We sat down with Ben Kulvichit from Emergency Chorus, performing Ways Of Knowing. For ticketing and info, please find here.
Ways of Knowing explores different ways humans try to predict the future, from scientific instruments to mysticism and divination. What first sparked your interest in this theme, and why did it feel relevant to explore now?
The world is an uncertain place. It feels such an obvious thing to say, but it’s true. Even just on a personal level, our own lives feel more precarious now than they ever have. We got interested in ways that people seek certainty or knowledge about the future because, fundamentally, we have so little. We were interested in how to be okay with uncertainty, and also in the possibilities that making friends with uncertainty could open up.
It also feels to us like certain acts of prediction are not neutral. Tech corporations, for instance, are always trying to stay ahead of the curve, but in predicting where the future is going — AI, etc — actually work to bring that future into being. Often the attempt to tell the future feels like dictation, a way of furthering the status quo and protecting existing systems of power, or a headlong race in a predestined direction without consideration for the long-term consequences of the machinery they set in motion. What would it take to rupture a trajectory that sells itself as inevitable? Is that the difference between prediction and prophecy? A prophecy as something that breaks something…
The show combines dance, found text, sound design and improvised choreography. How did these different elements come together in the creative process, and how do they interact on stage?
We are proud jacks of all trades. We’ve always enjoyed stealing from different disciplines, and doing things we don’t ‘know’ how to do. I guess there’s not one way of approaching something that feels right to us, but what does feel right is to incorporate loads of different perspectives, approaches, aesthetics — to try to create this collage that can hopefully add up to more than the sum of its parts and capture something of the way the world feels.
Dance and movement is a really key part of the language of this piece, though. There is choreography that is totally set and difficult to memorise (we wanted a part of the show that we had to be completely certain of in order to perform — and that we might fail at), and improvised dance that involves us moving without knowing what’s going to happen. Improvisation as a way of literally ushering in the future. We’re not trained dancers and we have a particular way of moving, but we challenge ourselves in this show to expand that vocabulary.
The piece is structured in two mirrored halves — All the Barometers in the World and The Spelunkers. Could you talk about the thinking behind this dual structure and how the two parts relate to each other?
All the Barometers in the World centres around a couple of Victorian weather forecasting devices, one of which involves a very particular secret ingredient. It’s about men of science, and the desire to rationalise, quantify and interpret an unknowable world. We’re looking up to the skies and interpreting the data.
The Spelunkers looks the other way and goes underground. We got interested in cave exploration, darkness, and hermits who have visions of the future. It’s asking questions like: ‘What can we discover in the dark, or in solitude, that we didn’t know that we already knew?’ And ‘can you ever truly know what’s in the hole without getting in the hole yourself?’
We made the first part first thinking it would stand alone as a short half-hour piece. We did that, but it didn’t feel enough somehow. Then we made the second part and the two came together to make a whole. One isn’t quite complete without the other.
The imagery in the show — from meteorological devices to caves and hermits — feels quite eclectic and evocative. How did you develop the visual and conceptual world of the performance?
As I mentioned, we really like to sample and collage in our work. We tend to start with a lot of research, getting obsessed with things — the broader the reach, the better — and then we find ways of bringing things we find together, or sitting them next to each other, or layering them on top of each other. It’s in those juxtapositions and tensions that the work gets interesting. What exactly does a Victorian inventor have to do with a hermit have to do with a cave in Somerset?
Visually, we knew wanted to work with smoke and darkness, two things that are very basic parts of the theatrical technical apparatus, and can both be ways of obscuring things, making things hazy or uncertain, putting you in an altered state. People have told us that the show is incredibly atmospheric for a piece that is made on basically no budget!
Emergency Chorus has previously created works like Landscape (1989) and CELEBRATION. In what ways does Ways of Knowing continue or depart from the ideas and styles you explored in those earlier pieces?
Thematically, it’s bang on trend. We joke that we just make the same show again and again — we’re always fixated on the idea of the future, on the tension between hope and despair, and on the incredibly difficult, incredibly important task of trying to imagine a future that’s different to the present.
Stylistically speaking, Landscape (1989) was a very meditative, spacious piece in which we barely spoke any text. By contrast, CELEBRATION was energetic, bright and charming. I think Ways of Knowing in some ways synthesises those two moods. One audience member said it was very warm and welcoming at the same time as being mysterious and opaque. I like that. It also ends with a scene that’s tonally super different from the rest of the show, and from anything else we’ve made. That’s probably my favourite part of the show (no spoilers!).