On In Floods

photo by Bruno Simão

Across and between the contexts of theatre, dance, and live art, dramaturgy is primarily about conversation. Greg Wohead and I began talking about In Floods in 2018, in what feels like another time, another world, another reality. Really, we began several conversations at once, and I would like to share some fragments of them with you now. They feel like conversations that began long before I knew Greg, and will continue long after this show is finished, and my work as dramaturg is done.

In Floods exists on several planes at once. On one level, it is a narrative about two funerals, the first being the funeral of Greg’s grandfather, the second of his grandmother, which occurred in the midWest of the United States, where Greg grew up, just 4 weeks apart from each other. The closeness and repetition of these events swerves us from fact towards fiction and back again, a distinction which, when we really zoom into the material of memory, swiftly begins to blur. The more we have drawn on fact, the more fictitious it has become. And conversely, the more we have constructed and manipulated fictional material - with elements of magic and impossibility woven tightly into it - the more reality - a kind of deep, shared reality, exceeding any individual experience or memory - has appeared before us. 

On another level, it is an experiment with theatrical form itself. Importing a TV script into a theatre show and then wriggling outwards from there - escaping back out into theatre, into performance, into the unknown, and beyond.

The personal is not only political, it’s also very weird

Something that has struck me about working with Greg on this show is how often I have found myself drawing not on critical discourse, theories, or performance-specific knowledge, but on actual life experience. As someone who usually reaches for movement, form, and rhythm as material, rarely have I referred so much to my own narrative - the memories and experiences which have built the fabric of my ‘self’ - to tease out the nuances and resonances of someone else’s material. Through traversing the strange intimacies and frictions between experiences of family, of desire, of choosing certain paths or having them chosen for you, again and again I have observed a sense of almost formal repetition between my own memories and Greg’s, in spite of our very different backgrounds. This is where The Weird has entered. It has felt like weirdness lives in the simultaneous impossibility of universal human experience and the inevitability of repetition. It is not that we all experience family in the same way. But Family - with a capital F - as a common set of inheritances - experiences us. That is to say, it renders us weirdly similar to each other.

For example, the nuance of how parents speak to others about their children - full of support and unconditional love, and at the same time often laced with disappointment, frustration, and confusion. How can we fail to fall short of not only our parents’ desires for us but also our own, when our conditions for existence are, in this late hour of capitalism, so endlessly compromised? Like the rug constantly being pulled out from under our feet. ‘Be yourself!’ we’re told. ‘Follow your dreams!’ they say. Both selves and dreams, even fractured and fleeting ones, require material conditions of support. The Family is supposedly built to provide that, and yet so often we fall through its cracks. Sometimes almost, sometimes entirely.

Greg and I have been careful to avoid overly simplistic binary divides between parent and child. The Child, too, at least the adult child, participates in their own unfreedom. Rarely are they convinced of their own choices. Rarely do they have a blueprint for ‘the good life’. And so too The Parent is so often unstable within their obligation to provide stability. As either parents or children, and often, at least on some level, as both - as people containing multiple positions and timelines and desires at once - how do we truly build the lives we want? How do we find both security and freedom? How do we manifest both belonging and mobility? What if the conditions for individual and collective security and freedom were not in opposition to one another, as they are so often framed under political conditions of scarcity and fear? What if we could have it all? 

This tension is woven throughout In Floods. The tension between wanting to love and be loved by that specific collection of human beings who have formed you, cared for you, ushered you and guided you into and through life - and wanting to exit the whole game, the whole structure of reproduction that The Family entails. How to hold that desire - at times a quite visceral longing for love and belonging in the largest possible sense - and the discomfort, frustration, boredom, exasperation and claustrophobia that the very conditions of that desire bring with them?

Active surrender

In what world, in what future, then, could we fully desire our desires, as open-ended, creative, liberatory forces? In what world could desire express rather than entrap? In Floods does not propose an answer, but lingers in the asking of that question, which itself produces some kind of shift within the parameters of the present.

Throughout the show, we return to the ground of the body: the body’s unstoppable processes; its interruptions to the smoothness of the present; its creative as well as destructive capacities. The sound of Greg’s stomach interrupts the whole funeral. A drip of sweat threatens to flood the room. A lump in the throat devours the entire picture, the whole world, before being dissipated by the arrival of tears, like a storm clearing the air.

We have returned repeatedly to the idea of ‘active surrender’, which I happened across on an instagram post about orgasms, and haven’t stopped thinking about since. The paradox of an orgasm is that you lose control, actively. You are subsumed, rendered helpless, by choice. The effect is a kind of disappearance of and from yourself. It entails something weird happening to the relationship between cause and effect. The effect causes and the cause effects. You, the desirer, become the desire. You, the chooser, become the choice. Everything becomes indistinct in this moment of pure, unstoppable transformation. 

These moments of active surrender started to blur together and infuse themselves into In Floods as we made it. Crying, dying, giving birth and orgasming all started to become about one another. Moments in which you are faced with an other. An-other body, an-other face, an-other form of existence or non-existence; that which is not you; and yet which becomes, weirdly, of you as you slip away from yourself, into darkness.

As friend-of-the-family Angie talks about her near-death experience in a local river, she says ‘I really went somewhere’. ‘And where do you feel you went?’ Greg asks her. There isn’t an answer. We are left only with the feeling that there is somewhere else. Another version of events. Another version of ourselves. Out there. Or in here. It is there for the choosing, within the overwhelm, within the floods.

Charlie Ashwell 
20.04.2023