How can stillness move? Theatre maker Dom Weatherby reflects on working with stones in Emballage Ensemble’s new production The Writing of Stones.
The stones sit in a box in the corner of the rehearsal room or, sometimes, perched on chairs, watching us from the side. We found them in a shop in the strange shopping centre they make you walk through when you are trying to escape The Louvre. We spent two hours in there, asking the shopkeeper to unlock the display cases and reach carefully inside dozens of exhibits and drawers, our broken French misguiding his fingers over the sharp and expensive artefacts. We put them on rickety plinths in a line that spread along the entire shop counter, shining our phone-torches at them from different angles. The shopkeeper was polite and helpful, but his facial reactions suggested that really he thought we were mad.
We couldn’t decide which ones were perfect, so we left without buying any. The shopkeeper agreed to keep half of them aside for ‘callbacks’, but when we returned later that day, two squashed sandwiches in the Tuileries later, he confessed that after we had gone he had put all the stones back in their cabinets.
We asked him to fish them out again. We paid him and we left, carrying our fragile cast members with us for another fortnight as we zigzagged on trains across France.
Emballage, a collaboration between myself and director, scenographer, and performer Emma Wagstaff, have been working on The Writing of Stones since February 2022. We haven’t been working on it constantly. We also haven’t been working on it alone. Since the start of 2024, we have also been joined by two talented makers and performers, John Harper and Juliana de Aragão. In May, we recruited another group of collaborators in the shop beneath the Louvre.
They are with us in rehearsal now – our precious fragments of agate, lapis lazuli, labradorite, and amethyst. With them in the room, we can begin to imagine the lively relationship that emerged between these curious objects and Roger Caillois, the multi-disciplinary writer whose ideas have inspired our project. As a member of the Surrealists, Caillois developed a lifelong fascination with stones; he collected hundreds, titling them like readymade artworks. He later split from the group (reportedly because André Breton refused to slice open a Mexican jumping bean) and set out to combine the fantastic with the empirical, the poetic with the scientific, ‘the web of dreams with the chain of knowledge’. In his essay-poem The Writing of Stones (1970), Caillois sought to present stones as points where web and chain could meet.
In giving grand roles to inert matter, Cailois recognised that his musings on stones were audacious. He acknowledged, as everyone can, that stones are ‘blind and insensate’, lack ‘consciousness and initiative’ and are ‘deprived of the fluidity of life’. For our purposes as theatre-makers, it is hard to think of worse attributes in your collaborators. Nevertheless, the longer Caillois attended to stones, the greater the power they exercised over him, and the more he felt they indicated ‘the existence of an underlying imaginary that is’, not just contained in the human mind, but ‘part of the real’. In reading Caillois’ more gnomic passages, I am grateful for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lucid distinction between ‘secondary music, which is what you hear when you go to a concert’ and ‘primary music which is what you hear when you listen to the sound of the wind and the rain.’ Caillois’ claims about stones are both more holistic and elusive, but a speed-walk through the woods with Coleridge can help us beat a quicker path to Caillois’ perception about the relationship between nature and the human imagination.
Reading Caillois is often both an invitation to theatre – a place to consider perception, imagination, and play – and a denial of it – what could be more antitheatrical than a stone? Our decision to work within a form that is driven by movement has only accentuated this paradox. How to launch things that are static and silent into the territory of physical theatre? How to make a movement-led show about objects that are entirely still?
However, the more time we spend with our stones, the clearer it becomes to us, as it did to Caillois, that they are, in fact, moving at a speed entirely of their own.
To see something is, in some sense, to become it, to take on its movements as movements of your own. After so many hours spent pondering his collection, Caillois reflected that ‘I feel myself becoming a bit like stones’. Occasionally, I wonder whether in the presence of these curious things something similar might slowly be happening to us, too.
Thu 21 - Fri 22 Nov 2024 at 7.15pm
Tickets: £8-12
