Class: Week Four

We built on the work that you've been doing throughout the course, generating more material, trying out new situations and configurations.

We started with sharing some more information. You suggested a supplementary list of 'home' songs. You also suggested some songs that reminded you of home, even if they didn't specifically mention home. (I'll post all these separately.)

We got some words for Home; I've added a couple:

• Casa (Italian, Spanish and Portuguese)
• Dom (Polish)
• Haus (German)
• σπίτι [spiti] (Greek)
• Huis (Afrikaans, Dutch)
• дом [dom] (Russian)
• Hus (Swedish, Norwegian)
• Domus (Latin)

We got some words for sick; again, I've added a couple

• Malato (Italian)
• Enfermo (Spanish)
• Chory (Polish)
• Sick (Afrikaans)
• Zieken (Dutch)
• Sick (German)
• άρρωστος [arrostos] (Greek)
• больно [bolno] (Russian)
• Sjuk (Swedish)
• Syk (Norwegian)
• Aeger (Latin)

We couldn't come up with another language that had the exact word 'homesick'. We suspect that German has one though. Other languages have words that include some of this sense:

• nostálgico (Spanish)
• nostalgie (French)
• ?νοστός [nostos] (Greek)

Other language have to use a phrase to express the concept, e.g. 'sentire molto la mancanza di casa' (Italian).

I then asked you to come up with some places in which people might gather and be homesick for various different places. You came up with the following:

• A trench
• The moon
• A space capsule
• A kibbutz
• A plane
• A truckstop
• Mecca/Vatican
• A brothel
• A hospital
• A cemetery
• An expedition
• A conference
• A reality TV show
• A foreign exchange
• An army mission
• A concentration camp
• The Olympics
• A travelling circus
• A boarding school
• A cruise ship
• A university
• A movie set
• A jail
• An hotel
• Castaway on a desert island
• A lift
• A homeless shelter

You then did some automatic writing, beginning with the phrase, 'The first time I felt at home was...' Some lovely material emerged from this exercise and I pick, entirely at random, a few lovely moments (apologies if I've misread them!):

• in all these mountains when you walk close to the edge you feel small among all the surroundings you look up into a sky and see a cloud of fog coming towards you covering the landscape ... milk, milk is everywhere and this small visible part of your route becomes a private piece of life.
• I came back from my first holiday [...] I was six years old. The reason why I felt like my home was really my home was because I had never really left it before.
• I arranged my things around my new room; it was really strange to me to see all my familiar things that belong somewhere else.
• Because we only rented houses before, I couldn't change anything about the room I was stuck with. I even had to put up with racing car wallpaper at one house.
• It's strange how you can't really recognise your own home smell when you're there but other people can and they say 'oh that smells of you blah blah'.
• Snuggled up on the couch with my mum, my forever friends, wallpaper at last! no turtles wohoo! my own room.
• Two days before we moved, me, my mum, and my sister were sitting in our living room and all our stuff was in boxes. I remember thinking how weird it all was, the place looked bare and unfamiliar [...] anyway my mum looked around and said, "It just goes to show your possessions belong in your home".
• Lots of coming home from holidays spring to mind. All the week in France or sometimes even first days at school, coming home after a long day for a five-year-old.My house in Tuscany [...] which was built mostly by my dad and my grandad when I was born [...] I love sitting here during the evening, around 7pm. During the summer it gets way too hot because the mortar stones soak up all the heat and it's only during the night that it begins to cool down. Late into the evening when the sun is going down, orange rays will fall into the room and you can see all the dust particles floating around, captured in the light.

I then chose three of the scenarios you'd come up with for a durational improvisation. You did twenty minutes of improvising as characters in:

• The Olympic Village in Athens 2004 (during a lockdown because of a terrorist alert)
• A space capsule on the way to the moon (at the point when the capsule first turned to reveal the whole of the earth in the observation window)
• A UN Conference on Refugees in Mexico City (at the reception party the night before the first day of meetings)

It was great to see the seriousness and imagination you displayed. The discussions of UN refugee policy positions was often impressive and you seemed to have the mannerisms of globetrotting UN apparatchiks off pat. I enjoyed seeing the astronauts' conversation fall silent and the simple looks of wonder as you stared at the earth. (And then the hilarious attempt to photograph each other 'holding' the earth, and the communcal singing that this provoked.)

I then asked you to become these characters' children (your own age). This produced some very interesting, imaginative material. Fragments I enjoyed:

• US astronaut's daughter: I read, like, a whole article about your mom. I was, like, 'oh wow'.
• Four Olympic daughters listening to the sounds of a table.
• UN Delegate daughters:

- It was a nuclear kind of family then.
- (All that changed, yeah yeah.)
- Yeah [clicks fingers] It's kinda exciting though.
- And you get to see all those places

• Astronaut's daughters:

- Would you like to be an astronaut?
- No. No. No way.
- God, really? How about you?
- [thoughtfully, looking into the sky] I don't know. I'd kind of like to be up there. I don't know if I'd like to get up there.

• UN Delegates daughters:

- My mum got me one of those phones, those cellphones, where you can call other countries, like all of them.
- (simultaneously) Triband.
- (simultaneously) Triband.

• One Olympic daughter to another: You've never had a TV? You've never had a milkshake?
• UN delegates daughters:

- My boyfriend's called Carlos.
- Oh wow. Very Latino!

• Astronaut's daughters:

- What about the food?
- Ohmygod, ohmygod.
- You tried it?
- They told her to get used to it and she brought some home and like ohmygod it was so gross.
- Like that episode of The Simpsons with the potato chips and they got onto the ants

In the last hour of the class we talked about Airport and looked at a sequence on video, considering the effect of the bilingual text, the fragmentation of the narrative, the gestural movement sequences, and the music. This led us into a discussion of our performance, and I asked us to provisionally take stock of where we were to think about where we had got to and what we thought we'd like to retain that we'd come up with so far. Some of the following were mentioned specifically:

• The floor patterns, perhaps with music added rather than words
• Using the Timeless device of present/past/future.
• Expressing transcendental values (!)
• Different languages
• Integrating the fragments of dialogue that I've been noting
• Gestureal work
• Maybe using the experience of coming to university and adjustment
• Build up a set of different associations with home that we can use throughout the performance
• A universal symbol of 'homeliness'? A log fire? The smell of baking bread?
• Personal testimonies (in the manner of Lament)

We then had two research reports, on Nomadic peoples, specifically Gypsies, and on Tourism. This post is getting very long, so I'll leave it to the researchers to post up their stuff.

I was very intriguing, however, by the story of the fanatically Anglophile eighteenth-century Frenchman who eventually abandoned his plan to visit London because the act of travelling would ruin his pleasure...

Next week:

• Please pick up from the office a copy of Lament and my article on Suspect Culture (which ends with a discussion of Lament)
• We'll have the remaining research reports next week (Homesickness, Liminal Spaces, and Interior Design).

Dan Rebellato