The world is a fraught place and recently it seems to be amplifying, escalating. I find myself, with many around me, trying to sink lower, deepen and soften into the jolting motion – like relaxing into the surf board, riding the waves. I find myself reaching for what helps. In such complicated times, what always helps me is stories.
I find myself reaching for certain myths, or find that they just pop up around me, like mushrooms after rain. Characters start to lurk at the corners of things – the dragons come closer to the tree line, along with the Queen Mother looking down from her tower with the perspective of a larger pattern and years of this kind of thing under her belt. The woman who speaks flowers is there trudging through the snow in a paper dress, or the shepherdess is pricking her thumb and continuing to sew her nightshirts. The one-eyed midwife is chucking a log onto the fire, ready to be asked the necessary question and the woman with wrinkles like bark is round the next curve of the next tree waiting for me, for us, to ask her for help. I find myself leaning into this polyphony of wisdom, advice and experience. I find myself remembering that this magnificent entourage is just there, just beyond the corner of my eye. I find myself finally feeling not just solace but direction, hope.
And in a moment such as this, I find the Single Stories, the toxic mimics become more powerful but also more obvious. I’m talking now about the stories that flatten us as we believe them, reduce us as we tell them, that slowly shape us into spears of othering polemic, bashing out the mystery and complexity in the heat of fear or rage or whatever. The ones through which we make others – and ultimately ourselves – partial. Through which we make others – and, of course, ourselves – stereotypes.
SINGLE STORIES & CARRIER BAGS
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks powerfully, calling out those Single Stories that have shaped and affected her life in her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”.[1] “The Single Story creates stereotypes,” she says, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote and spoke passionately throughout her career about such a single story (let’s release it from its capitals), perhaps the most dangerous only story of them all: the Hero story. In her sublime 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”[2] Le Guin talks about it being time to tell, with urgency, something else other than the hero story (likewise released from capitals); instead to tell “the untold story, the life story” that has, in fact, been told for a long time in myths, trickster stories, folktales, jokes and novels.
She goes further and offers a new direction, a new way of perceiving these stories – a different, more helpful, more human metaphor to live by, after Elizabeth Fisher’s theory: the carrier bag theory. To consider, in her example, the novel:
“I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in particular, powerful relationship to one another and to us.”
I think we can extrapolate that to any piece of art: a performance as a container, a bundle holding things in particular relationships to one another and to an audience.
It’s a different way of perceiving, of listening and it’s one very natural to such stories as myths: you look out of the corner of your eye, to the things that are revealed only over time, only by dedication and devotion, only when you keep coming back. There is no short, sharp, fast way in and way out with a myth, no thwump of an arrow or thrust of the spear. Just a repetitive return to sit and to listen. And then, if you wish to bring that to an audience, the slow building, assembling of the bundle, the slow crafting of the container that will hold the performers, the story and all those who are there to witness it.
The generous thing is, the carrier bag isn’t about getting rid of the hero. It’s just about bringing him back into context, down to right size, to see him as he is:
“Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.”
Back at ground level, he rattles around the bag and we suddenly realise he’s one of many in the bag. We listen past his, now muffled, mono-tone and instead are struck by the polyphonic janglings and whistlings and whisperings and trillings of all the other voices from the story, from the bag – both human and more-than-human.
In her wonderful story “Sur”[3], Le Guin imagines a fictitious journey to the South Pole, the Yelcho expedition. Set in the times of the real-life stories of Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, it explores an alternative: what if nine South American women would have slipped their domestic shackles and mounted their own expedition to the South Pole? What would that have looked like?
The alternative she dreams up is certainly not utopian and nor is it very easy but it certainly is humbly and touchingly human. The nine women care, collaborate, celebrate, commemorate, create and, of course, grumble and argue – “But then, we had time to argue”. Nevertheless, they endure the hardships of the expedition without a scrap of heroic hubris in sight. The women are constantly brushing up against the mistakes and debris of the heroes and choosing something else. They’re learning from and side-stepping the heroes’ missteps, while creating something new. (Virginia Woolf would have approved).
Seeing Captain Scott’s dirty, mean hut surrounded by skins, bones and rubbish, they create a beautiful base of their own elsewhere, a series of chambers out of the weather and carved into the ice, complete with skylights, sleeping pods, a central meeting space (named “Buenos Aires”), a storeroom and even a studio where one of the team sculpts ice. Out on the ice, they pass the spot Shackleton had arrived to – a pole with a shred of a flag, an empty oil can and a few frozen footprints. When they arrive at the South pole they leave nothing behind; it doesn’t feel necessary. The only thing one of the women leaves behind, years later, is the story: a report in a trunk in an attic in Lima for her children and grandchildren.
“Even if they are rather ashamed of having such a crazy grandmother, they may enjoy sharing in the secret. But they must not let Mr Amundsen know! He would be terribly embarrassed and disappointed. There is no need for him or anyone else outside the family to know. We left no footprints, even.”
The heroes’ stories still exist in this imaginary world and they are, of course, real stories. But what Le Guin’s story does is it creates a glorious space with her imaginary story, for me, in the real world. Around the heroes’ detritus and starvation, around the frozen footprints and the oilcan, it creates in the bag a new space for the imagination. A new perspective on the heroism we admired but which now looks maybe a bit grimy. A new possibility for collaboration. A new way of going, seeing and beholding.
To lean into such a story, to see what else is in the bag makes space for other voices, telling other futures.
WOMAN. BEAST. MINOTAUR
Time to tell you, now, of two other bags that offer other futures. The first is a solo-dance piece I’ve been deeply fortunate to work on for the last few years: “If The Bull Won’t Come” by choreographer/dancer Adi Weinberg, with sound designer Filipe Gomes, costume designer Angharad Matthews and lighting designer Matan Preminger (with me on the dramaturgy).
This bag started out as another container: a body. Specifically the body of the choreographer, Adi. As things started to emerge in her body, she slowly assembled the team around her and the container opened out to a shared, communal bag between us. There were colours in the bag, red and purple and brown, crawling on all fours, elbows in different positions, delicate hands on fabric, a willow tree. Hannah Arendt was in there, turning into a centaur in three languages. The sculptures of cow hides and bronze of Nandipha Mntambo were there, bows were sweeping across strings from side to side. Saxophonist Evan Parker was in the bag but in a way that even his mother wouldn’t recognise him. A bouncing ball, a labyrinth, a few different pairs of trousers. Freshly cut vinyl, reams of tape, piles of post-it notes. Potsdam in all its weathers was in the bag.
And then one day Adi told me there was also a myth in the bag. It had been there for some time but she hadn’t shown it to me yet. I looked in and saw Pasiphae. It rang a bell but I didn’t really recognise her. She was missing some context. Adi gave me the context, seen through the eyes of the hero. Pasiphae was wife of Minos, mother of the monstrous half-man, half-beast Minotaur. Ah, her, I said.
But in this bag, Minos was nowhere to be seen – and the Minotaur carried no monstrosity and slowly, over the weeks and months, Pasiphae’s story emerged through Adi’s body quite differently. Other sides of the story, strange melodies. Desires, pangs, longings. Friction, calling, kulning. Tenderness, wildness, fragile-powerful vulnerability. Movements against, movements with, movements of surrender to that thing that’s asking:
What do you want?
What do you need?
What do you desire?
It’s been a wild ride and a tough one, to bundle all that into a shape, to contain all that in movements in a body and to build up the sound and light around to hold it. But we did and now the performance is coming back to a stage for you to see.
NEW DOCUMENTARY PIECE ON RAMSGATE RADIO
And our amazing sound designer/composer Filipe Gomes (whose titles extend far beyond those two) and his team at Ramsgate Radio have been making a documentary about “If The Bull Won’t Come” – a delicious 20 minute behind-the-scenes glimpse into the bag. It’s being broadcast live, as an audio piece tomorrow, Saturday 14th October at 10am UK time/11am Germany & Poland time/12 noon Israel time for those who love good old-fashioned radio. After the live audio broadcast it will also be available in its video version, which you can watch whenever you wish.
Please tune in or have a look here. We’re humbled and proud of this one:
https://www.ramsgateradio.com/ifthebullwontcome
And the performance of “If The Bull Won’t Come” is on at fabrik Potsdam on Friday 20.10 and Saturday 21.10 at 19:30. We’d love to see you there:
https://www.fabrikpotsdam.de/event/1047
Finally, if you’re interested in some of this thinking, exploring, world-making, story-telling and are in reach of Berlin, I’m holding a workshop in a few weeks on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th October: “Polyphonies of Story”. It’s just the place to dive in to draw out some of these other voices from the bag, including your own. We’ll be telling, sounding, moving and trying to make some space for some other stories to appear, perhaps the ones we really need now to show us some different futures.
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/catgerrard/994512
Until next month,
Cat – and the entourage
PS – I mentioned two bags...
The second bag is the vast container of “rewilding”. I’ve been volunteering a bit with a great organisation called Rewilding Oder Delta, up in Mecklenburg Vorpommern, Germany, who are working with this messy, complicated, hopeful new story/bag. It’s taking a while to brew the story but more on rewilding in posts to come.
And in the next newsletter: leading up to our final workshop of the Autumn series - on puppets, puppetry and reciprocity with objects (an alternative “objectivity”). See you then!
[1] From 2009 but still relevant... https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
[2] Read it as a lovely stand-alone essay in purple (published by Terra Ingot – with a fantastic foreword by Donna Haraway) or in her thwomping essay collection “Dancing at the Edge of the World” (1989)
[3] In the brilliantly curated collection “Space Crone” (2023), edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin. If you want a first collection of Le Guin essays, look no further.