The Angel of History

A big thank you to everyone who joined me on Thursday evening for our session of devising, Looking Forward, Stepping Back, a creative session of The Embodied Voice. It was such a lovely bunch and each of you in your own way contributed something beautiful and authentic.

Our theme for the evening was embodying our relationship with time. I mentioned how I’d noticed in my studies of Mandarin that time seems to flow differently than in the West - 上年 (above year) means last year and 下年 (below year) means next year - while 前年 (in front year) means the year before last and 后年 (behind year) means the year after next… Compare in your own language how you relate the position of your body in space to time, I’ll bet it’s interesting! 

As we explored these concepts, some beautiful imagery and poetry arose - 

“What you’re present to is the lingering past”

“Nice confusion”

“There will be another rhythm, but it won’t be the last”

We ended the session by creating a sort of sound and movement forest, as one participant put it, performing with and for each other, our movement and song snippets. It was a real pleasure to see what we could do together, albeit in different rooms around the world. 

I thought I’d leave you all with one last little meditation on this topic of the embodied inhabiting of time. As I was preparing the session, an excerpt of some philosophy that I had read many years ago came to mind. It was a paragraph written by author Walter Benjamin about a painting by Paul Klee. In it he imagines a bleak angel of history facing towards the past and being blown inexorably into the future. 

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”

A really arresting image don’t you think? 

Anyway if you’d like to ponder more about this vision of history and progress, there’s a lovely article about Walter Benjamin and this painting here.

And once again thank you to everyone who attended, it was such a special session and I hope to see more of you in the Fall.