Table Of ContentEntanglements of Two:
A Series of Duets
EDITED BY
KAREN CHRISTOPHER AND MARY PATERSON
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Contents
Opening Gambit
KAREN CHRISTOPHER 6
Foreword
SEASON BUTLER 8
Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects
Duet Collaborations, 2010-21 11
Introductory Fragment 1: The Two of You
KAREN CHRISTOPHER 12
Between Two Somethings
J. R. CARPENTER 14
Duet Walk
KAREN CHRISTOPHER & MARY PATERSON 26
Resonance of Two
KAREN CHRISTOPHER 35
Six Practices of Learning Together in Havruta
ORIT KENT 46
Introductory Fragment 2: Heart and Lungs
KAREN CHRISTOPHER 58
Consider This (Control Signal)
MARY PATERSON 60
Images from Haranczak/Navarre’s duet series 64
Staying With the Tremble
EIRINI KARTSAKI 74
What Never Stops?
JOE KELLEHER 84
Invisible Partners Remain Themselves Inside
LITÓ WALKEY 90
The Promise of More to Come (So Below)
MARY PATERSON 100
On Creating a Climate of Attention:
The Composition of Our Work
KAREN CHRISTOPHER & SOPHIE GRODIN 104
Not so much balanced as balancing (miles & miles)
MARY PATERSON 116
The Collaborative Artistic Working Process of Control Signal:
A Drama-Linguistic Exploration of the Shifting of Roles
ANDREA MILDE 120
Introductory Fragment 3: Tangled
KAREN CHRISTOPHER 140
Imagining Seven Falls
MARY PATERSON 142
Introductory Fragment 4: A Lot of Rope
KAREN CHRISTOPHER 152
Always on Uneven Ground
RAJNI SHAH 154
TwoFold: Questions
MARY PATERSON 162
Always Already: Material in Progress
JEMIMA YONG 168
A Physics Duet
DAVID BERMAN 177
Conclusion: I Have Been Thinking of You This Whole Time
MARY PATERSON 182
Diffractions: Record of a Passage
DAVID WILLIAMS 188
Contributors’ Biographies 202
Acknowledgements 206
Opening Gambit
KAREN CHRISTOPHER
This book is about duets. Not duos, as we discuss in these pages, but an other form
that is produced when two people work together. This careful distinction in language
is important because a duet is a third element that emerges from its constituent
parts. A duet is a creation, both more real and less real than the elements that made
it possible.
This book is anchored in the work of my performance company, Haranczak/Navarre
Performance Projects; specifically, it is anchored in over a decade of my practice
working in duets with other artists including Gerard Bell, Teresa Brayshaw, Tara
Fatehi Irani, Sophie Grodin and Rajni Shah. Like those duets, this book began as an
invitation from me – or a series of invitations – each designed to expand beyond a
single point of view. One of those invitations was to Mary Paterson, to co-edit the
publication. Other invitations were sent to other performers, other artists, other
writers and other people working in disciplines that are less often connected with
performance: linguistics, pedagogy, physics.
The aim of the publication is to reflect on these third elements – that which happens
when a duet is formed – and, as part of that process, to generate new ones.
Because sequencing is everything and every sequence tells a story (the story of the
sequence), we have arranged the contents with an introduction that is more like a
thread stitching through the book than a pile of words at the beginning. The usual
transition from not reading to reading a book is all upfront; in this book, we have
distributed it throughout and reflected back on the texts in the conclusion.
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As co-editors, we are thinking about transitions and how they operate and how
we make it from one moment to the next, drawing each receding moment into
the oncoming one – healing the gaps with a moment of lingering, holding on for
adjustment, bracing for change. With our distributed introductory fragments, we
are acknowledging the many transitions encountered between the different pieces
of writing that appear here. A reader (you) can certainly drop in at any moment, or
follow a single thread, or follow a number of threads simultaneously. Apparently, a
sentence in English can only say one thing at a time. We will see about that.
Since 2010, Mary has responded to the work of Haranczak/Navarre Performance
Projects by composing creative responses, in written form, to the experience of
attending our live events. They stand as works of art in their own right. These
pieces now form Mary’s contribution to the introduction. My introductory
fragments attempt to convey a set of preoccupations that led to the conception of
this book project.
In this way, we have tried to assemble the essays that make up this book into
a continuous whole, while leaving them intact as individual entities. We are
attempting to weave them together into a fabric of differentiated strands.
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Foreword
SEASON BUTLER
Part One: The Urchin and the Octopus
When I was 11 years old, I lived with my parents and sisters in an apartment a few
blocks from the National Zoo in Washington, DC.1 There was a constant exchange
between the smog of broad streets congested with big cars that, in the early
nineties, had not yet fallen entirely out of favour and the impossible green of Rock
Creek Park. This exchange was nearly imperceptible but much easier to notice
during the slowdown of The Hundreds. The Hundreds refers to 100 days of 100° heat
and 100% humidity that sets in the summer.2 Under these conditions, you have to
go slow – so slow that you can almost see the exhaust exhale and the trees inhale; so
still that the city is perfect. Under these conditions, I would walk to the zoo, a place
with air-conditioned buildings but without store detectives and fresh air without
audacious, catcalling would-be paedos.3
And if I was quick, I could meet Arthur4 there for lunch.
Static hugged the afternoon: the overcast white sky, the buzz of big brown beetles,
the songs of cockroach wings and the odd abortive cicada. Mosquitos bit welts into
my straight brown legs on summer days and I scratched the welts to big round scars
and I was almost a juvenile giraffe, all limbs and knobbly joints, legging my way
through the city.
I entered the Invertebrate House as black spots started to appear on the hot pavement
with the onset of the afternoon rainstorm. Inside was close and clammy but a few
precious degrees cooler. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the dim, but I knew
my way by rote. I admired the cuttlefish first and proceeded to the ‘touch pool’ where
1. This is not true. When I was 11 years old, it took me a bus and a Metro ride, with a short walk on each side
of the journey, to reach the zoo.
2. My use of the term implies that it is a regional institution, a common local saying. It is not. And the
mention of the specific temperature and humidity is hyperbole but not too far from the truth. I am basically
trying to make fetch happen here.
3. The would-be paedos at the zoo did not catcall, so I did not know they were there.
4. Not his real name.
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I teased anemones that tried to grab my fingers and let urchins’ spines explore my
palms until the time came to feed Arthur.
Arthur, the giant octopus. He had eight legs and three hearts – facts I admired but
did not envy. I took my place for the feeding demonstration, watching him and
pretending he was watching me. That day, his craggy skin was deep brown. I turned
my arm and squeezed the skin of my elbow to compare.
Normally, the zookeeper would stake a shrimp through a long metal stick and walk
it along the floor of the tank, letting Arthur hunt it as if in the wild.5 I made small
talk with the keeper, who recognized me from my frequent visits. She eyed me up
with scrutiny, raised her eyebrows in a come on, cheer-up, it can’t be that bad expression.
I smiled back weakly, whereupon she asked whether, as I knew the drill, I would like
to feed Arthur that day. My single heart leaped and my face formed the sincere smile
people prefer from girls.
I climbed a step ladder to the top of the tank while the zookeeper narrated for the
assembled tourists and day trippers. I staked the shrimp on the sharp end of the stick
and plunged my arm in.
Arthur watched and strategized.
But when he finally did strike, it was to shoot a tentacle from under his coiled body,
not to grab the dead grey shrimp, but the more substantial meat of my right arm. It
spiralled up from my wrist to my shoulder with the speed and strength of absolute
intent. There was a short splash as he pulled, and my chest hit the surface of the water.
Arthur’s grip was both elastic and unyielding, strange smooches from the animal I
most admired, the outset of the contact so quick and wet, I was breathless and never
wanted it to end. At some point, we made eye contact, and somehow, I knew that the
event – what I would later decide was my life’s very first event – would last as long as
our eye contact. Indeed, my rescue came far too soon; the zookeeper rushed to my
side, climbing the ladder next to me, then reaching into the water to soothe Arthur by
rubbing his big, wrinkly mantle. After a long moment, he relaxed his grip; his colour
changing from brown to the deep red of an anatomical heart. I withdrew my dotted
arm and hoped the blush red suction-cup circles would leave scars.
5. The rest of this story is appropriated from the zookeeper’s anecdote. Since I heard it, I tried it on as a lie so
many times that it has become a memory. The story from here on is the lie I eventually gave up telling since no
one ever believed it. But the memory of the lie is the best duet I have ever had.
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