There occurred an important shift in my research when I moved my thinking about the practice, from what I could learn as an individual through the act of dowsing, towards what happens when it is presented in a shared space, as performance. On the simplest of levels, I remember very clearly a sensation I encountered when I presented dowsing to my classmates as a performative act for the first time. The context was a small showing in the final session of our Plant Thinking course. In a studio on the 6th floor my classmates exited the space and I staged, rather theatrically, their re-entrance into the room as ‘audience’ to my performative moment. In secondary school the ‘black box experiment’ teaches scientific methodology to deduce what might be the contents of a sealed black box. The movement of my work into artistic contexts, including the black box theatre, was a way of more comprehensive understanding my own method of dowsing.
In the room, I was standing in anticipation, rods held at shoulder height. I began to walk and waited as usual for the feeling of confidence in the practice, for the rods to cross almost without my noticing. But on this occasion, the waiting continued and I began to stress. The awareness of spectators had entered by full body, and seemingly restricted my capacity for the dowsing response. Somehow, through patience, and perhaps through feigning, I managed to fulfil the score that I had in my head. However this unlocked an important question, about what happens when a system such as dowsing is performed in front of an audience.
How might the complexity of the dowsing knowledge being either transmitted to an audience, or otherwise analysed from an ‘outside’.
From this position, It seems relevant to acknowledge, the expectations, I understood in relation to the performed elements of this research project. Some
of these expectations come from wider context of discourse within performance, others from the context of the Theatre Academy, and of course many of my own personal desires.
Just as Barad67 explains that the instrument of measurement in quantum physical terms produces the nature of the result, the work we create as artists is being produced by many the economic and social conditions surrounding the practice. In Bojana Cvecij’s paper on imagining and feigning , she describes a68 shift in the political expectations placed upon performance. Through the rigidity of institutional funding bodies, she explains that performance has to pitch its validity in facile terms. Audiences of performance, she says, ‘must arrive to the work, knowing what they will see upon their arrival’69. For Cvejic, within her primary context of contemporary choreography and performance, she sees the bleed of language formalised for these funding application forms, into the space of programme notes. The standardisation of what then is expected in a successful application, becomes a standardisation in how we then we might pitch a performance work to a respective audience. As such Cveich argues, that performance becomes instrumentalized, explicit in its political worth, evidencing what it might seek to do, before you attend. In this sense setting up a value system whereby an audience member may assess the quality of a work in its success of failure in producing the results which it promised in advance. It is now widely accepted that the value of a production or project ought to be measurable in a way which is demonstrative to these funding bodies and institutions. If we consider Barad’s provocation then, that the measurement apparatus is constitutive, we might ask how these systems affect the art which is co-produced by these factors.
67 Karen Barad. 2012 ‘What Is the Measure of Nothingness: Infinity, Virtuality, Justice’ Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2012.
68Cvejic, Bojana. “Imagining and Feigning.” Lecture,How To Do Things With Performance, Helsinki, November 8, 2017.
69Ibid.
Furthermore in the context of this MA programme in Ecology and Contemporary Performance, and its implicit or explicit relation to climate change, I find myself negotiating, what my works position might be within a sphere that is in many ways demanding more than minimalist gestures towards our collective circumstance.
In Lavery’s introduction to Green letters journal titled, what can theatre do? He 70 suggests that it is in fact theatres ability to evade the cause and result nature of funding bodies, which might contain its most generative capacities. He takes the theory of ‘weak action’ into the realm of performance, suggesting:
If theatre’s ecocritical potential is located in how the immanence of the
notions of mastery and intentionality, to remain hypothetical and suspensive.
I feel that this type of weakness featured in the first public performative action of this research, which occurred almost directly after the media flurry around dowsing. In my uncertainty of how to share the practice performatively, I decided to offer the practice as a peripheral happening, simply existing on the outskirts of the house which featured my classmates artworks.
70Lavery, Carl. 2016. “Introduction: Performance and Ecology – What Can Theatre Do?”. Green Letters 20 (3), 229-36. 232
A Slight Bend of the Forearm 2017. Photo by Antti Ahonen
There were certainly some intentional and unintentional semiotic signifiers involved in this iteration of the work. The clash in aesthetics of workers tools with my own dowsing tools of bone and crystal sought to engage with an uncanniness.
The Lemminkainen costume, contained within its own history, a mixture of these ideas, with a reference to the Kalevala in its trade name. I suppose this illustrates how our societies might integrate elements of folk knowledges and histories into its commercial identity, while leaving behind many of the beliefs which in fact constitute them.
Aside from these signifiers, the performance itself had little clear intention, other than to investigate the feelings, and my own capacity for dowsing in the context of an artistic event. I found that having spent more time with the practice since my first performative example, I was able to enter the familiar mode of focused
unfocus, and that isolating the dowsing response was not a struggle as I might have worried. After gradually establishing a map across the snow covered ground, marked with bones and crystals, the objects were simply removed.
Underwhelming in many senses, this lack of action in response to the act of dowsing contains, perhaps a form of weakness, akin to that Lavery refers to.
Just as the dowsing task was not present in order to carry out some form of productive labour, the performance too existed without an explicit intention.
Rather what I feel I offered in this performance was a mode of experience similar to the dowsing method. While spectators, who took the form of those entering and leaving the house, as well as dog walkers and runners in the local park, might not have processed the performance in a conscious way. It’s presence might somehow have stimulated thought through its strangeness. It might have caused people to hazard a guess as to what exactly was happening in this space. In this sense, Bojana Cvejic suggests that in regards to the demands on theatres instrumentalization, we might propose that ‘theatre changes its quest, from the impossible real, to the possible imagined.’ 71
For Cvejic, the weakness introduced in Lavery’s text might be embraced through a dedication to the imagined. She describes her own performative engagements with imagination, in how she seeks to integrate audiences into something of a shared imaginary. Her task, in order to stimulate the imaginative capacities of the audience is to establish a theatre which is bodiless, ‘ sending some parts of its body on vacation’ . She seeks to compose a sensorial imagination in her72 audience, and stimulate an abstention of oneself. For Cveic, to imagine is a process of absenting oneself.
71Cvejic, Bojana. 2017
72Ibid.
It is here that I might begin to establish a triangulation between this theory of imagination, and the ideas previously explored surrounding neurodiversity. Just as we read from Manning, and indeed echoed in the work of Nan Shepherd, in their relation to their environments, they too engaged in a process of absenting themselves from the image, removing oneself as focus point.
I suggest then that in Cvejic’s call for engagement with the sensorial imagination, she proposes a stage which bares resemblance to the perceptual processes of neurodiverse subjects. In this proposal she claims that audiences might take a form of “leap towards new life” , perhaps with an exploratory capacity similar73 to that established in Taylors ‘complementary cognition’.
In some sense, this is what I hope I explored in my black box edition of A Slight Bend of the Forearm . The minimalism of the stage provided a suggestion that the performance took place in the spaces around just the theatre space. I hoped that through the gradual reveal of my dramaturgy, audiences might be filling in for themselves what the method responded to. A After the second night of performance, I approached two friends in a discussion about the work. One is an architect, who’s daily practice involves explicit engagement with the infrastructures wired and plumbed through our domestic and public settings. He asks me, at the end of the performance, wasn’t it revealed that the marked spots on the ground directly corresponded with specific points on the ceiling? He walked me throughout the space to demonstrate that above each small pile of materials, was some feature such as a projector, wifi router or power outlet.
73 Ibid.
A Slight Bend of the Forearm 2018. Photo by Sanni Siira
Perhaps others were imagining what pipes lay under the ground, creating another narrative altogether. Some audience members asked whether there was a level of fakery, that perhaps I knew where I was going to lay the objects. In this sense performance occupied a specific reality. As I had occupied the theatre space for some four weeks prior to the performance, it is true that I had dowsed the area so many times, that discernable patterns had been established in where each of the objects lay. There is no way for me to unpack how much of each evening’s performance was responsive only to the space in its present state at that exact moment, and how much in fact it was in response to the memory of having found some sort of response to a space the evening or even week before. This level of uncertainty then was shared, somewhat between both myself and the audience.
In some way, this provided what I had hoped for, a shared commitment to an idea. An abductive trust in the relation between my body, the rods and and the non-visible agencies in the space. But with enough visual space to explore the possibilities, and unsettle our collective relationship to the walls around us. While I cannot speak for the audiences of the work, as the performer, I left the performance with the same trust that I had found my dowsing method. That something had happened, and while unquantifiable, existed in a very real sense.
Conclusion
Contrary to the examples above, where dowsing has been critiqued for its seeming obstacle to the profits and productivity. An example from 2009 appears to show the co-option of dowsing’s capacity by exactly a profit driven organisation.
In a New York Times article , nestled beneath a flashing logo banner, advertising 74 the paper’s integrity: ‘The Truth is Worth it’ , an article describes the dubious nature of a device being used by Baghdad bomb detection squads. Sold by UK firm ATSC, the devices were fabricated to mimic the dowsing response, and sold to Iraqi checkpoint security for sums up to 60,000 dollars per hand set. The article describes the feeling of knowing by Iraqi border guards, reminiscent of my own dowsing experience, the ability to build up a relationship between your instrument and body: “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,”75 said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.
In 2013 the CEO of ATSC was prosecuted for fraud, and sentenced to ten years of prison time for the sale of 70,000 devices across many war torn countries in the Middle East and Africa. The judge commented that the fraud had "promoted a false sense of security and contributed to death and injury.” He also described the profit as "outrageous". 76
I reference this example as a cautionary example, of what might otherwise might be read as a defence of the capacity of dowsing to instil confidence in one’s own
74Nordland, Rod. 2009. “Iraq Swears By Bomb Detector U.S. Sees As Useless”. The New York Times.
November 4, 2009.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
body. That while I feel it is important that we explore this realm of somatic knowledge, it too is a knowledge which might be co-opted and exploited. In this case the scale of exploitation reflects the racialised and global nature of weapons trade and its profits. I am reminded that different forms of knowledge, despite their histories and lineages, may only be understood with reference to the power dynamics at play in our society.
The method of dowsing, which has led my process throughout the last two years, has created a landscape through which I have unpacked ways of knowing. The thoughts have taken place on multiple scales and planes, from my own internal neural system to societal conceptions of the nature of fact. What I have tried to unpack throughout this thesis, is a sense that these planes are linked on social and material levels, and that somewhere in these connections I have found suggestions for being with knowledge and perception in fluid, flexible and dynamic ways.
There is in each section of this writing, scope for much deeper analysis of these ideas. In some capacity, these developments have already continued in my thinking and practice beyond this thesis, and will to do so long after the completion of these studies. In particular I feel invested in further exploration into the relationship between the neurodiverse subjecthood, and our ecological crisis. In how we might already have within our physiological structures, the capacity for fundamentally different aesthetic relationships to our environment, which might contribute to the urgency of our climatic regime.
The act of dowsing then, has not only been a training in the search for water, but a training in trust, trust of a process and of my own body. In its ability to navigate both my body through space and the development of new thoughts, dowsing has fundamentally altered the way in which I know.
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