This America: A Conversation With John Collins About Elevator Repair Service

by Sara Jane Bailes

In the summer of 1997, I moved from London to New York City. I had never been here before and knew no one. I had no concept of the city’s geography; I’d never even looked at a map, or contemplated how land and water came together in such splintered and devilish ways, how the bridges connected different boroughs, where rivers ended and the sea began. How did the buildings map out the city? What does it mean to live a daily life here, to buy a bagel or catch a bus? Where could I find stamps, or purchase milk that tasted the same as the milk I knew? So much shuffling; so many small, incalculable acts of transition in our quotidian lives when we transit borders. How do you get onto a subway platform, or learn to “swipe” with the right touch? Will I know when I am in danger? And will I, too, learn to walk and halt smoothly, clutching hand-held cup of coffee as I chase the blinking semaphore D-O-N-T W-A-L-K? When will New York feel like my home?

Kathy — a New Yorker relocated to London — told me that Manhattan was urban. Yet while I still lived beneath England’s tumultuous gray skies, and strolled its plump, green parks, this gritty word carried no resonance. City life meansdifferently in New York than, say, London or Rome, where I had also lived. The sweeping avenues that slice down Manhattan vibrate with a different intensity than those crooked old European streets. Even trees here seem tough, scorched by traffic and choked of air. I came to the city with an outline, a sketchy map of sorts detailing recent past, and predicting immediate future — acceptance into a Master’s program, a scholarship, my history as a performer and theater-maker in England, and enough dollars to open a bank account and obtain that critical social security number. At Newark airport my J-1 visa was cautiously checked, an I-94 stapled inside my passport, and I hobbled through customs with two heavy suitcases, out into the humid evening air and onto a bus headed for Penn Station. My friend, Lauren, ushered me into the city briefly before returning to Rome. And soon that infamous, filmic skyline loomed up against the dark — real for the first time and brilliantly lit, like a floating island of ancient cubic columns filled with tiny, electric stars; acolony of stars, this diorama of miniscule grandness and multitudinous hope. It was ferociously dense; I gasped. How does one breathe here? Manhattan. This is America, I remember thinking, this abrupt shard of an island, unfinished prologue to a vast country; where no one entirely arrives and where none, they say, get left behind. This America: a concept more than a country, the biggest of all brand names, a lifestyle to suit us all.

Arriving ached, beyond jetlag or fatigue. Like growing pains and grieving loss, all mixed together. It was gradual; a spatial, temporal and psychic process, unfolding through the transitional rupture and recommencement that acculturation demands of its travelers. Oh-so-slowly I came into this city, in bits and fragments and bursts, through the unrelenting 24-hour heat of late August, coincident with the ubiquitous media coverage of Princess Diana’s violent death-by-car-crash some days after I landed. England was all about me, dogging my heels and further confounding my senses of “being here,” this obsessive close-up on the grieving country I had left behind. But this was a Strange England, experienced through the lens of the America that lurked on the other side of Manhattan. I felt the presence of my body daily stepping up to meet with extremity (no home, no friends, no air) and unfamiliarity, my feet fighting their way across the grid, traversing As and Bs, up and down 5ths and 6ths, crossing the asphalt or ducking in and out of subway stations labeled with 1s, 2s and 9s, uptowns and downtowns, Ls, Ns and Rs. Here there were no street names, only scattered alphabets and numbers, or one-word labels — Spring and Broome, or Lexington — new articulations of whereabouts with an unfamiliar logic. I swung wildly in and out of delirium and devastation, giddy excitement and plain, simple fear. I cried at glass booths in subway stations as guards stated back at me blankly — “WHAD’YA MEAN, WHERE DOES THE UPTOWN 6 GO?” — unmoved by me ruddy, wet cheeks. “It’s so easy,” people purred, as I succumbed to mild breakdowns, my nervous system registering high alert, reactions unpredictable and fickle, me a sprawling child. “It” certainly wasn’t easy, but through reassurance we kept faith — interstitial fictions that tide us over in times of stress.

More than four years later, I am still questioning what we mean when we speak of having arrived somewhere. I wonder, even, if such a procedure can possess finitude, or if it needs to. As the West relentlessly “stretches the sides of the world” — to quote Shakepeare’sCymbeline as he invokes the brutal reach of the Roman Empire — redistributing power and peoples willy nilly, so we need to redress the terms that define movement, travel and diaspora, for they no longer signify as before. They, too, have warped. Perhaps I recognize that this arrival process never ends, that the wait continues, and that we lose and gain parts of ourselves over and over. Our identities are never fixed, despite our flimsy passports, precious visa stamps and social security digits. And perhaps it is as Edward Said suggests in his memoir, Out of Place, where the self, like the polyphonic convergences of music, may be experienced as “a cluster of flowing currents.” These currents are “off,” Said writes, or even “out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme” (2000,295). But at what point — and there undoubtedly comes one — do we comfortably utter the words “I amhere,” or, more accurately, “I is here”? For in such times, when we leave some homeland and journey across multiple boundaries, traversing oceans, national borders and continents in the course of an afternoon, is it not as if the “I” we once were, that “self” we so carefully procured and who arranges meaning in life, and through whom we think to know ourselves, is it not that very “I” who now seems unable to arrive? Delayed; misplaced; unexpectedly absent? While instead, the present chaos and unfamiliar experience of who we now are feels without meaning? In such times, we become, in Julia Kristeva’s words, “strangers to ourselves,” experiencing the uncanny sensation that, contrary to our steadfast beliefs, the figure of the foreigner is not outside but rather “within us.” In Italian, Spanish or French, we can say “I am arrived” — a tighter collapse of person and place into the linguistic, spatial and temporal geographies of one world, any world. In English, meanwhile, we maintain separateness, a linguistic and cultural boundary that indexes an impossible, experiential distance, a gap we can never close: we can have the arrival, but we will never become it.

What enables us to feel that “I” is “here”? That she, the one we think we are, has returned? I wonder: what habits, events, and experiences that partially determine our lives also brings us back once more to ourselves, or make us feel comfortably in our skin? Isn’t it a myriad of elusive moments, grounded in phenomenological experience, both trivial and grand? From the location of a cafe that makes a latte as we remember it, to the street corner that throws up light, bricks, and angles just so? Instants that deliver that present world through the filter of an already known place; this cumulative process is what produces the sensation of “home.” We live the present, it seems, through the half-remembered fragments of our past. We carry blueprints, and through them we watch, listen and taste; we make our way.

In October 1997, I first saw the work of Manhattan’s downtown performance collective, Elevator Repair Service (ERS), and this event was significant to my arrival in New York City. Seeing Cab Legs performed downstairs at the well-loved East Village venue, PS122, I experienced a “homecoming” of sorts, like an invasion of Freud’s uncanny where the unfamiliar felt unmistakably familiar. That evening “I” caught up with myself. It was to do with witnessing something that I knew how to read. I sensed, in this 90-minute performance, an architecture that corresponded to the world-making practices I already knew. And this, in some fundamental yet utterly child-like way, is what performance gives back to us: the chance to make up places and lives, and to repeat, always differently, the way we remember and sort of forget things we have done, and imagine those we wish we had done but know we never will. As I sat amongst the tightly packed audience that night, I remember the thrill of not knowing when the show had begun, because nothing announced it. Cab Legs establishes resistance to many theatrical conventions, such as the delineation of the performance space itself; the temporal “start” of the show, which instead we individually stagger into; the “characters” before us on stage, who seemed more like the performers being themselves, but then again, not entirely. People wandered in and out of doors that led onto the performance space, exchanging looks between audience and each other — one in a cream, knee-length lace dress, set loose from a period drama; another more contemporary in white tank and chinos, a sweatier world altogether. You couldn’t quite tell when you needed to start paying attention and watch as if you were watching a show. You wondered, “What are the rules I need to understand, in order to watch this world and be part of it?” The performers conferred and played, deferring the beginning of their own performances. But they were, or course, all the time performing. They muttered too quietly to be heard (and we strained to hear), kept “us” guessing, caught us with a look, briefly, in the eye. They erased, but then carefully redrew, that tangible divide between spectator and performer, and in this way — a gradual process without fixed co-ordinates — they made something happen. Things shifted. The ambivalent world of the piece flirted with us, the spectators, who giggled and spluttered as the people before us coughed and whispered, and then suddenly, pleasingly, broke into a perfectly executed ensemble dance, a stomping, gestural sequence. Instantly they disperse the anxiety established through the failure of so many small stabs at communication.

But never did Cab Legs give itself over entirely to the audience, though we followed its journey and willingly engaged in attempts to interpret whatever languages it shared with us. The stage was decidedly underprepared, like a rehearsal room — and they were on edge, these eight performers, working to draw us in, yet maintaining us just at the limits of understanding. Their performances, singular and collective, bristled with the layered neuroses of performers pretending they don’t know what they are doing, but doing it ever so well. Such performances work is complex — it travels in multiple directions, refusing to tell us how to read it, how we might decode what’s thrown before us. It’s what I might call honest performance work; work that reminds me of the way we go about inhabiting everyday spaces. It’s not fake. But then neither is it real. It performs complexity and contradiction, the beautiful and pathetic attempts to be meaningful that define our individual and collective existence. All that intangible interiority is played out and mixed up with the demands of the material world. I see it captured, for example, in the awkward and excessive movement of a small, dark woman on the stage in an inappropriately large, furry hat, fidgeting on a squeaky wooden chair. She is talking herself into — or out of — a self-contained conversation that threatens any second to break its own rules. This confusion, hers and ours, feels pregnant; we understand it without knowing what it means. We watch her, closely, as she watches herself, wriggling in the discomfort of a private language becoming public.

ERS performances topple certain theatrical hierarchies. It is hard, for example, to determine the predominance of any one constituent — narrative, aural, physical, or visual — in their pieces. They foreground a working process which dismantles narrative and aesthetic strategies and which I found familiar, comforting even, a recognition tinged with strangeness. Such “knowing” is not predicated on sameness or difference. Instead, it acknowledges the absence of concrete, fixed narrative structures, positionality or reference points, proposing alternately that in the restructuring of order we will find our own meanings across the negotiation and collision of elements. We will meet the performance half-way. This kind of theater reminds us of our agency and responsibility in all political, artistic acts. It illuminates how we make the world up, instead of trying to convince us “it is only ever this” by limiting us all within the circumscribed light of its own reflection. The work is prism-like; matrixial rather than linear. Augusto Boal writes that “Theater is change and not simple presentation of what exists: it is becoming and not being” (1979, 28). And this reminds us of Said’s allusion to the self as a cluster of flowing currents rather than a stable set of objects and relations. Why, then, would theater ever strive to be other than this? Why do we try to flatten things down? “Becoming” characterizes our existence better than most other terms. It’s where I’ve been, day and night, for these months and years, a condition heightened by my move to New York. And it names the promise of an ERS performance, for their work reveals itself through this constantly revised state of becoming. It understands change — honors it, even.

Cab Legs reminded me of one of the more valuable imperatives of performance at its best: its capacity to resituate us, not as it mirrors or reflects back who we are, but in its ability to show us things differently. Then it can summon recognition from the blind-spot or the not-yet-realized of our imagination. Then it proposes imaginary, heterotopic spaces, where the cultural behaviors of now and then, here and there, coexist. I relished rediscovering this desire to play with narratives and identities haphazardly, and ERS’s commitment to the arbitrary ways performance can allow meaning to occur through incongruous and chanced-upon, barely repeatable moments and structures.

Frequently, sense arises out of accidental confluence, not only in the bustle of daily city life, but in the culturally defined spaces where we allow our artists to perform their labor. It was all this that gave me the happy illusion that I had truly “arrived.” For here was a reflected version of America that was unruly, messy, and questioning; it was poetic, terribly funny and willing to stake its life on the fact that none of us will ever entirely understand one another. ERS wildly court a love of imperfection, and the unresolvable tensions produced through misunderstanding and difference. Tirelessly, and with care, they engage open-endedly with what it means to be strangers, all of us and always, to each other but, primarily, to ourselves.

The following conversation took place with John Collins, artistic director of ERS. It started in an apartment on East 7th, and evolved on the way to a cafe. It began in 1999, and continues still.