FLOODESIGN

HIS IS A MEDITATION ON THE TRAFFIC BETWEEN BOOKS AND STAGES. IT MOVES IN BOTH DIRECTIONS. As a publisher of performance texts, I spent a long time asking how I could make a book more like a performance. In addition to publishing texts, my little treehouse of a press, 53rd State, runs a series of expanded documentations of intergenre, hybrid performance works whose larger scores could be said to exceed whatever we might call a script (and so present a problem for publication, because what is said or sung is only a portion of the event's skeleton: the unspoken parts, including all the choices about embodiment and voicing, developed in the rehearsal room, are rarely notated — living, as performance does, in layers of physical memory and idiomatic shorthand). A script, after all, is a technical document, a conveyor of information for fellow tradespeople. It can't account for a show any more than a blueprint can account for the experience of inhabiting a building. What typographical interventions might happen during the experience of reading so that some amount of a performance's sonic and spatial amplitude remains? I imagined these books as offerings to a reading stranger. I was interested in making books that gave this imagined stranger a private, speculative theatrical experience. I wanted to create an invitational page that authorized the reader to augment their solitude with the spectral nearness of a hypothetical room. How could I make reading a book feel more like being at a performance? As a performance-maker I realized recently that I have also been asking this inverse question: How can I make a performance more like a book? Performance can be defined in part by its status as group experience, but isn't there also group experience in a book? I think of the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who described the gesture of writing as pitched toward the unknown future reader. However much a text might be embedded in a moment or scene, it is also — on behalf of the way any one human belongs to the human in general, however impossible that is to define or delimit — addressed to a future "we." We don't gather in a single room; we don't turn the house lights off at 8. But nonetheless, when we read, we do in some way gather: our micro-solitudes of reading constellate into the unfixable, uncloseable cloud of the book's reception and effect. Distant, spectral community. So to make a performance grow out of a book, especially one with a long history of readers (for example "The Romance of the Rose"), is, in a way, to make a gathering of one kind from a gathering of another. At the same time, the invocation of the book makes an opening for a memory of solitude. Besides the blooming mood of reading's quietude that attends a book's migration into the theater, another species of solitude can be interpolated into the live event when the language spoken by the performance is transferred from the social space of speech to the silent space of reading. When I've made performances out of old books, a process not so much of adaptation as of transplantation, I've used the delicate room generated by image, sound and movement composed within the alembic of group attention to prime a space for silent reading. As a performer I make myself public, offering myself to be seen or heard. But I am also a performer with a habit of performing in 20 | PEAKPERFS.ORG PUBLICATION SOLITUDE PERFORMANCE By KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS

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