In Comes I is not a book about performance so much as a performance in its own right. As such, it almost defies description in the traditional, academic sense of the book review. Mike Pearson’s autobiographical wanderings around the district of North Lincolnshire (NE England) engage the reader in a co-journey that successfully conflates time/memory and space to produce the dense experience we sometimes call place. In this sense, the book does not ascribe meaning to the place but, rather, achieves it.
Currently teaching performance studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Mike Pearson returns to the home of his first decade and, with co-performers (including the reader), undertakes a critically reflective and concomitantly prospective exploration of place. He begins with the intimate space of his very own backyard, widening the circle throughout the book, from village to neighborhood, to region—the landscape that can be traversed by foot, bicycle, and, lastly, by car. Within each concentric circle, we begin with a performance of the place, then join in excursions to very specific points, often evoked through historical photos, and end with site-specific performance proposals that could feasibly engage individuals in joint, but not necessarily equivalent, experiences of place.
Echoing the three concentric circles experienced horizontally, over terrain, each section of the book moves chronologically through, essentially, three historical epochs (if you will), from the post-enclosure physical transformation of the relationship between people and their land (circa 1800), to the new self-reflexive era of photography ushered in around 1900, to the author’s own childhood in the 1950s. The nature of evidence moves from (what is taken to be) history to memory to, what is in fact the fourth period—presence—where time and space are conflated (or collide) in a now, which is performance.
The scholar of English folklore will find much to value here. Pearson, citing secondary sources and employing archival photographs, paints a wonderful picture of the evolution of the Plough Plays in North Lincolnshire. While judgmental historians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were bemoaning what they considered a movement from courtliness to hooliganism in the mumming activities of young farm workers, I suspect Pearson prefers the rougher elements of the tradition, insofar as mumming insists on spectators becoming part of the performance, or suffer consequences. Indeed, I imagine that Pearson prefers the Haxey Hood over the Plough Plays, as the body itself is privileged over language and formulaic traditions.
The Haxey Hood could best be described as a an inter-village contest in which teams of increasingly inebriated lads enter into and maintain a giant scrum or “sway” ranging over wide territory and several days, attempting to grab and move a leather sack (the hood) to the group’s home pub. With scant but “sufficient” reference to historical origins in the fourteenth century, the Haxey Hood annually re-traces the physical landscape as the sway somewhat unpredictably washes roughly over pasture, public street, and private hedge. As the mumming plays, with costume and behavior, challenge the social order, “The Haxey Hood is a potent act of transgression, of spacial delinquency, of communal trespass, rewriting laws of tenure and ownership, reappropriating the land, ignoring those maps that define and delineate: all under the illusionary sanction of no law” (161). In Pearson’s wonderful description: “All one sees is steam rising and the tracks that it leaves in the mud; part stampede, part slithery trail. In the neon-lit village street it becomes a tsunami, its approach apprehended only by the arrival of those fleeing to avoid it. In there (in the sway), there is nothing scapic or scopic about land; it’s underfoot and suddenly not. And then it’s in your ears and under your nails and up your nose” (157).
As Pearson notes, the Haxey Hood, for the insiders, erases the separation between self and scene and, as such, evokes the essential nature of what he considers to be alternative theater practice. In this practice, this performance art, the performer becomes dweller, after Ingold (2000) and Bourdieu (1977), and occupies not a spectated landscape but a taskscape—a lifeworld in which humans are (muscularly) engaged in an array of related activities drawing pattern, yes, but also novelty from merging experience and memory with projections of the future. In his interesting afterword, Pearson suggests that alternative theater practice may now have a long enough history for us to learn from the practitioners what, in retrospect, constitutes good practice (my phrase), as the mistakes or “scars” of alternative theater are reviewed in the ruminations and reminiscences of the players, a kind of genre-making, perhaps.
In the end, this is certainly not a book about English folklore. It’s not a book about anything. With its excellent concluding commentary notwithstanding, the physical structure of the book itself engages us in its performance. In a somewhat poignant comparison with the disappearance of the stone abutments of the wooded footbridge at Pottage’s Beck, Pearson muses that his book might eventually become just another historical document. Actually, he has likely minimized the chances of that happening by creating a work that, in many ways, is beyond time. In the words/weblog of his collaborator Michael Shanks, Pearson has “re-articulated fragments of the past as real-time event” (www.michaelshanks.org/archaeography).
Works Cited:
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
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[Review length: 890 words • Review posted on March 9, 2009]