Making Silence Speak through Repetition: Don Duncan

At the centre of narrative re-enactment is a hybrid figure who can exist in the past or the present, or both at the same time. Margulies calls it the ‘split figure’ (5). Because of its ‘protean temporality,’ she argues, this ‘split figure’ of re-enactment has significant powers of revision (6). In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I was able to verbally reconstruct key moments from my own memory of my childhood, then physically re-enact them on stage, and then comment on, analyse and make sense of those moments from a present-day perspective through live, spoken word commentary. Part of the power gained from such re-enactments is the act of rendering public the secret, scary feelings and experiences of my past. The split figure’s power of ‘multi-directional temporality’ enables re-enactments to be ‘effective stages for actualization, exemplary purposes, and critical analysis’ (Margulies 11). By using this function of the ‘split figure’ device while on stage, I could easily switch between the past moment being re-enacted and the present-day moment on stage and thereby generate a rich dialectic through which to develop sustained and valuable criticality both for myself and (potentially) for the witnessing audience. Within these layers of compositional and revisionist activity, I could also add in – via the pre-recorded sound mix played out through QLab – the non-verbal ‘biotic voices’ (Toop 60) and ‘geophony’ (Watson qtd. in Street ‘The Memory of Sound’ 98) of the forest and bog landscapes of my childhood loneliness. Much like the broader criticality mentioned earlier, this criticality was also facilitated through layering, this time via the temporal layering of past and present voices and actions.

For a shared and public criticality to occur, the re-enactment needs to work as an act of public communication. In her work on the relationship between enunciator, text and audience in autobiographical essay films, Rascaroli asserts that these films’ ‘monologic, self-centred structure always hides a dialogue, which seeks a relationship with the audience’ (109). In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, this dialogue played out in a very palpable way for me while I performed. The audience was sitting within a few metres of me, not a removed abstraction as it would have been if the project were an essay film. This physical proximity played a role in the ‘alchemy’ of the re-enactment I was trying to concoct on stage. It underlined the public ownership of both the re-enactment and the split-figure contained within it. Quoting Rowena Santos Aquino, Margulies asserts that the ‘split figure’ of re-enactment is ‘applicable to a collective since it narrates not only one’s past but also references others’ experiences and memories’ (10).

In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I had to take care to make the ‘split figure’ in the work a functional, generous, public body – one that was accessible and legible to people from different backgrounds of experience than mine. I achieved this, in part, through a continual blending of personal, micro level details with collective, macro level details – the combination of private and public memories. Culturally iconic figures like Thatcher and E.T., in addition to communally shared experiences like school and religious services, were blended with and became public access points to the private intimacies, feelings and experiences of my childhood. My intention in doing so was that the audience had the possibility to ‘become complicit in the process of meaning making, of making history’ (Rabinowitz 32). In this kind of participatory, historical culture, Margulies argues, ‘the replay of a contingent past activity raises it to a momentary universality making its value discernible for the present’ (10).

In this kind of excavation of history, where primary sources are non-existent, one must read ‘for absences as much as for presences,’ says Rabinowitz, adding that ‘the weight of evidence lies in the spoken word [of the witness] and its ability to evoke visual memory as the foundations of historical justice’ (35). Lanzmann, a Jewish filmmaker, was aiming to achieve historical justice for his people with Shoah despite an absence of material documentation with which to make it. ‘What was called the Holocaust was a tabula rasa,’ he said in his film The Karski Report (2010), when speaking of the making of Shoah, ‘and each time I found a survivor it was like a powerful exhumation.’ Simone de Beauvoir stated that Lanzmann’s art is in ‘making places speak, in reviving them through voices’ (qtd. in Lanzmann ‘Shoah: the complete text’ iii). In such a context, it is not necessary for the audience to see for themselves but to ‘look at those who have looked and to hear their emotional testimony’ (Lanzmann qtd. in Rabinowitz 29). In this storytelling paradigm, also extensively used in my work on All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, voice and story are generated from silence and used to overcome the forces that mandated that silence and to try to correct the damage wrought through that silencing. Through the approaches to narrative production detailed above, I (re)gained power at multiple stages: through the mere generation of voice from (and despite) the silence; through the critical reflection, revisions and corrections that were applied to that past once it had been reconstructed, and through the sharing – with a witnessing public – of the entire story and story-making process.