​​Goldsmiths, University of London
Department of Theatre and Performance

“TIMING IS DIVINE”
Research Statement

Vida Vojić Frankmar
MA Performance Making 2021-2022
Candidate Number: 33687271



“TIMING IS DIVINE” is a 30 minute drum solo that uses elements of performance art, poetry and ritual.

Throughout the course of studying performance art, I began questioning the importance of “liveness”. At the start of my masters programme, I used a lot of technology in my performances such as pre-recorded sound and video, because this was simply my habit from before. I soon realised that my main challenge throughout these two years of study would be to simplify my setup, and consequently grow (physically) closer and closer to myself and the audience. This would entail overcoming the fear of not being perceived as smart or entertaining enough on stage, but rather focusing on the quality of “presence”.

As a way of treating the theme of absence and distance which I personally feel comes with the extensive usage of technology in contemporary art making, the drums felt like a suitable choice of instrument because of its directness, vibrational capacities and primal feel.

Upon deciding to use the drum kit as my centre focus in creating this piece, I began diligently practising the drums about a month prior to the performance. Questions that surfaced through the process were; how can I pull off a 30 minute drum solo, without it becoming boring and without me being a very “good” drummer, yet knowing good as meaning something different in the world of (performance) art? How can I use the drumming to draw attention to matters I find meaningful? How may I insert femininity into the assertive role of the drummer?

In the process of improving my drumming technique, I tried approaching the drums using my idea of an Asian martial arts mindset - where discipline and spiritual growth are married, as opposed to the way I recall experiencing music education while growing up in Sweden. Back then, I kept losing patience, because it felt as though the only purpose of practising was to “become better”, and this lacked purpose for me. I still view Western education (and society at large) as deprived of much spiritual purpose. To echo what the pioneering free jazz drummer (and martial artist) Milford Graves said in an interview - “A musician is a vibrator. Their responsibility is to energise the whole body, bringing people deeper into themselves, which invites them to tap into their unmet potential”(1). Vibration is something we are always experiencing. The poet and ritualist performance artist CAConrad has in their work “Resurrect Extinct Vibration” emphasised the fact that while losing the inherent sounds of the earth’s wildlife, and the vibrations of nature, our environment is increasingly being replaced with the vibrations of industrial machinery. Having lived within the infrastructure of the city of London these past nine months, I wanted to regain power over my own rhythm - delivering it as a woman creating and asserting her own structure within a patriarchal and industrial one. Connecting my drumming with these bigger themes helped me to not grow bored, but instead, evolving in my practice felt like a profound experience for both my body and mind.

I decided to repeatedly count out loud during the initial sequence of the performance, so as to invite the audience to actively listen, drawing attention to the way the polyrhythms are created through different numbered patterns - desiring to insert spiritual awareness - into numbers, making holy what Western society has sought to make solely functional.

Hammering away at the drum kit, I found myself feeling in a position of authority. Drums have frequently been used in ritual contexts in many cultures, not only to activate the living bodies, but also to call in spirits, connect with ancestors and awaken the dead(2). I thus saw this as an opportunity to recall histories that might have been lost to time. In my ontology - I am cautious of labelling our current era as progressive, or “at least better than the past”. Instead, I am interested in ancient civilisations, indigenous cultures and alternative timelines. This was how I came to recite the poem “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” which dates back to circa 2 - 4 AD and was discovered inside a clay jar in the Egyptian desert in 1945 along with 51 other Gnostic manuscripts, known as the Nag Hammadi library. These primary "Gnostic Gospels'' were thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define "orthodoxy". « The Thunder, Perfect Mind focuses attention on the hearers’ relationship to the divine speaker not only through its alternating structure of first-person proclamation and second-person address, but also through its themes of kinship and gender, its references to the audience’s responses to the divine, and its claims about the speaker’s role in the operations of language and intellect. Its persistent, uncompromising use of paradox pushes its hearers to relinquish the apparent sense of its words and to seek the hidden meaning of individual utterances and of the discourse as a whole. Finally, by locating the divine in the “voice” and “hearing” of the text, it leads its hearers to find the divine within the text and within themselves, and so to discover themselves within the divine » (3). Thus, the poem somehow retracks intuition, inner knowing, and utter presence in feeling, rather than the rational, atheist and scientific thinking that is favoured in today’s society. It is written from the perspective of a divine feminine authority, which puts into question how patriarchal early Christianity, may, or may not, have been.

The choice of finishing the performance by singing the Swedish folk song “Uti Vår Hage”, meaning “Out in our pasture” was that I recently learnt that the song’s mentioning of a variety a flowers, berries and herbs, might not only be painting a picture of a beautiful summer landscape, but might in fact be a recipe for an abortion potion. There is plenty of evidence that women knew how to perform abortions using medicinal plants in pre 15th century Europe(4), though following the events of the European witch hunts and the shift into the industrial ages that came to shape the world we today live in - this type of knowledge became banned and consequently fell into oblivion. Erasing knowledge through burning books, censoring information and silencing people is a constantly recurring power tool for authorities to define our shared ontology. To conceal this type of information within the format of a folk song, that is transferred generation to generation via oral tradition, seems to me a clever way of keeping knowledge alive.

Another idea which inspired this performance was that of a male artist genius, and how it seems as though in rock music, many famous men have been praised for embracing “their feminine side” e.g. Prince, David Bowie, Robert Smith. I questioned whether a woman embracing her male side would receive the same amount of praise and I wondered what the reversal might look like. I hence sought to experiment using the most archetypal rock daddy I could think of - Elvis Presley. Despite the humour of this choice, the irony is that I find the song "Can't help falling in love with you" really beautiful, and true - because even though all these men annoy me, I can't help falling in love with them. We are, after all, in this together. However, this time around I wanted to tell another story, as a woman within the lineage of many unheard women.

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1. Milford Graves: Sounding the Universe, New Music USA
2. Ritual dance of the royal drum, Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
3. The Thunder: Perfect Mind, Diotima, 2019
4. E.g. Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici



Bibliography

The Thunder, Perfect Mind, Nag Hammadi 4 AD, Translated by George W. MacRae in 1977
Caliban and the witch, Silvia Federici, 2004
Pyramid Code documentary series, 2010
The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell, New Dimensions Radio, episode 6, 8, 13, 1975-1987
Girl in a band: a memoir, Kim Gordon, 2015
A Sand Book, Ariana Reines, 2019
AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, CAConrad, 2022
The Thunder: Perfect Mind, Diotima, 2019