Forming transitory but generous communities
http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2020/04/forming-transitory-but-generous.html This is a difficult book to review because, although it is easy to say this is a volume of collaborations by SJ Fowler and many others, it is not easy to delineate the types of collaboration involved. Anybody who has attended the hundreds of collaborative ‘Enemies’ events curated, and participated in, by Fowler wouldn’t be too surprised by this, but Nemeses is not just a selection of the experimental cabaret duos of those performances, important though they have been, but a presentation of samples of many collaborations in various media.
You will find literary collaborations of many kinds, from Oulipo experiments and ‘translations’, to ekphrasis of artworks or films, through what look like extemporised wordplay texts, to collages of found sources. There are even some lyric moments. There are co-authored proverbs, diaries and journals, micro-fictions, absurdist texts, and fake public information documents. Many are manifestly the results of dialogic to and fro responses, some even maintaining the form of letter and email exchanges. There are sketches and playlets (often for two voices and often very funny), as well as polyphonic poems for multivoiced delivery. There are speculative instructions for performances, as well as photographic and linguistic documentation of actual performances, whether for voice(s), dance and wrestling, sometimes involving visual art and/or music, and occasionally without words at all. There are visual poems exploring neurodiversity (of the variety dubbed by Fowler the poem brut). There are representations of artworks and sculptures that incorporate texts by Fowler. There are stills from films accompanied by notations of the films’ narrative or action. There are text and photographic collaborations. There are conceptual texts for and about conceptual performances. There are notes from psychogeographical dérives (with and without visual evidence). There are excerpts from book length coauthored publications, already in the public domain, alongside short one-off collaborations, seen here for the first time. There are nearly 300 pages of this.
The collaborators are also suitably varied, as might be expected from Fowler’s often unusual pairings for the ‘Enemies’ performances. Fowler works with some elite figures, such as vocal artist Phil Minton, or novelist Iain Sinclair. There are ‘names’, such as Sandeep Parmar and James Byrne, emerging artists like Eley Williams or Ailbhe Darcy, but there are many lesser-known figures here, which suggests Fowler’s generosity, and many European authors, which underlines Fowler’s internationalism (intensified after Brexit), as well as to the non-native speakers’ willingness to risk work in the bastard language of our insular isle, for example, Ausra Kaziliunaite and Robert Prosser. Tom Jenks, Harry Man and Christodoulos Makris are frequent partners for Fowler. Luke Kennard, Camilla Nelson and John Hall are less so. In all, there are 54 collaborators (and I’ve mainly named only writers above), a promiscuous bunch.
I found the book an exhausting but exhilarating read (or ride). One of the delights of creating collaboratively is the opportunity to produce work that could not have been made in any other way, and which is not like work produced individually. Artists here vary in their abilities to ‘let go’ (Sinclair unavoidably sounds like Sinclair) but there is a general willingness to surrender to the encounter (particularly where performance is part of the works’ realisations). In a postface, Fowler quickly passes over the usual reason for collaboration as a concept: collegiate sharing disrupts the loneliness of the long-distance writer. He notes: ‘I have proofed my concept with others, forming transitory but generous communities which have supported the making of challenging and complex work, live, and it has taken me on an extraordinary personal journey.’ He admits, also, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that the whole endeavour is ‘selfish’: ‘I have somehow mitigated defeat in my other works by constantly working with others … collaborating has left me smug’! Success has been snatched from the jaws of his collaborators. What strikes me as interesting is that there are 54 other poetics of collaboration lurking in this volume, none spelt out coherently like Fowler’s, of course, but each interacting in various ways with his. I want to leave the poetics to one side and plunge into two sample offerings, one a collaboration across media, the other what I call a ‘literary collaboration’.
‘Beastings with Diamanda Dramm’ ends with a timeline of Fowler’s collaborations with the Dutch violinist and singer. In it, he repeats his ‘smug’ thoughts about collaboration quoted above, and accounts for their four meetings and works. Dramm seems to have set pre-existing poems by Fowler to music, although he says: ‘DD made them better by cutting them up into smaller, newer chunks and singing them’; she characterises this as ‘making a mini opera’. This work is (partly) about a killer chimp, and will be available on CD. What this book contains is three startling delay photographs of Dramm’s performance at the Bimhuis (Fowler is surprised how famous she is in the Netherlands) with Fowler’s visual poems projected against her, a barefoot figure in a long red dress streaked with black or blue forms, vertical tendrils. It also contains a couple of texts, though it is difficult to see where they fit in with the timeline. The second is a long processual piece, ‘A Clever Trick Memorising This You Played’, which begins: ‘your words sound better when my words are put through your words’. This suggests the piece was narrated or sung by Dramm from memory and that it describes its own verbal compositional processes. The lines metamorphose into ‘a word sounds wetter when your words are out of my words’. In the next line, ‘words’ has become ‘worms’. Eventually the text is in different territory altogether: ‘freeing tampon seems bloodier when you are tickling the red loom’. This reader is left wishing he’d been an audience member, a witness to the unfolding processual phrases, sung and set to violin playing.
In reading literary collaboration on the page, the reader often has recourse to a peculiar binary refocusing that feels like a lack of focus. That’s because the flow of the writing is continually interrupted by itself, by the switch between writers. (Imagine two drivers switching at the wheel of a truck, without stopping.) In some cases, where the dialogue is not visible, you stop trying to guess who wrote what. This, I believe, is a sign of success. It hasn’t achieved a third voice (a term which is based on identity of writers not on the identity of writing), but it could be said to leave a linguistic trail coherent enough to regard as a single discourse.
In ‘Sleeping Beauty’ with Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain (from the book House of Mouse) you can see this in action. A Disney film, not the original fairytale, is deconstructed (though deliberately misread might be a more accurate term) by the two writers, interpolating modern idioms as they go, with their ‘slept upon beauty’: …. see full review for text.
There are plenty of other pleasures in this book. SJ Fowler, never smug, despite his self-identification, has extended his own practice, to be sure, with these interactions, but it is difficult not to think that the collaborators also have extended their practices. As you read this book, you feel collaborative potentiality turning to imaginative growth. That’s a rare thing.
© Robert Sheppard 2020
