Swimmer (68): A perfomance text-in-progress

Why I Wanted to Make a Performance Inspired by The Swimmer

by Ker Wells

About twenty years ago, when I was twenty-five, I first saw the 1968 film The Swimmer, in which Burt Lancaster plays a man who emerges, without explanation, in a bathing suit from a forest on the edge of a residential swimming pool in a wealthy suburb. He dives into the pool, swims some vigorous laps, and as he lifts himself from the pool, he is greeted with a cold cocktail by the couple who apparently own the pool, and who are apparently his friends. Shortly thereafter he decides that he is going to swim to his own home by following the route through the swimming pools in the intervening, manicured landscape. I found the film strange and fascinating and disturbing. It hauntingly evoked a particular feeling of disorientation and dislocation that I associate with certain mysterious memories from my childhood in which I saw something on film or on television or in a photograph that I found disturbing (in part because of a lack of context). The lack of context might be in part the perpetual lack of context that is childhood, the time in which we are continually seeing things we don't understand—stolen, accidental glimpses into the adult world that will not be explained to us. But I now think it's debatable whether that child's response, rather than simply preceding an understanding of the world and particularly of images and representations of the world, isn't actually a truer response to the actual nature of images and representations—unvarnished, that is, with the illusion of understanding that we acquire as adults.

When I watched The Swimmer again a couple of years ago, it was no less interesting than I remembered. The evocation of the childhood disorientation was still present, but the film was also disturbing to me in a way that related entirely to adulthood. Lancaster was fifty-five when the film was made, but very fit and seemingly vital. As the film progresses and his swim home becomes more and more physically difficult, and as he confronts more and more troubling details from a past that he seems to have forgotten (or at least seems to be trying to forget), he appears to age, or to fall victim to the age he is. At forty-five I understood something about the Swimmer's character and his struggle that I hadn't at twenty-five.

These two phenomena were at the heart of my impulse to make a performance inspired by The Swimmer: 1) the desire to explore that feeling of naïve disorientation and dislocation in the face of media and images that remain unchanged even as they transform in our memories of them; and 2) the struggle to accept our own inevitable decay, especially the letting go of a particular ideal of male potency.

Why I Wanted to Help Make a Performance Inspired by The Swimmer

by Bruce Barton

In much of my work, I understand theatre as an attempt to understand what it means to be "live," and thus "alive," in a thoroughly intermedial world. In the last few years, this interest has crystallized for me in a deep curiosity about the possibility of, and possibilities in, intermedial intimacy. Intimacy has long been held as the central validation and central stereotype of theatre. A group of people, sharing a common space and a common time, in pursuit of an experience that is at once both intimate and communal—indeed, communal because intimate. And despite the theoretical deterioration of all these key terms—space, time, community—the intimate co-presence of spectator and performer endure as the justification for an art form that otherwise often seems to have passed its best-before date. Yet foremost among the factors insisting upon a more complex understanding of theatrical intimacy is the irresistible flow of mediation transforming our understanding of human perception, attention, comprehension, and memory. In the process, this flow of data is also utterly changing the concept of self.

Drawing primarily on...