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Some Slow Going: Considering Beckett and Goat Island

Watching Goat Island move and observing the Chicago-based performance group’s approach to the composition of gesture and movement, I often think of the work of Samuel Beckett. For the group’s physical vocabulary proposes a kinesthetic exploration that parallels the surefooted hesitancy of Beckett’s approach to language and image-making, in particular the attention he paid to articulation itself as a process bound up with dissipation. I think, for example, of how Goat Island members go about the labour of constructing a dance together, and of the extensive process in rehearsals whereby an individual performer might discover and then reveal a series of gestures, subtract from each one, eroding its tangible surfaces, and then teach it to fellow members through its absences and evasions, through the remains of a movement once its contours have been effaced. Or how resistance might be enfolded into a movement’s possibilization, bringing it to a performative state of stillness. Or the group’s recent investigation into staging ‘missing’ itself, a parallel to Beckett’s examination of absence, waiting, and the active longing such states produce. What does one do to fill in the gaps, the holes, the breaches in everyday life, and how might the state of missing someone or something be represented? These approaches to making a performance recall Beckettian territory, for the company’s working methodology and its productions extend the Irish writer’s preoccupation with life and the dramatization of humanity as a process determined by subtraction rather than profusion, delivering physical dimension to the linguistic turns and nuances exemplified by his thought. In particular, Goat Island develops Beckett’s ever-doubting yet assertive investigation into the productive ways that failure inheres within the ontology of the expressive act and the infelicitous outcomes communication yields. If Beckett’s ambitions manifest a desire to examine ‘language as possibility, as ruleless game’, by paying meticulous attention to its ‘creative convulsions’ as George Bataille describes, Goat Island approaches the task of movement as (choreo)graphic technique with the ‘wide-eyed confidence’ Bataille observed in Beckett’s prose (Bataille in Gontarski 1986: 132). To watch them approach physical composition as an inscriptive code is to encounter this tight-knit ensemble in a state of modest apprenticeship as they embark upon a process of slow learning that invites audience members to observe with patient eyes. In October 2004, in a post-show discussion after the two-part performance, When will the