Their Hands Full of Ghosts: Goat Island at the Last

Remembering Goat Island

The opening dance of Goat Island’s last performance work The Lastmaker (2008), which I saw for the first time as a work-in-progress excerpt at the Chelsea Theatre in London in 2006, is the strangest thing.¹ The dance, involving five performers, three men and two women in uniform shirts and trousers, going through a repetitive sequence of intensely focused gestures, leaps, and falls, continues for long enough—around twenty minutes, I reckon—for me to lose myself in it; except that getting lost is not—I think—quite what happens. My attention is drawn to the detail; my focus is drawn to a particular movement of a performer’s body, repeated on another body, the movement of an arm, the movement of the fingers against the palm of the other hand. I watch these movements expand. I watch these gestures inscribe themselves like a form of writing upon the space and time of the stage. And, as I follow this writing, it feels as if I could find myself not out here, in the auditorium, enjoying the spectacle, or not only out here, but also somehow in there and moving through it, turning around to get a better view. Less like looking at a picture and more like moving through a building, noticing the way that the angle of light through the various windows or the direction of the sound changes as I make my progress, all of the time trying to follow closely, trying to watch that peculiar thing they are doing with their hands, trying not to lose my way.

The first time I saw Goat Island’s work was eleven or twelve years ago, in a dance studio in Greenwich, southeast London, where they were performing their fifth show, How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies (1996). After so many years it is hard to remember the piece in detail. I recall there was some business about a flying woman, the famous pilot Amelia Earhart, as well as a sequence concerning an earthbound man, Mike Walker, “the fattest man in America.” The fat man’s body—like that of the real life pilot, I suppose—could only be supported, a few inches above the stage, by a specially constructed apparatus. His voice—I believe it was Karen Christopher doing the voices for both figures—was produced with great difficulty, a heavy, flesh-bound utterance, struggling to take to the air. Really, though, I barely remember this much. I’m already inventing upon what was given. What I remember isn’t dramaturgical details so much as an occasion, the quality

Mark Jeffery, Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish and Bryan Saner in Goat Island’s The Lastmaker.

Mark Jeffery and Litó Walkey. Photos: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy: Goat Island.

of an event, a way of doing on stage (for them) and a way of paying attention (for me) that is near impossible, I find, to get at except by remarking that the first thing I remember—it was the opening sequence of that 1996 show—is that they were doing something strange with their hands.

There were four or five performers lined up and taking instruction, repeating some gesture with their hands or arms that went on for a considerable length of time. Did this happen? Did this night ever happen? Did I see what I remember? I don’t know for sure. Even so, as I have been conjuring this image from a decade ago, in preparation for writing this essay, it seems that something more is going on than the recall and repetition of a rehearsed gesture. I also recall seeing thinking going on. After all, if the task on stage is to recall a gesture and perform it effectively, why, except for the sake of a repetitive composition (to which we shall return), perform it more than once? Composition was certainly at stake, but composition in the form of a contingent process, a process of invention that...