriving on a riff.” The flurry of images from the beginning is now recapitulated in slow motion and from another perspective, as the projections swim by like wreckage after a catastrophic flood. The screens are again bathed in red while optically disassembled body shapes appear; the cello is again played.
As the screens move away from us, bodies in white garments that have been lying around Wu Tsang emerge from a hellish white steam to writhe towards us as if seeking help, trying to overcome the space that separates them from the audience. The association of a purgatory, now darkening again to a complete black, is reinforced by an unsympathetic, electronically doubled voice echo followed by a chromatically descending tone—the sound of a quiet apocalypse. The purgatory scene gives way to stroboscope projections that flow into one another, accompanied by Wu Tsang’s voice and the sound of chirping birds from a future, deserted world. In flickering light, Wu Tsang strides towards us like a savior. Speaking of torture and injustice in a touching, personal tone, her words sound as if spoken by the whole room. Something irrefutably urgent in her voice draws our attention to the text. We hear: “There ain’t no nonviolent way to look at somebody.” Then Wu Tsang’s statuesque, almost motionless figure recedes again towards an otherworldly vanishing point. The performance disappears into a final darkness.
The flood of projected images already raises the suspicion that what we are seeing transcends genres and genders, liquefying subject and identity, figurality, narration, and even performance art, as Sudden Rise is simultaneously dance theatre, installation, and political action. Wu Tsang speaks gently and without emotion, like a therapist, and at the same time like a newscaster reporting undeniable facts. The actors move like clockworks winding towards the audience, staring through us instead of establishing a dialog with us, thus staying entirely for themselves. The scene is wrapped up in itself, as if we spectators aren’t meant to be here, as if they are seeing something that isn’t meant for them, or rather as if it isn’t “meant” at all: as if it has no “meaning.” Although a lot of text is spoken, Wu Tsang’s voice is as detached from what is going on as the audience. The intersubjective bond is cut; those present are no longer addressed as individuals with ideas and subjective intentions. The viewer is rejected, excluded from a shared experience in the space between stage and audience.Footnote 5
Instead, we seem to be on a journey into a posthuman galaxy where theatre as a critical public space is obsolete. We feel transported to an epoch after the collapse of discourse, and consequently, of theatre, far from Eric Bentley’s minimal definition: “A impersonates B while C looks on” (1967:150). A and C are missing. B remains as something anonymously embodied, physical, even vegetable. Sudden Rise crosses the Rubicon to some postsubjective reality, without looking back, into something other than theatre, something that “suddenly rises,” that does not reject the anthropocentric world but, more frighteningly, simply has nothing to do with it. The conditio humana no longer unites the individuals present at the theatre venue. Instead, there seems to be a new connection between the living and the lifeless, between analog bodies and digital images. This breaking through of the anthropocentric framework entails a fundamental contradiction: Wu Tsang’s conditio ignores us, even when it touches us deeply, or perhaps I should say: in the very moments when it does so.
Consider Wu Tsang’s “There ain’t no nonviolent way to look at somebody.” The violence the sentence touches upon can be experienced directly as the speaker comes ever closer to us. It’s not about the triviality of a threateningly approaching body, but rather about the subtle violence inherent in our watching. This violence is now deflected, since what we look at is not a person but a ghostly, untouchable, unaddressable apparition. One does not even have to speak English or listen carefully to the text to have the contradictory experience of the gaze being obliterated by the strange unavailability of those one is looking at. Thus, the violence that springs from the viewer’s gaze seems to return to her or him without having achieved anything.
We may interpret this experience as a performative evocation and critique of the structural violence in all communication. We may conclude that only art, and perhaps not even art, allows such “violent” looking, especially if the bodies onstage aren’t considered role models by the mainstream (Wu Tsang and many of her colleagues are queer or trans people). And in terms of theatre theory, we can see a real example of performativity here: Tsang’s phrase does what it says, reflecting and at the same time deflecting the violent presence of the audience—which makes the quoted sentence ambiguous. However, these considerations—the critique of violence in its performative evocation through the embodiment of the textual statement—do not yet bring the core of this experience to light. Thus, the phenomenological consideration of this moment of performance must ask the question more precisely. How does the embodiment and reversal of the violent gaze happen aesthetically, so that we arrive at this description of experience? The aesthetic event here is the confusing experience of intertwining closeness and distance, of being touched and ignored, and it occurs on a presymbolic, affective level: not through our decoding of signs, but through the theatrical situation as such, i.e., through the affective process between stage and audience.Footnote 6 Affects are based on our vulnerability, when the world, as Judith Butler puts it, “comes up against” us (2009:2).Footnote 7 This vulnerability manifests in Sudden Rise as the strange and contradictory experience of simultaneously entirely exposed and entirely protected figures. These figures are not characters, as in representational theatre, nor are they real-life individuals, as in postdramatic theatre. In solemn, slow, and repetitive movements, they carry out anonymous actions that make them appear present and passive, vigorous and detached and, at the same time, like priests who combine power and powerlessness, presence and distance in the offering of a sacrifice. In this type of passive activity, life and lifelessness are fused as opposites, creating a contradictory experience: a continuous presence of lives that vanish as quickly as they appear. This experience of a fundamental contradiction branches out and multiplies on various levels.
One branch is the organic continuity that emerges all the more clearly the more it is interrupted by blackouts and strobes, culminating in the strobe light on the statuesque figure of Wu Tsang herself, which fractures the coherence of her body. The meditative flickering of real and digital bodies is reminiscent of the germination and sudden sprouting of flowers, or a swarm of blinking fireflies. Everything is flow and interruption at once, self-organizing and self-dissolving, movement without mover, so to speak.Footnote 8 To the contrast of movement and passivity, we simultaneously experience a kind of suffering, a sense that something is disappearing; this is, however, immediately masked by the emergence of a new, unknown state. Through this constant and unpredictable succession of contrasting impressions, we seem to lurch into a new, uncontrollable world. We feel confronted by the unbridgeable opposition of meaning and matter, of significant symbol and meaningless process. Whenever narrative elements flash up, their transience prevents us from holding on to a story. A dancing figure tries to reach the back of the stage, kepng slipping, and tries again desperately. Not clearly seen, is this a projection or a real body? The figure gives a last supreme human effort, the final fragment of a subjective narrative in an otherwise new, “objective,” subject-free, and—the adjective surprisingly suggests itself to me—“fair” space: a space that combines the living and the tangible, just as “fair trade” takes into account the rights of all those involved. I feel like I’m being shown the last fragments of humanity. No secure meaning opens up to me, only partaking in gestures, movements, the voice, and the mysterious strangeness of the projections, which throw me back to myself. No one speaks to me here; I am the sole witness of an anonymous, organic process that subliminally connects me with what’s happening onstage.
I feel a “leaning back” passivity, which I share with the staging. Bewildered by the stoic calm of this rhythmic network of tones, colors, and forms, I experience Wu Tsang’s voice as “pathic” in the literal sense of pathos: captured, moved, affected.Footnote 9 As her voice speaks of suffering, she seems to be carried by something, a very slow fall caused by a change in gravity and time; fish suspended in the endless ocean, astronauts weightless in space. The performers do not play these feelings or produce these images, as actors do. Rather, the images or feelings seem to come to them from outside, as if everything were manifestations of an indecipherable matrix. And as if the performance had read my thoughts, the matrix becomes visible in the form of a thin flickering metric net, the precision of which contrasts with the vague organic contours of the dancers’ garments. The delicate network seems to “measure” human and cultural history, reinforcing the experience of passivity and creating thoughts of strangeness and transgression.
Strangely enough, this becomes even more evident when the ephemeral figures seem to rebel sporadically: when they run, flee, or dance. Even then there still is something passive about them, something like “being run” or “danced” before they “sink back” into the surrounding space. The German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels uses the word “patient” to stress the affective structure of experience: “We simply call those who suffer affects in this way ‘patients,’ as we speak of actors” (2002:93). In this sense, just as the word “actor” comes from acting, one could speak here of “passors,” my neologism accentuating the passivity of their bodies onstage, their “passing through” the situation portending that, in Butler’s words again, their own movements “come up against” them. Occasionally they seem to fall headfirst from the sky like degraded gods. Their fall appears as if following a natural law, that is, something nonhuman. They seem to suffer a nameless, desubjectivated process that is operating or going on around them, in them, or through them. In German, “going on” is vor sich gehen, literally “going ahead of oneself” or “going before oneself.” The term suggests that something anticipates the appearance, something that is logically “before” it, revealing itself as the action’s origin (the unmoved mover again). By having this “something” appear as the actual protagonist of a performance, a new era is announced in which processes or movements replace (human) actions. Stories, plans, ideas—all are replaced by sensual processes. By being “pathic,” refusing to convey anything or to address anybody—i.e., refusing to communicate—Sudden Rise does not show us a postsubjective or posthuman world, but actually transcends the borders of presentation. By re-flecting, literally “bending back,” the viewer’s gaze on itself and thus disrupting the intersubjective connection, it performs postsubjectivity or posthumanity. Sudden Rise not only lacks dramatic action (which could be compensated for by having real people portray themselves), but rather denies (inter)subjectivity and human agency as minimum conditions for theatre. We experience the irony of theatre turning out to be no theatre. This irony, of course, lies in the nature of theatre in general.Footnote 10 But by exposing the contradiction, Sudden Rise makes the underlying form paradox the secret theme of the performance.
Subjectivity at Stake
What is the form paradox of theatre? It is, to put it casually, that theatre is itself and something else at the same time. The philosopher Christoph Menke explains it using Nietzsche’s concept of play. Playing is traditionally contrasted to serious, purpose-oriented, action. But actions, according to Menke, are only possible because there is another category of processes before and within them: “These are playful behaviors. They differ from normative actions in that they are without rules” (2018a:40). In play, something is produced and then dissolved at will, transformed into something else. In aesthetic play, the imagination creates forms that immediately become something else again. Playing theatre means the “permanent creation, dissolution, and transformation of images, shapes, and forms” by the actor (in German Schauspieler, literally “show-player”), who by no means simply transforms themself into a character or identifies with it, but first and foremost transforms “into an aesthetic player who produces images in an infinite process” (40). The unbridled rapture of transformation is the precondition of theatre: “In this enchantment, the DionysianFootnote 11 enthusiast sees himself as a satyr and as a satyr he in turn sees the god, i.e., in his transformation he sees a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian completion of his state” (40). Only with this new vision is the drama complete. The antagonistic impulse, which brings something categorically different (the god) into play, leads out of the self-enchantment and interrupts the incessant change of images: “One is held, fixed, and exhibited so that it can be looked at” (Menke Reference Menke2018a:40).
In Sudden Rise, this dialectic of rapturous flow and fixed form is literally demonstrated when a figure emerges from the play of forms and becomes recognizable, be it an image in the midst of the flood of images that is allowed to linger longer, or a real body that suddenly writhes towards us from the kaleidoscopic superimposition of projected and real bodies, as if it wants to escape the stage. Or towards the end of the performance, when Wu Tsang crystallizes as a charismatic figure from an amorphous, constantly changing group. In these moments, a narrative emerges from the seemingly meaningless process, “redeeming” we who yearn for meaning. Theatre is, as Sudden Rise shows, rapture and release from rapture, redemption: a movement out of “the formlessness of play” that immediately dissolves back into play. Trembling “between the formlessness of play and the forms of life, between abyss and ground, nothing and world” (Menke Reference Menke2018a:43), form in theatre is constituted through its self-contradiction.
This paradox, says dramaturg Carl Hegemann, is also constitutive of subjectivity. How so? Human consciousness knows itself as identical to itself: I am me.Footnote 12 To do this, however, it must literally re-flect itself, i.e., bend back on itself (Hegemann [Reference Hegemann and Hegemann2012] 2017:223).Footnote 13 Hegemann names three conditions for the constitution of the subject.Footnote 14 First, the “infinite activity” of the ego, which is oriented outwards towards the world; second, the ego relates this activity to itself “as its own” (Hegemann [Reference Hegemann and Hegemann1978] 2017:79); third, this self-reference must be triggered by something outside. Re-flection implies the “distinction between centripetal and centrifugal, between the reflecting and the reflected” (80). The ego cannot do this itself; it needs “a non-ego-like counterforce [eine nicht-ichliche Gegenkraft]” (81), which limits the activity of the ego that otherwise would extend to infinity. “I” is only possible “if the I is limited by something that is not I” (82). The external world, on the other hand, needs the ego, because it is “only independent if there is something from which it is independent, namely the ego” (85). Hence the paradox: the independence of the world is based on its dependence on the ego and vice versa. Self-reflection is only possible if the ego remains open to external influence. But this means that the ego does not simply stand opposite the non-ego, but carries the non-ego within itself. It moves “in a tension between self-consciousness and ‘self-forgottenness’” (85).
This paradoxical entanglementFootnote 15 is in turn “the paradigm and the permanent thorn of every dramaturgy” (Hegemann [Reference Hegemann and Hegemann2012] 2017:230). In Sudden Rise, the passivity of the movements makes it possible to experience the non-ego as something that “goes before itself,” preceding and conditioning any subjective action. The paradoxical emergence of subjectivity through the playful loss of self can be sensed in the appearance of the actors—using the neologism I suggested above—as “passors”; Wu Tsang’s moving forward in the final scene is a veritable allegory of this paradoxical emergence, which not only realizes, but literally demonstrates the philosophical self-contradiction of the subject. By eliminating subjectivity as the supreme premise of theatre, Sudden Rise “comes up against” itself and us as its own negation, demonstrating the paradox of form par excellence.
The reason for this paradox is that the form is inscribed in two incompatible relations: in its creative transformation through the play—and in its “relation to the forms that make up the reality of life” (Menke Reference Menke2018a:42) where form is imitation: the Aristotelian mimesis of life “outside of the theatre” (43). Performing dissolves the forms, mimesis grounds them in reality. These two contrasting operations work together at every moment. Performing is imitating, imitating is performing. The paradox of theatre is the paradox of its action, its poiesis. This is where subjectivity and theatre are connected. “The subject only exists where the loss of self in the playful dissolution and transformation of forms and self-knowledge as a participant in the forms of life and practice meet (and mutually oppose each other)” (43–44).Footnote 16 Aristotle calls the difference between acting in life and acting in the theatre “prattein” and “dran.”Footnote 17 The practice (prattein) of life is unambiguous and tension-free. But in drama (“dran”) its forms are imitated in a playful way, freed from the ties to any purpose and put at risk. This creates a tension “between possibility (dynaton) and its fulfillment (telos),” which reduces real forms to possible—and therefore changeable—forms. In this transformation, the theatre unfolds its critical power by “fighting the defense, the immunization of life against the change it undergoes in the theatre” (Menke Reference Menke2018a:45).
Since Sudden Rise not only realizes but exposes the form paradox, its critique consists in undermining not only the immunization of life against the change it might undergo in performance, but also the self-immunization of the theatre against its playful self-transformation. With its flood of images, with what I described above as “passors” instead of actors, the seemingly random appearance of this or that projection, and a dramaturgy that seems far removed from authorship or even concept, Sudden Rise shows that both life and theatre can be changed.
Wu Tsang in Sudden Rise, appearing white and reddish in the digital grid. (Photo by Ketty Bertossi)
Performance as Metaphor
But what is it in Sudden Rise that makes us immediately feel that real life is at stake along with the theatre? If the performance were just images and sounds, we would experience meaningless bluish-
white figures floating up and down, and hear gloomy cello tones. As a purely sensual Dionysian rapture, without a recognizable deictic gesture toward the outside world, the performance would be boring and irrelevant, the storm of images would implode, the ghostly appearances would become unintentionally funny. But Sudden Rise is gripping throughout, and like a lonely voice calling in the wilderness, it seems to be aiming at something. After the remnants of human history have been swept away and the signs have become aleatoric, too many to continue tracking them, a deeper affect-image suddenly emerges from the gliding figures and forms embedded in the surrounding soundscape, which only becomes clearer in the variation through new appearances and fragmentations, confronting us with a strange, frightening new corporeality and temporality. The performance opens the floodgates and makes us receptive to new forms in theatre play and in life.
Josh Johnson in Sudden Rise. Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2019. (Photo by Ketty Bertossi)
This paradoxical appearance of forms that links theatre and life finds a striking parallel in the poetic function of language, more precisely in Paul Ricoeur’s concept of metaphor. In the foreword to the German edition of “La métaphore vive” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 1986:i–viii), Ricoeur says that he cares about “the connection between the creative and the rule” (i). To create is “to fight against rules, be it to let them lead you, be it to break them” (i). Using Gottlob Frege’s distinction between sense and meaning (ii; see Frege Reference Frege1892:25–50), Ricoeur attributes to metaphor the ability of “semantic innovation on the level of meaning and the heuristic function on the level of reference” (iii). The metaphor is creative as a “language-immanent extension of language” and as a “new description of reality” (ii). This relationship to reality as a “mediation between man and the world” (iv) finds its parallel in the reality-changing potency of the theatrical form paradox. Ricoeur calls it “metaphorical” (i–iv). This understanding goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, where the displacement of meaning by the metaphor has two functions: a rhetorical and a poetic one. In Ricoeur’s formulation, Aristotle defines metaphor as the “transfer of a noun to something, making it mean [also] something else” (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1975:19).Footnote 18 As Ricoeur reads Aristotle, the components of tragedy “form a network, as it were, in which everything centers on one dominant factor: the fable, the plot, the mythos” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 2003:40).Footnote 19 Myth is the essential carrier of mimesis, “not just a rearrangement of human action into a more coherent form, but a structuring that elevates this action” (45).Footnote 20 Therefore, mimesis does not produce mere copies of reality; rather it “preserves and represents that which is human […] in a way that makes it greater and nobler” (45),Footnote 21 that is, as poiesis. Thus, the metaphor, as a function of mimesis (and thus of myth), is not a trivial replacement at the word level. Rather, its creative power extends from the level of the word to speech, lexis, which is why it is able to augment, enrich, innovate, or “superelevate”Footnote 22 its context (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1975:57). Abstracted from this referential function, “metaphor plays itself out in substitution and dissipates itself in ornamentation; allowed to run free, it loses itself in language games” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 2003:45). Far from this, metaphor participates “in the origin of logical thinking, in the root of every classification” (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1975:32). It emerges in the production of a new phrase “in an act of an unheard stating […] like a spark that flashes when two previously distant semantic fields collide” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 1986:vi). It “makes one see things because it ‘represents things as in a state of activity’” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 2003:48). This “activity” is reminiscent of Menke and Hegemann’s concept of play. There, too, the “truth of the imaginary, the disclosing power of poetry” is rooted in reality, and this is why the mimesis “not only preserves the referential function” but binds it, as mimesis physeôs, to the “revelation of the Real as Act” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 2003:48). In this understanding, physis serves as an “index for that dimension of reality that does not receive due account in the simple description of that-thing-over-there,” but rather is “the ontological function of metaphorical discourse” that represents things “as blossoming forth, every latent capacity for action as actualized” (48). Thus, a new meaning not only expands “the preexistent polysemy of the word” (Ungheanu Reference Ungheanu2008:85), thereby altering the whole context, but also projects new worlds.
As live theatre, Sudden Rise plays by the rules: it shares a narrative time concept of past, present, and future with its audience; and at the same time breaks these rules by transgressing itself, ignoring the onlooking subjects and introducing a strangely different temporality. Against the backdrop of Ricoeur’s metaphor, the performance thus appears as a utopia that announces a new, posthuman world, barely contoured, experienceable only as suspicion, as possibility, as the awakening of an unknown future. It is pure theatre that at the same time goes beyond theatre: The timeless affect of the fulminant pictural thunderstorm and the weightless anonymous bodies that haunt the stage alongside a strangely floating text bring the roots of theatre to the fore. As a ritual-like, hyperaffective space in which mimesis is not imitation, but rather is creative, violating rules to expand an existing meaning, Sudden Rise transforms the “disappearance of man” into a positive posthuman theatre in which the collapse of semiosis does not lead to passivity and arbitrariness, but to a postsubjective shared (theatrical) cosmos. By writing and continually rewriting a new “affect-image” with an invisible hand, Wu Tsang and company intervene creatively in reality, crossing out any semantic identity. They show the familiar anew by seeking the strange in it and presenting it to us in a gentle, comforting way by keeping it at arm’s length.
Perhaps that’s why the tempest of pictures in the opening scene and the fragility and ephemerality of the subsequent appearances only initially seem to be a swan song for humanity. Actually, they euphorically celebrate humanity’s agony and the new aggregate state that arises through movement, gravity, and plant-like becoming and growing, like dead grass moved by wind. In this subject-empty space, a paradoxical, mysterious meaninglessness prevails. But the horror is beautiful: the subjective life forms are not missed. Rather, as the performance solemnly suggests, they make way for something long-awaited, more peaceful and ultimately more humane. Music and movement, rhythm and design point to something: they carry across (meta-pherein) an inherent meaning, a self-statement, just as Patrick Belaga plucks his cello, creating sounds that, instead of human decisions and dramatic fantasies, reflect the calm determination of natural processes. If metaphor is the “linguistic expression of the creative faculty” (Ricoeur [Reference Ricoeur1975] 1986:ii), here is a 40-minute theatrical metaphor that introduces a new world within a still existing one. Every metaphor is a miniature poem, Ricoeur concludes. Sudden Rise is a cheerful, grand song for the serene departure into a new hybrid, fluid, nonanthropocentric theatrical future.
Life in Theatre in Life…
As stated above, the critical potential of Sudden Rise is to combat not only “the immunization of life against the change it undergoes in the theatre” (Menke Reference Menke2018a:45) but also the self-immunization of the theatre against its playful transformation. Wu Tsang and Moved by the Motion achieve this by playfully playing with forms in structured life behaviors (such as gender roles) and in theatre (such as psychological character roles) and transforming them. Theatricalizing their life, and vice versa living their performances, putting their own concerns, bodies, and shame unreservedly at risk, they enrich both life and theatre. Wu Tsang’s early projects already bear witness to the playful transformation of theatrical forms. By producing videos, installations, and performances, and organizing events and parties, Tsang became a “hybrid” activist/film director/visual artist who consistently combines different people, elements, and styles. The only stable thing is the movement itself, which arises from bringing together what does not belong together—not eliminating the contrasts but revealing the noncoherent, the deviant, and the queer. This movement also creates its opposite: fixed aesthetic forms, images, artworks, performances.
Tsang earned her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2004. In her first attention-grabbing short film, Shape of a Right Statement (2008), she recites text by the controversial nonbinary autism activist Mel Baggs. Tsang’s first feature-length documentary Wildness (2012) portrays the theatricality of the Los Angeles LGBTQ bar Silver Platter, well known by local Latinx trans and queer people. Tsang gives the bar itself an androgynous Latin Spanish voice (just as she had given Mel Baggs a voice), making it an omniscient dialog partner. Wildness is named after the weekly parties that Tsang threw there around 2008. The Silver Platter was, for Tsang, “a space for people to express themselves and to also lose themselves” (macfound 2018, 2:15)—the paradox of form and formlessness in real life. At her Silver Platter parties, Tsang met the other artists of Moved by the Motion (founded 2013): musicians Asma Maroof and Patrick Belaga; dancers Tosh Basco (boychild) and Josh Johnson; and poet, scholar, and philosopher Fred Moten.Footnote 23 The collaboration with MotenFootnote 24 is subtle, intuitive, and at the same time intellectually demanding. Before meeting face-to-face, they exchanged voicemails “characterized by moments of unexpected synchronicity—ghostly near misses of shared thoughts” (Bergholtz and Gibb Reference Bergholtz and Gibb2016:3). These resulted in their first work, Miss Communication and Mr:Re (2014), a piece about the paradoxical creativity of miscommunication. In 2015, Tsang directed the video Girl Talk in Moten’s backyard with Moten dancing in drag, exploring “the fluidity of performed identity” (EAI 2024). In Girl Talk Moten’s introspective movements become a direct address to the viewer: “This girl talk, talks of you.” Several opposites create a paradoxical, multilayered complexity: a Black man dancing in drag filmed by a queer woman; a calm, dreamy atmosphere that flips into a political message; lyrics that transform the title’s cliché phrase into a feminist imperative; the change from the narrative “they” to the performative “we.”
Moved by the Motion
Ritual and Play
In a playful double entendre, the name “Moved by the Motion” refers both to the collective and to an early performance that Tsang and boychild produced in 2014. How does Moved by the Motion work? From the start, the collaboration “with people I love” (Asma Maroof in Richman Reference Richman2022:18) amplifies how each member of the group tries “to understand each other’s practices” (Tsang in Richman Reference Richman2022:9). Moten calls them “the band” (9). Just as single tones form chords and overtones in music, individual input creates something in the other group members: “Everyone in the band is there because they’re playing an instrument in a different way,” says Johnson. He admires the playing style of multi-instrumentalist Tapiwa Svosve because “it feels like an echo of your own voice” (22). The openness to being touched, “working within and through things” (Basco in Richman Reference Richman2022:8), allows the collective to put its learned skills at risk, as Johnson says about Belaga’s cello style:
You can hear the years of training and the years of him, like, unlearning that training in the way he plays. That’s very similar to dance for me. You spend all this time to learn this one particular thing, and then you spend the rest of your time trying to, like, unlearn it. (in Richman Reference Richman2022:21)
When Basco heard Belaga playing cello for the first time, “it was as if someone had translated my movements into cello” (21). She recognizes herself in a sound coming from outside. The “band” emerges from this playful exchange between the individual styles. Subjective control is subordinated to a collective synesthesia. Asma Maroof:
We will meet up and read together, discuss what we’re reading, and get ideas from that. Then we kind of workshop the ideas, sometimes separately, before we come together for, like, a show-and-tell moment. (in Richman Reference Richman2022:8)
The multisensorial overlay can be experienced in Tsang and Moten’s strange and yet transparent text Who touched me?, “a liturgical book” and a compilation of two years of lived collaboration for the sculptural performance and book Gravitational Feel (Bergholtz and Gibb Reference Bergholtz and Gibb2016:2).Footnote 25 Composed of emails, notes, poetry, fragments of essays, transcriptions of earlier collaborative work, and a hybrid design of patterns, colors, shapes, and sketch lines, Gravitational Feel anticipates the key features of Sudden Rise. It transcends the boundaries between touch and voice, theory and practice, female and male, coincidence and staging, artists and visitors, text and tissue. A footnote in the introduction unravels the etymological root of “textile,” referring to the entanglement and awareness that take shape “in a multi-channel soundtrack and numerous strands of fabric rope, which draw inspiration from ‘quipu’ or talking knots—a sophisticated form of Incan data and record collection using knotted string—and brings attention to the unique language of fabric” (Bergholtz and Gibb Reference Bergholtz and Gibb2016:2). In the voice messages that are part of Miss Communication and Mr:Re, associations proliferate like in a garden left to its own devices—“pie(d),” “(re)ply,” “bye” (Moten and Tsang Reference Moten and Tsang2016:25)—symbol and design grow into one another (colored stripes or colored omissions take the place of words), programmatic confessions merge with private ones (“We aim. We miss. We live in the gaps between our intentions and the shit that doesn’t work out” [2016:7]), people and material merge (as in the optical interference of cords with the bodies of the visitors moving between them, cut into strips, to create a new pictorial impression, so that the shadows cast by the strings on clothing and faces seem to belong to both the fabric and the light).
Because of this interference of figurality and abstraction, the flow of ideas is more reminiscent of dance than of writing and makes reading a sensual, almost erotic experience, as Moten and Tsang say:
When we are together we miss one another. Voice goes past itself and goes past one another. A script drawn from a series of missed conversations. A form derived from miscommunication. We deliberately, as a matter of daily practice, miss one another, but from within a conversation, a mutuality of lost and found, of more + less than voice. And then we stage that offness, together, from room to room, yoked, even in the record, the daily meditation, of this missed communication. Articulation implies a separation, a distance, but the normative model of conversation and communication implies seamless connection. What if we simply foreground the communicative ruptures and displacements that are the essence of conversation? […] a certain number of words or sentences or phrases from our miscommunication, our space-time separated conversation, our quantum entanglement or spooky actions at a distance. This should tend towards music and dance, the inarticulacies of a kind of articulate or articulated song and dance. To stage, in co-presence, a troubled duet. (Moten and Tsang Reference Moten and Tsang2016:8)
Page 32 from Who Touched Me (2016) by Fred Moten and Wu Tsang. (Image courtesy of Frithwin Wagner-Lippok)
The paradoxes in this quote run through all levels of collaboration and reinforce the impression of some basic movement that kepng the work open. It ensures a permanent overlap between theory and practice, constantly giving rise to new relationships that are connected despite or precisely because of their differences, as the Indigenous Brazilian researcher Denise Ferreira da Silva from the University of British Columbia says: “When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement” (da Silva Reference da Silva2016:65).Footnote 26 What commonly functions as “differences” between people, groups, nations, genders, behaviors, and even politics Moten and Tsang interpret as connection, togetherness, reconciliation, redemption, love. Actually, “nonlocality” alludes to the indeterminability of the location of elementary particles, a quantum physical phenomenon. That a particle is here and there at the same time runs counter to Newtonian physics where space and time exist independently of each other and of us; a theory based on the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa—ego and world. Applied to art and epistemology, this means that we cannot control everything, but should be open to extrasubjective instances, influences, and fields, even if this makes everything more complex. Entanglement is not a luxury that can be dispensed with, but a characteristic of reality whose complexity must be accepted and whose epistemic and factual pressure must be acknowledged.
This understanding of entanglement is also reflected in the title Who touched me?, which quotes the apostle Luke. Luke describes how Jesus’s miracles cure the sick, provided they believe in them: “And a woman […] came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched. And Jesus said, Who touched me? […] Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. […T]hy faith hath made thee whole” (Luke 8:43–48, in Moten and Tsang Reference Moten and Tsang2016:57). The authors emphasize the word “faith,” implying that rather than being shackled to a logic of power and knowledge, we should trust an unknown, incredible otherness that we do not control. The mystery is in the faith that allows us to touch the other. This is precisely the paradoxical structure of the subject’s self-constitution under the influence of a nonsubjective force, and its reflection in the theatrical form paradox. In the light of this paradox, Who touched me? becomes a question about making art: Who touched me so that I’m able (and condemned) to do this? The cryptic passages of the “liturgical book” Who touched me? and its design (highlighting in soft colors and shapes that emphasize individual words) suggest a religious fervor that returns in the final sacrificial image of Sudden Rise. Indeed, Sudden Rise is quasi-religious in the sense of being touched by something “strange” that we cannot explain, bringing theatre back to its ritual roots, i.e., to itself.Footnote 27
The paradoxical confluence of ideas that are alien to each other not only expresses a desire for reconciliation and redemption, but also a sense of creative humor, even a dash of romantic irony: “The performance is not a product but a node. […] Naw, it’s an anthology of noding (Autocorrect wants it to be ‘nodding’ so bad!) [in red:] A no(ma)dology” (Moten and Tsang Reference Moten and Tsang2016:39). The idea of several threads crossing each other here and there and forming nodes reflects a process that condenses into forms, discards them, and continues playing. As Josh Johnson says about writer Kandis Williams:
[She ties] the most complicated knot that connects the most opposite ends of a plane and makes them make sense together. It’s not even on a “plane,” on a flat surface—it’s layered, as though it’s made in a way for you to understand it, then misunderstand, then understand that, then understand it again. That’s how composition works to me. (in Richman Reference Richman2022:23)
The roots of Moved by the Motion are in the New York and Los Angeles house music, drag, and dance scene. Tsang’s 2019 “magical realist” documentary Into a Space of Love (produced by the media and events company Frieze in collaboration with the fashion brand Gucci, starring Kevin Aviance, Kia LaBeija with Taina Larot, Jeff Simmons, Shaun J. Wright, and Venus X) explores the “legacies of house music rooted in New York underground culture.” The film is a hybrid documentary and art film interweaving fact and fiction. Kevin Aviance, who is not a member of the group, says of the music scene in the legendary New York club Paradise Garage: “that was gospel, in the form of house music” (in Tsang Reference Tsang2019, 8:54), referencing what for many participants is the communal, spiritual experience of raves and clubbing. There is also a religious aspect that plays a central role in the Moten/Tsang publication Who touched me? The playful joy and movement of gospel music, which Aviance mentions in the film as a source of house music, embodies one side of what Tsang calls “in-betweenness,” going back and forth between immersive and intellectual experiences. In “Into a Space of Love,” for example, two people who are completely absorbed in their intimate love experience are suddenly interrupted by a calmly detached question: “What is the voice actually?” (Tsang Reference Tsang2019, 19:57). In this way, the emotional flow is crossed by an intellectual consideration. The duality that is programmatic for Tsang and Moved by the Motion, the inseparable coexistence of the physical-visceral and the signifying-intellectual aspects, culminates in speech, in the expressive and meaningful use of the voice: here, the prototypical physical and mental dimensions flow together. By questioning the origin of a voice, or by giving a club a voice, as in Wildness, or by depersonalizing the voice, as in Sudden Rise, the voice playfully thematizes subjectivity. The very name “Moved by the Motion” is a play on subject and object: One does not want to make movement, but rather to be moved by it. The ego needs an impulse from outside. In Sudden Rise, this is experienced by the performers in the passivity that afflicts them. Into a Space of Love demonstrates this paradox of creative passivity when camera and dancer (Kia Michelle Benbow aka Kia LaBeija) stand in a narrow passageway in the precarious no-man’s land between two towering walls covered with graffiti. They circle each other, chase each other, and swap places, as skateboarders go by (Tsang Reference Tsang2019, 11:10–14:07). An off-screen voice at the start of the video says: “The hazard of movement, of moving and being moved, of knowing that we are affected, and that we are affective…”
In the empty space between two people, between body and camera, movement unfolds as a playful being-moved. Tsang’s 2019 exhibition in the Gropius Bau, Berlin, There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody, “counters the hierarchy of visual perception with the utopia of a space between seeing and being seen” (Huber Reference Huber2019). This in-between space is the uncertain zone where the subject plays and thereby also loses itself. Moten’s statement “There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody” suggests a space (“way”) between particularities. As a spoken line in Sudden Rise, it announces this between-space as the theatrical space in which Sudden Rise is set.
Because the (Dionysian) play respects nothing fixed, it infests the framework, i.e., it does not stop at its own boundary conditions: title, motto, announcement, description—even analysis. However one describes a production of Moved by the Motion, the traces, associations, and the material and intellectual threads lead to something else, always continuing in a kaleidoscope of colors, forms, and words. Against my will, I keep coming across new tentacles, new dimensions. The images I use to describe even a single detail take on a life of their own, just as, according to Ricoeur, a metaphor leaps from the word to the sentence level, and creates something new whose description requires further metaphors, ad infinitum. Wu Tsang and the artists around her cannot be pinned down; they are radically open, in the sense of being ready for connections with something completely different, touchable, unbounded. Whatever they create always creates its opposite at the same time. In addition to its religious gesture, Tsang’s priestly presence as the narrator in the final scene of Sudden Rise, in which she initially stpng closer and closer to the audience like a savior, only to retreat backwards and disappear, incorporates the contradictory nature of the savior figure and at the same time of the narrator-subject as a physical movement that makes the ambivalence, the imposition of theatrical encounters physically tangible. “There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody” is itself paradoxical. The statement turns the powerlessness of those being looked at against the viewers by making the viewers feel that they are forced to use violence, that they have no choice but to use violence, because the very act of viewing is violent. And the real movement of approaching and receding ostentatiously shows the imaginary movement that results from the paradoxical tilting back and forth of the perspective of victim and perpetrator, and thus, in abstraction, that of subject and object: The violence is mirrored back and forth endlessly between victims and perpetrators. In this mirroring movement, a space of play opens up for thinking: Is it blindness that shuts out the identity of minorities, or even racism, or affection and love? We always have a counter-claim, which we extinguish. Infinite power and infinite trust flow into each other in every encounter. That is the tragic and even slightly comic message of Moved by the Motion’s art.
Thus, playing is the underlying movement that produces hybrids and entangles categories. Queerness is but another kind of play. The working style of Moved by the Motion is rooted in the playful connection with any newly emerging element that tumbles into the situation, a serious play that produces ever new forms and compositions by vividly interweaving text, image, sound, objects, and living bodies. This playful dynamic of entanglement can be regarded as the “vivifying principle” of the metaphor that is Sudden Rise. Driven by the same playful transgression, the spoken text in Sudden Rise moved across genres to become a foundational text (“Sudden Rise at a Given Tune” by Moten and Tsang Reference Moten and Tsang2018) and fragments of “civil rights activists, poets, essayists, including Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois alongside Jimi Hendrix’s lyrics, Hannah Arendt’s musings, and Oskar Becker’s ‘mantic’ phenomenology” (HAU 2019)—combined in the performance in a surrealistic-aleatory manner with images and sounds in the style of a “Cadavre exquis” (HAU 2019), André Breton’s term for artistic production that leaves room for play and chance.
From left: Josh Johnson, Wu Tsang, and boychild in Sudden Rise. Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2019. (Photo by Ketty Bertossi)
And So?
Reflecting the artists’ style of work and of life as a concretization of the philosophical paradox of form, Sudden Rise is a living metaphor pointing to a strange, utopian world without us, and to a theatre that transcends human subjectivity. What it shows is not some future state of the art but the transformability of theatre and life. Just as gender ambiguity fits only into open concepts of reality, performances of ambiguity can only be integrated into a theatrical mind that is open to going beyond straight subjective agency. The critical utopia that lies in the self-contradiction of subject and theatre is thus implied in the creative self-referentiality of metaphor. It is embodied in the work of Moved by the Motion—light years from the actor-role dichotomy, but also not “themselves” onstage in the sense of postdramatic theatre. They resign, step back as subjects, surrendering their autonomy unreservedly to the affective aesthetic process of the performance. This process is autonomous and yet precise, a “flow” like in jazz improvisation. Moved by the Motion artists criticize the immunization of life and theatre against the play that changes both. In their working methods and the form of their projects, Moved by the Motion demonstrate their liquidity, which is also their own. The swan song to the certain, the definable, is the chance for change, a new beginning, survival, and ultimately redemption. A new beginning, the impulse to change, presuppose repentance, forgiveness, grace, and ultimately to have redemption as their goal—a conceptual pattern that inevitably evokes Christian religious ideas. In the light of the eschatological dimension of the texts, the production method reminiscent of early Christianity of peaceful and equal cooperation in mutual affection and the aforementioned associations that are suggested to the viewer in the performance Sudden Rise also appears as a religious project.
Sudden Rise reflects the paradox of the theatrical form. This paradox is linked ontologically to Wu Tsang and her team. They do not produce the show as an oeuvre, separate from them; they are interwoven with it in real time. They do not make the performance, but experience and describe it at the same time—and themselves in the process. They are the oeuvre, or more precisely, this process. The performance, which is inseparable in time and space from the entire earlier and later artistic productivity of the performers, transcends itself.
