On Sheep Pig Goat
What was my role in
Sheep Pig Goat?
In its first iteration, in London in March 2017, my official title was “research advisor”.
I was an invited respondent to one of the Encounters and a guest speaker for the Contextual Conversation, “On Rights and Relationships”.
As a research advisor, I also appear in the short film of the project. But you do not see the footage recorded where I face the camera and introduce myself. Instead, you see me waiting, not yet “on”, not yet showing my ‘self’, licking my lips, nervously. So, it is not that I am not yet “on”, not that I am simply “myself”, but rather than I am just differently “on” – definitely aware of the gaze of others and responding accordingly, albeit not in the mode of conscious presentation. I am not comfortable being in front of a camera and it shows. At least it shows to you, human viewers.
Sheep Pig Goat by Fevered Sleep, Surrey 2020. Photo by Malachy Luckie
I had a different role in the second iteration of the project, in Surrey in February 2020.
This time I commissioned Fevered Sleep to bring Sheep Pig Goat to my university as part of a research project.
The aim was never to re-create the first version, but to develop the project in response to the radically different context offered by the University’s Vet School.
Another goal was to model a different kind of relationship between artists and academics: beyond ‘research advice’, towards a more collaborative and equalizing practice of ‘thinking alongside’ one another.
As part of this experiment, I asked Fevered Sleep to help me play the part of a “performance philosopher” on the project.
Neither I, nor Fevered Sleep, knew what exactly what I was going to do. And in fact, this element of not-knowing is an important part of being a performance philosopher. Just like it is an important part of how Fevered Sleep work as a company.
Sheep Pig Goat by Fevered Sleep, Surrey 2020. Photo by Malachy Luckie
What is a performance philosopher?
The performance philosopher I have in mind is not someone who philosophises about performance or who makes performances about philosophy.
The performance philosopher is someone who attends to the philosophy that comes from performance or, to how performance itself does philosophy – including by transforming our very ideas of what philosophy is, who does it and how.
The performance philosopher attends to performance as a philosophical practice – both in the sense of attending to the philosophy performed by others and to her own philosophy, in the event of its unfolding as performance.
The performance philosopher as a new “tool” for Fevered Sleep
“I wonder if you might be willing to consider me as part of your “toolbox” for Sheep Pig Goat.
I wonder if you can consider me as one more improvising performer to whom you might offer directives.
I bring with me a different set of embodied skills, techniques, contextual knowledge and habits to the dancers and vocal performers you work with: various forms of academic and creative writing and speaking, concept, question and argument creation, alongside some residual skills in drawing, photography and other forms of image and object making that I am in the process of recovering from my history of practice as a visual artist.
I would like to invite you to experiment with what these skills and embodied techniques might do in the context of this new iteration of Sheep Pig Goat.
This experiment can take any form that you like: from asking me a question, to inviting me to try different (writing, thinking, drawing, attending) tasks during the Encounters; to setting me a concrete task to produce a particular form of response to a particular moment. Tasks might take me 5 minutes or 5 hours. They might produce 1 word or 500.”
Sheep Pig Goat by Fevered Sleep, Surrey 2020.
Photo by Malachy Luckie
Directives for a performance philosopher from Fevered Sleep
Write a word for the atmosphere in the space every time it changes.
Describe or draw the weather in the space (NB. to describe includes to draw).
The space feels very, very full. What is it full of other than ‘stuff’? Make a list of all the things that are in the space that are not physical or objects.
Describe all the ways in which each of the animals is looking.
Describe what’s happening from the point of view of any of the performers’ skin.
1. through eyelashes that point down;
2. hesitantly and enquiringly, with curiosity, with her eyelids more widely open;
3. softly, calmly, lightly, casually, with eyelids hanging loosely, without exerting too much effort, seemingly pre-occupied - with her mind on other things;
4. blinking, squinting slightly sometimes in the bright sun, sometimes tilting her face towards the sun;
5. with her head lowered, fearfully
10.02AM Meditative, loaded, sacred, charged
10.15AM Attuned, settled
10.43AM Internally different - for her the atmosphere is still threatening
10.47AM Ordinary sacredness
10.58AM Peacefully busy
11.04AM Radiant and banal
11.06AM Expansive
11.09AM Fragile idyll
11.10AM Deceptive
Sheep Pig Goat by Fevered Sleep, Surrey 2020. Photo by Dr. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
This space is full of... the human ability to compartmentalise citations to other architectures of control systems of knowledge (Reuff’s method...) analogy (udders like human fingers)
ghosts (she says the cows have been given a “stay of execution”)
normalization (a bridle is normal)
the reduction of the complex to the simple
the assumed service of the animal to human need instructions to see a cow as a machine
as an object
as made up of parts
as a type
Sheep Pig Goat by Fevered Sleep, Surrey 2020. Photo by Malachy Luckie
Bright warm light on her hairy back - highlighting the bones inside; rippling black and white landscape as she breathes; protruding mounds of bone and curving cavities pulsing with the breath; a golden flood of sunlight that draws attention to every texture: where wet nostril meets black sheen hide. It’s nice to feel the heat of the sun on our faces in this cold air.
Sheep Pig Goat by Fevered Sleep, Surrey 2020. Photo by Dr. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
How to think
Here, directives for performance philosophy offered help to pay attention. I needed help to attend. I needed help to behave differently so that these sheep and cows might appear strange to me.
Artist-philosopher, Eva Meijer says:
“The question of the animal is always intertwined with the question of what it means to think, and the animal is used to demarcate the human subject”.
I would like to add:
“The question of the arts is also always intertwined with the question of what it means to think”
- amounting to an entanglement of art, thought and animals, both human and nonhuman.
The larger research project, of which this version Sheep Pig Goat was a part, seeks to attend to these events of demarcation - of human and nonhuman, of different kinds of knowledge - but also to the question of how to think.
But it is less concerned with what it means to think (as a meaning we can define and articulate) and more concerned with how thinking is performed (practiced, embodied, felt, lived, improvised, fumbled toward) in interspecies and interdisciplinary encounters.