There’s a bit in the middle of ghosts of the near future where the two performers just sit with some sunglasses on and the melody of Rocket Man plays and you watch atom bombs dropping and you’re thinking about the nuclear winter but it’s funny. It’s a magic trick of the best kind, to make you laugh in a moment where you might be feeling pretty bleak. A lot of the show seems to work like this, silly costumes overlaid overlaid with sad stories, an over-saturated shaggy-dog cowboy-story told like it’s a ripping-good-yarn.
I use the word magic trick advisedly: the rough arc of the story is about a magician going on a walk through the Nevada desert. The show references magic tricks a lot, talk about magic tricks, occasionally do magic, and the performers wear white gloves like magicians. There are these very beautiful micro-cinema sections, where they use a tiny shoebox filled with sand and little toys and when they project it. What looks a bit shaky and unimpressive, when blown up onscreen, becomes spectacular, transformed from one thing to another.
It got me thinking, obviously, about Derrida and Hauntology. I actually encountered Hauntology as an idea through Mark Fisher, where all my good ideas start and end, and his writing about nostalgia for lost futures in the electronic music that preoccupied him. Hauntology is – bear with me – interested in the idea of ghosts as manifesting the atemporality of western culture, the always-already-absent-present. In a Derridean sense, nothing ever happens, there is only a trace of the thing having happened, and the potential that it might happen again – and even then there was never an “it” in the first place – which is a little bit like theatre and a little bit like a nuclear bomb falling and a little bit like a magic trick and you see why I was thinking about Derrida.
I would say that it is a very difficult show – I sort of wish the makers had opened the show up a bit more, so that I didn’t have to work as hard – I do think that sometimes a maker just explicitly explaining what they are about to do in very simple terms can allow an audience to sit back and more confidently try to parse what they are seeing. But hey I had a really rewarding reminder that I didn’t really understand Derrida this morning while writing about it, so maybe that’s not a fault at all.
I really liked it. I found it ambitious and challenging and rigorous. The sound-design by Patch Middleton is beautiful. You should go see it and let me know what you thought it was about.
ghosts of the near future is on at Summerhall, Edinburgh this month, as good things are. You can get tickets here.
★★★★★
DARKER NEON 