Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved

Abstract

‘There's a moment coming,’ says Karen Christopher in Goat Island's final performance, The Lastmaker (2007-9). ‘It's not here yet. It's on the way. It's still in the future.’ She waits. ‘Here it is! Oh, it's gone.’ She's caught on film, going round and round, just as she herself echoes a George Carlin routine. Before a twenty-minute silence that is at the heart of Kings of England's Elegy for Paul Dirac (2011), Simon Bowes says, ‘We are gathered here to stage Dirac's most notorious silence, not to close it, but to hold it open.’ These and other theatrical moments are caught between act and re-enactment. They gesture to themselves. They are an open door in the theatre, one that lets the outside world filter in, but also one that lets the suspended frame of the theatre widen outward.Adapted for the page from a live performance-lecture, this text describes performance moments such as these at the same time as it performs its own act of originary repetition. It flutters unsteadily at the tipping point between stasis and movement, between feeling and critique, between image and recognition. Drawing on the writings of Susan Sontag and Stanley Cavell, theories of the brain from neuroscientists such as Benjamin Libet and David Eagleman, and aspects of my biography that precede my own birth, I ask: what is it that moves us to act? Like all performances, it is an attempt to hold that within which it is itself held.