DIALOGUES

Blood Math

Peggy Phelan and Adrian Heathfield

This dialogue took the form of a series of spoken fragments developed in correspondence by Phelan and Heathfield and then composed in an interleaved structure. Employing slide imagery and a musical score the correspondence was pursued through a ‘game’ of spelling in which the participants gradually chalked out a word on a black board. Each letter of the word stood for a thematic concern elaborated in the speaker’s writing. Working from various anthropological, psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses on the nature of ‘the gift’, the dialogue examined the place of performance within various economies of cultural and personal exchange. The authors’ attempts to write letters to each other moved through the inter-texts of Beckett, Boltanski, Heidegger, Nabokov and Franko B. The resonance of the act of giving was explored as it is played out in the relations between language and loss, calculation and love, memory and the object, the body and sacrifice, the arts of living and the arts of death. Aside from its conceptual address the dialogue explored the possibilities of the practice of performative writing and opened the form of the scholarly essay.

Blood Math was commissioned by the performance company Goat Island and was first performed at the Goat Island Summer School, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, July 1999. It was later performed at Virtual and Visceral, Performance Studies international, Phoenix, March 2000 and at the London International Festival of Theatre, Riverside Studios London, June 2001.

A version of the text without images and sound is published in The Performance of Love an issue of Cultural Studies, Vol. 15. No. 2. April. ISSN 0950-2386.