Speaking Pantomimes: Notes on "The Calling to Come"Author(s): Paul CarterSource: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 6 (1996), pp. 95-98Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513328 .

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CD COMPANION: ARTIST'S ARTICLE

Speaking Pantomimes:

Notes on The Calling to Come

Paul Carter

L he Calling to Come was a commission of the Mu- seum of Sydney on the site of the first Government House, which

opened in May 1995. As the name implies, the Museum of

Sydney is built on the site formerly occupied by the headquar- ters of colonial power in the British colony of New South Wales. Australia's first Government House, situated midway between the present-day Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House, immediately behind the Circular Quay, was abandoned as early as 1846 in favor of more salubrious accommodation on the nearby Domain; the old house was dismantled and, until

parts of its foundations were unearthed in the late 1980s, no

physical trace of it remained. The subsequent decision to erect a commemorative monument over these foundations raised

important questions about the construction of social memory. The further erasure of the site's specific signature (the footings of the house and the earth matrix supporting them) in the in- terests of installing a symbolic memory site in the form of a new

building promised a recapitulation of the original clearing and environmental disregard characteristic of the white settlement in 1788. Invited to help develop a historical and design philoso- phy that would counteract an ideology that confused piety with amnesia, I recommended that the site should be recon-

ceptualized as a still-contested place of meeting, of unfinished

dialogue across difference. In this way the Museum would not

only commemorate the inception of colonial rule: it would

ponder the persistence of colonialist attitudes and, more posi- tively, indicate how, within the interstices of colonialism, other modes of communication, other kinds of remembering, re- mained possible.

One corollary of this revisionist intent was a critical atten- tion to the media of historical representation, and a wish to communicate to the public the sense in which social memory is technologically shaped and produced. A critique of history as theater was a key feature of our methodological vocabulary; we sought to dramatize this fact by drawing attention to the

way in which history performs its meanings, self-consciously devising rhetorical and visual languages appropriate to the kinds of historical narrative it wishes to legitimate. Out of this ferment of ideas, and as one expression of them, emerged The

Calling to Come, a stereo-mix sound installation located in the

four-square glass Entry Cube to the Museum. The script of The

Calling to Come derives much of its historical material from two

language books kept at Sydney Cove between 1790 and 1792 [1 ]. The author of these notebooks, William Dawes, a surgeon with the British First Fleet responsible for the white coloniza- tion of Australia, in turn derived the majority of his informa- tion about the vocabulary, grammar and everyday usage of the

Sydney Language [2] from one native informant, a young woman whose skin name was Patyegarang. The relationship

ABSTRACT

The Calling to Come, a stereo-mix sound installation com- missioned by the Museum of Sydney, represents an innovative approach to the performance of primary historical sources. The script, derived from the William Dawes language notebooks (1790-1792), explores the ambi-

between Dawes and Patyegarang guities of cross-cultural communi- did not conform to a master-slave cation under colonialism. The

work exploits the echoic mimicry stereotype. The pragmatic basis of characteristic of such situations. their cooperation is indicated by a The technique of scripting, style passage in the notebooks in of direction and use of environ- which, in response to the ques- mental sound in The Calling to

tion, why do you not scorn to Come are described and located tionk, liewhy unot

s n ts theoretically and biographically in

speak like whiteman?" Dawes dis- terms of sound artist Paul covers that it was because "I gave Carter's previous work. The politi- her victuals, drink, everything she cal implications of the work and wanted, she said" [3]. That an in- public reaction to the installation

are briefly summarized. timately familiar, if not physical, relationship existed briefly be- tween these two people caught up in the cogs of the colonial machine is suggested by another aside:

Patyegarang was standing by the fire naked, and I desired her to put on her cloaths, on which she said Goredyu tagarin, the full meaning of which is "I will or do remain longer naked in order to get warmer sooner, as the fire is felt better without cloaths than if it had to penetrate thro' them" [4].

The interest of Dawes's notebooks to us in conceiving the Museum of Sydney lay not only in their human record, but in the heterodox light they threw on the character of cross-cul- tural exchange in the early colonial period. Drawing on the notion of "spatial history" articulated in my book The Road to

Botany Bay [5], the Museum's design was carefully revisionist: we wanted to contest imperialism's fiction of a seamless, lin- ear progress with a polyfocal history that would be dialogical, cognizant of both the noise in the historical system and the resistances of the environment, of the colonized peoples and even of classes of people within the invading ranks. Although they attested to a keen desire to reduce the Sydney Language to rules, Dawes's notebooks conveniently embodied the ratio- nale of this counter-narrative. Because of his immersion in the life of Patyegarang and her kin, Dawes "paid attention to the process of language acquisition: the fluid nature of

speech patterns, the baffling capacity of sounds to change their meaning from context to context, became for him not a frustration but a source of revelation" [6]. His notebooks

report a style of communication whose object was not instant assimilation of one party to the other, but a mutual conver- gence, a kind of behavioral and gestural, as well as linguistic, process of pidginization. This was not a purposeless idling on the spot. As I wrote in the exhibition catalog for The Calling to Come,

Paul Carter (sound artist, writer), 58 Fitzgibbons Street, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia.

LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 6, pp. 95-98, 1996 95 ? 19961 ISAST

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Immersion in the ambiguities of hu- man communication is not a sign of weakness or self-indulgence: it has a

political meaning. It is, rather con-

sciously, a way of putting off the end, of

deferring the time when, written down, reduced to order, there is nothing else to say, and the Eora can be com- manded or, worse, silenced and ex- cluded from future negotiations. Even as it was the end came soon enough: obliged to take part in Phillip's madcap but potentially murderous expedition against the Eora in December 1790, Dawes could not conceal his disgust. He let the Governor of the nascent colony know that "he was sorry he had been persuaded to comply with the or- der"; and as a result he was made to leave the colony, never, despite re- peated applications, to return [7].

With regard to my own meditation on colonialism and the modes of communi- cation peculiar to it, The Calling to Come can be located theoretically on an axis

running from The Sound In-Between (pub- lished in 1992) to The Lie of the Land

(published in 1996). In the former, two

scripts-Cooee Song (for live perfor- mance) and Mirror States (for electro- acoustic site-installation)-and essays about them explore the poetic and his-

torical significance of the "word-sound": "a sound that signifies, a word whose

meaning cannot be defined." The proto- semantic sound in-between

does not originate on one side or the other. It is provoked by the interval it- self. In this sense it resembles a name given to a space; the verbal gestures of first contact, the stumbling mimicry of the other person's speech, look forward to places. Such a sound is not then sim- ply a performative strategy.... It is a historical device for keeping the future open, for delineating a space where, in [the] future, misapprehensions and dif- ferences can begin to form the basis of a new cross-cultural argot, one based on the incremental convergence of sounds and gestures [8].

The Lie of the Land generalizes this ar-

gument historically, arguing for a direct

relationship between the act of clearing cognate with colonization and the si-

lencing of those sounding spaces where other kinds of history (and poetry) are

possible. "The lie of the land is associ- ated with a noise that must be silenced. To inhabit the country is to lay to rest its echoes" [9].

These historical arguments are also

poetic ones: they implicate theater, whose empty stage, analogue of the co- lonial clearing, may also be said to be dedicated to the clearing away of am-

biguous noises and the replacement of these noises with a regime of signs. The

burden of both The Sound In-Between

and, differently, The Lie of the Land is to

define an alternative poetics of dramatic

representation, one that is, in my terms,

performative or participatory. In prac- tice, it is a methektic [10] or mimetic awareness that dictates the composition of the scripts: a nucleus of word-sounds

generates a growing array of dialogical fragments, which in turn conjure up echoically a widening field of allusions, both phonic and semantic. In terms of its compositional poetics, The Calling to Come falls along another axis, one pass- ing through What Is Your Name (1986) and inter alia The 7,448 (1992) [11]. There are indeed echoic links between these three works. The polyvalent poten- tial of the word-sound "mar," for in- stance, in The Calling to Come consciously recalls a baroque elaboration of the same element in What Is Your Name;

"agh" and "la," in The 7,448, recur in The

Calling to Come with an allied range of associations. These evidently over- determined word-sounds are mentioned here not to prove an after all rather trivial genealogy. I have an idea that they belong to a larger, historically and re-

gionally determined lexicon of expres- sive sounds. The philosopher Vico

thought that the core concepts inform-

ing the institutions of different societies

might be reduced to a "Mental Dictio-

nary." In a regional sense, as ways of

opening up those desired spaces of ex-

change, these proto-verbal sounds may operate similarly.

There is not space in these notes to il- lustrate how complex chains of meaning may grow from even the simplest phonic nuclei. Readers interested in this may wish to consult the recently published catalogue of The Calling to Come, where the associative logic of the work is dis- cussed in detail [12]. The commentary on the opening phrase, "Ca mar," gives the flavor of this:

the first of many phrases in the script illustrating "the irresolvable ambigu- ities, the multiplication of misunder- standings" mentioned in the Introduc- tion could be taken as a verb form cognate with the Sydney Language word "gawuwi," meaning "calling to come"; or perhaps, as emerges later in Scenes 13 and 16, it alludes to those who are called (those who also call), the variously spelled Camerigal or Kamarigal people. On the other side, as it were, the same word-sound irresist- ibly suggests southeast English "Come on" or, even more closely, "Come 'ere."

In coining the phrase, I also in- dulged in some echoic mimicry of my own: no respectable linguist would en-

tertain this but, with Schuchardt's stud- ies of Sabir or Lingua Franca, the "go- between language" of the Mediterra- nean in mind, I imagined that, for some listeners at least, the phrase might sound like "This sea!" Less fanci- fully another phono-semantic echo suggests itself: between "Ca mar" and "chamara"-this latter term being, ac- cording to Schuchardt, a Lingua Franca form of "chiamare," the Italian word meaning "to call." As the same writer remarks, "More than elsewhere, panta rei rules in [this] area .... This is highly unsatisfying to anyone with a sense of scientific order."

For instance, and to confine our- selves to only one further instance of the kind of phono-semantic over- determination on which so much of the resonance of The Calling to Come de- pends, it appears that in writing down the "Heathen Greek" of the English sailor, as a contemporary described the emergent 17th Century sea-trade jargon ("his language is a new confusion"), the phonetically-literal transcriber regularly used "the spelling group arin closed syl- lables" to represent "a lengthened vowel rather than a vowel and conso- nant." Following this orthographic logic, "Ca mar" might approximate to the sailor's "calm" or "calmer," a state of sea and sky no doubt devoutly to be wished for after weeks at sea or nights of unsettling tempest.

Unsatisfying, this echoic mimicry, to the scientific mind: but not on that ac- count to be dismissed as mere poetic coincidences. The historical claim of these mimic forms on our attention re- sides in the fact that they originate in writing (in historical records), in the panta rei of orthography as it negotiates the realm of the verbal in-between. The odd, unsettling, corollary is that where no correct spellings as yet exist a richer exchange may be possible, a Janus-faced opening of doors that is anathema to the makers of dictionar- ies, but on which genuinely alternative historical destinies can hinge [13].

Informing the direction and produc- tion of The Calling to Come was the ques- tion of theatricality-the problematic, if

you will, of representation where one side (the colonizers) is licensed to see and to speak and the other (the colo-

nized) to be seen and to listen. As I mentioned before, the architectural en- closure of the theater, the dramatic illu- sion and the passive audience it houses

may be said to recapitulate this situa- tion. How, then, to avoid this foreclo-

sure, to essay a kind of representation that would not stereotype or position in these ways? The Sound In-Between had al-

ready mounted a critique of an assump- tion-prevalent among museums and allied institutions interested in using electroacoustic compositions to lend their exhibits a site-specific signature-

96 Carter Speaking Pantomimes

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that the use of electroacoustic composi- tions can serve to overcome the theatri- cal impression given by exhibit spaces [14]. Soundscapes, however they may have been conceived, composed and in- stalled, tend to remain supinely depen- dent on the architectural enclosure they occupy to lend them a coherence that is

always dramatic; at best, they add up to an environmental radio theater. Besides, there lurks within the idea of creating mimic sound environments a naivete about the actively performative nature of listening.

Against this background, the chal-

lenge of the already architecturally de- fined Museum of Sydney was clear: it was to dramatize, to make explicit, the theatricalism already implicit in conceiv-

ing the museum as a building, as an ex- hibition site in whose clearing historical

patterns and narratives might be seen more clearly. From this perspective, the decision to install The Calling to Come within the glass entry cube to the Mu- seum made good sense. An empty glass box: the degree-zero of theater, sans ac- tors, audience or sets, appended theatri- cally to a museum of obviously theatrical

appearances, it could be said to drama- tize architecture's paradoxically self-

effacing theatricalism. By rendering it

explicitly theatrical with the installation of The Calling to Come, we hoped to make the cube's design on the historical site- its role in recolonizing an already colo- nized terrain-perceptible. Achieving this effect, however, naturally required a

comparable critical self-awareness on the part of the director, producer and actors. With the help of ethnolinguist Jakelin Troy, the actors could be in- structed in the meaning and pronuncia- tion of the Sydney Language fragments scattered through the script-but how to deliver them? How, if at all, to charac- terize and embody them?

It is my practice, in directing verbally gestural texts such as The 7,448 or The

Calling to Come, to conduct the actors, to insist on precise attention to the under-

lying dialogical rhythm, its caesuras, accelerandos, tonal shifts and reprises. In compensation for this musicalization of the script, this emphasis on the to- and-fro of word-sounds rather than any psychological origin or motivation, the actors are encouraged to melodramatize parts of their delivery, to behave vocally like quick-change artists or verbal mim- ics. In combination, a performance re- sults that is at once measured and sprightly, ritualized and disconcertingly

animated. In positioning the actors in this and my other Museum of Sydney commission, Lost Subjects, I frequently re- iterated observations that Polish director Tadeusz Kantor made about his Impos- sible Theater. In the wake of the disaster of war, any kind of dramatic illusionism seemed to Kantor an act of collusion; his actors would have to learn new roles. Henceforward, "They do not imitate any- thing.... They do not express anything ... but themselves, human shells...

They solve all the problems . . . the di- lemma of autonomy and representation, then and now" [15]. In the comparably disastrous aftermath of invasion, these

insights applied equally to the realiza- tion of our text. Like Kantor, we did not have as our objective historical illusion- ism: our intention was the performance of a site, the rendering problematic of its claim to represent anything. My introduc- tion to the exhibition catalog closed with a statement of this intent:

The Museum of Sydney occupies a site of disappearances: its monumental ap- pearance may be said to contradict the site's history, or once again to obscure it. What then? We can colonise it with little theatres that exhibit what has dis- appeared. Or, refusing to come to the party, siding with the lost subjects, we can persist in enunciating the space of disappearance, where things refuse to quieten and settle down [16].

The sound mix for The Calling to Come used apparently conventional sound ef- fects-environmental recordings of waves breaking, of wind, and of a door

closing. These were, in fact, directly sug- gested by the script: east-breaking waves and west-originating breezes served to denominate that narrow clearing be- tween ocean and forest where most of the conversations between Dawes and

Patyegarang occurred. Winds were in- voked in a spiritual as well as environ- mental sense, as they were imagined as the natural equivalent of the desire to

speak: flowing over windowsills, they whispered like human breath passing across human lips. Other, punningly similar, although differently signifying, sounds (notably a crackling fire) were also layered in, providing a kind of sonic chiaroscuro, a sense of noises converg- ing towards each other and finding a common ground-a sound analogue of the verbal structure of The Calling to Come. In mixing these sounds to the voices, the object was not to use them as auditory images, as signifiers represent- ing aspects of a (theatrical) environ- ment; rather, it was to suggest a common

grammar linking words and sounds, a

tonally and timbrally mediated grammar characteristic of the discourse of word- sounds. Thus, the third sound-that of the door closing-was not introduced with any idea of reproducing the sound of a late-eighteenth-century latch: allud- ing to the recurrent pun in the script on Dawes's own name, it punningly con- jured up a sound-effects stock-in-trade of radio drama. When installed in a

space that was entered and exited via doors, the sound of a door closing achieved, of course, a further punning significance.

Public reaction to the installation of The Calling to Come has been gratifying. As might be imagined, the politics sur-

rounding the work's commissioning and execution were lively: descendants of the

speakers of the Sydney Language, in par- ticular, were committed to seeing that the Dawes material, potentially so impor- tant to their own ongoing project of cul- tural and political self-empowerment, was not used once again to whitewash the facts of Australian colonization. Ne- gotiations with Aboriginal representa- tives were an essential preliminary to the work's realization. Aboriginal communi- ties have embraced the result: The Calling to Come has provided the first opportu- nity for blacks and whites alike in Sydney to hear something of the language that was being spoken only a little over 200 years ago on the land the city now occu-

pies. Further, it has not been lost on

people of both Aboriginal and non-

Aboriginal descent that this long-si- lenced tongue is now being sounded out in a spirit of reconciliation on the very doorstep of the site once occupied by the most potent symbol of European im-

perialism in these parts: Australia's First Government House.

References and Notes 1. William Dawes, "Grammatical Forms of the Lan- guage of N.S. Wales in the Neighbourhood of Sydney," c. 1790, and "Vocabulary of the Language of N.S. Wales in the Neighbourhood of Sydney," c. 1790-1792, both manuscripts held in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.

2. The native name, if any, for the language or lan- guages spoken around Sydney Cove is unknown. Tribal names are, however, well-attested, and one of these, Eora, is increasingly used to designate the people with whom the white settlers first came into contact. On this and the Sydney Language gener- ally, see Jakelin Troy, The Sydney Language (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1993).

3. Dawes [1].

4. Dawes [1].

5. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (London: Faber & Faber, 1987).

Carter, Speaking Pantomimes 97

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6. Paul Carter, The Calling to Come (Sydney: Histori- cal Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1996) p. 3.

7. Carter [6] p. 4. A much fuller account of the communicational environment implied by the Dawes notebooks, and its implications for a revi- sionist history of cross-cultural dynamics under co- lonialism, is contained in my "Repetitions at Night: Mimicry, Noise and Context," in Ross Gibson, ed., Exchanges (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1996).

8. Paul Carter, The Sound In-Between (Sydney: New Endeavour/Univ. of New South Wales Press, 1992) pp. 12-13.

9. Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber & 12. Carter [6]. Faber, 1996) p. 8.

10. The Platonic term methexis, or participation, is used in The Lie of the Land to articulate a kind of performance that belongs neither to mimesis nor to the externals of mimicry.

11. What Is Your Name, subsequently Quel Nom Toi (1987) and Wie Ist Ihr Name (1988), was a commis- sion of the radio arts unit of the Australian Broad- casting Corporation. The 7,448, known as 7,448: Eine Kolumbische Phantasie in Germany, was a joint commission of the Australian Broadcasting Corpo- ration and Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koln.

13. Carter [6] pp. 30-31.

14. Paul Carter, "Sound Houses: Scripting for Pub- lic Spaces," in The Sound In-Between [8] pp. 158-176.

15. Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990 (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993) p. 101.

16. Carter [6] p. 6.

Manuscript received 14July 1996.

98 Carter; Speaking Pantomimes

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