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Textbook New Media Dramaturgy Performance Media and New Materialism 1St Edition Peter Eckersall Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook New Media Dramaturgy Performance Media and New Materialism 1St Edition Peter Eckersall Ebook All Chapter PDF
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New Dramaturgies
Series Editors
Cathy Turner
Drama Dept.
University of Exeter
Exeter, United Kingdom
Synne Behrndt
Dept. of Community and Performing Arts
University of Winchester
Winchester, United Kingdom
This series seeks to develop understanding of dramaturgy as a contempor-
ary field, in dialogue with its rich and varied past. The prefix ‘new’ invites
authors to pay attention to the expansion or re-framing of dramaturgy in
relation to contemporary contexts, rather than implying a requirement to
replace ‘old’ with ‘new’, or to offer a programmatic approach to the
definition and practice of dramaturgy. The series will comprise two
strands: Course texts which encompass fresh and original research insights
on key themes related to dramaturgy, at an accessible level for students
and non-experts; More specialized work which includes a higher level of
theorisation. The books in this series will, for example: look at the drama-
turgical implications of new media, globalisation and forms of spectator-
ship; draw on an ‘expanded’ use of dramaturgical analysis to examine the
relationship between theatrical performance and other disciplines; discuss
dramaturgical practice and theory, across a range of perspectives and
geographies. Aims of the series: To foster international dialogue and
exchange, extending understanding of the complex contexts of drama-
turgy and embracing its diversity and scope To examine and deploy
dramaturgical thinking as a productive analytical and practical approach
to performance criticism as well as performance-making To offer theore-
tical discussion of dramaturgy as a field To investigate the relationship
between idea and form in contemporary practice, including practice-as-
research To discuss emerging areas of contemporary performance practice
that produce new dramaturgies or re-contextualise existing approaches To
provide English-language texts for teaching dramaturgy in Higher
Education To build on existing overviews of dramaturgy and of contem-
porary performance practice to discuss specific aspects of dramaturgy in
detail, applying historical and theoretical rigour.
New Media
Dramaturgy
Performance, Media and New-Materialism
Peter Eckersall Helena Grehan
The Graduate Center Murdoch University
City University of New York Perth, Australia
New York, USA
Edward Scheer
School of the Arts & Media
University of New South Wales
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
New Dramaturgies
ISBN 978-1-137-55603-5 ISBN 978-1-137-55604-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55604-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932655
Cover illustration: END. A Two Dogs/Kris Verdonck production. Image © Reinout Hiel
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
humour. We would also like to thank the performance makers and artists
who joined us for the NMD praxis workshop we ran at UNSW, and thank
Su Goldfish and staff at the Io Myers Studio. Thanks to Performance
Space, Sydney for supporting the project and exhibiting Kris Verdonck’s
Gossip.
Some of the material in this study has appeared in earlier versions in the
following publications: Grehan, Helena. 2001. ‘TheatreWorks’
Desdemona: Fusing Technology and Tradition.’ TDR 45(3): 113–125.
Grehan, Helena. 2004. ‘Questioning the Relationship between
Consumption and Exchange: TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project,
December 2000.’ Positions East Asia Cultures Critique 12(2): 565–586
– and it has been really valuable to have the opportunity to revisit and
reconsider these earlier writings in the context of NMD, some years later.
We also acknowledge our entry on ‘New Media Dramaturgy’ in the
Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska, 2014,
London: Routledge – where some of the arguments developed in this
book were first canvassed.
The authors are also very grateful to TDR for permission to reuse their
three linked essays on NMD that were published in 2015. Grehan,
Helena. 2015. ‘Actors, Spectators and Vibrant Objects: Kris Verdonck’s
ACTOR#1.’ TDR 59(3): 132–139. Eckersall, Peter. 2015. ‘Towards a
Dramaturgy of Robots and Object-figures.’ TDR 59(3): 123–131.
Scheer, Edward. 2015. ‘Robotics as New Media Dramaturgy. The Case
of the Sleepy Robot.’ TDR 59(3): 140–149.
Kris Verdonck and A Two Dogs Company, Blast Theory, Hotel Modern,
Mari Velonaki, Ed Jansen and Louis-Philippe Demers have all kindly sup-
plied us with images and image permissions. A book on NMD without
images would have been a sad book. We thank them for their generosity.
We would also like to thank Fujimoto Takayuki, Takatani Shiro, Bubu de la
Madelaine, Ong Keng Sen, Lydia Teychenne and Kris Verdonck for their
generosity in taking the time to discuss their work with us.
Helena Grehan would like to acknowledge the Dean and staff in the
School of Arts at Murdoch University who have been gracious in their
support throughout the writing of this book. Particular thanks go to Anne
Surma and Sandra Wilson. She would also like to thank her co-authors
Peter Eckersall and Ed Scheer for spirited discussion, thoughtful
exchanges and for pushing her into the new media landscape. Helena
would also like to thank Hans-Willem and Saoirse for their love, tolerance
and interest. You make everything meaningful.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
Peter Eckersall would like to thank Helena Grehan and Ed Scheer for
their continual inspiration and generosity of spirit. Thanks also for the
dramaturgical insights and provocations from David Pledger, Katalin
Trencsényi, Alyson Campbell, Anny Mokotow, Rachael Swain, Paul
Jackson, Melanie Beddie and Paul Monaghan.
Edward Scheer wishes to express his gratitude to Rosa, Cordy, Nini and
Isa, and to Peter and Helena. ‘If You Want To Go Fast Go Alone, If You
Want To Go Far, Go Together’ (unattributed, possibly African origin).
Finally, we would like to thank Alexa Taylor, our research assistant, for
assisting with the final stages of the manuscript production. Her eye for
detail and breadth of knowledge about the topics, works and ideas covered
in the book have been invaluable.
CONTENTS
9 Post-NMD? 209
ix
x CONTENTS
Bibliography 213
Index 229
LIST OF FIGURES
xi
CHAPTER 1
to make the ‘impact of technology on our daily lives [its] very subject’ in
ways that touch on ‘existential questions of humanity’ (Verdonck 2002).3
Verdonck’s work highlights a tension between new media as an enabling
part of everyday life and culture, and as something that threatens it. This
tension informs the approach we take in this book. We situate the analysis
of what we will define as new media dramaturgy (NMD) between the
critique of a techno-determinism (the notion that new media determine
and delimit human experience) and the positivist development of a
techno-poesis designed to enhance and optimise social conditions. In
the style of Verdonck’s ongoing experiments with the dramaturgical, we
approach new media in relation to the place – technical, artistic and social
– it emerges from. This means that, in NMD, new media are considered
in terms of their material properties as well as their sometimes virtual
effects or appearances so that the technical specifications of a device will
be considered where relevant to its aesthetic deployment.
Verdonck has been pivotal to the development of the arguments
outlined here and has participated in workshops, presentations and
debates with the authors around the key terms of the research project
into new media and new dramaturgy from which this book emerged.
We began with the notion that what was once called new media has
increasingly become a familiar part of the dramaturgy of the last
quarter-century. This is especially the case since the pioneering work
of Japanese artist collective dumb type,4 a group whose work has, we
argue, been central to the development of NMD. We also wanted to
examine the ways that the use of video, powerful data projections, new
sound systems, and even technologies such as robots in dumb type’s
work reflected not so much a vanishing of human bodily presence from
the theatre or the arts of that period, but a more subtle repositioning
of bodily presence. This repositioning would not effectively abolish the
actor, for example, but would enable a different conception of acting
to emerge from the mediated assemblages in which performance now
occurs.
In broad terms we see that there is evidence of what theorists such as
Mark Hansen, Anna Munster and Donna Haraway have recognised as a
form of mediated rematerialisation rather than a dematerialisation occur-
ring in these fields of symbolic activity, in which bodily sensations and
sense experiences are now redistributed through technical means rather
than diminished or de-emphasised. What we discovered from looking at
the processes of making this work and talking with the artists was that the
CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 3
the human and the machinic in opposition. Instead, these agentic objects
now appear to engage in complex processes of negotiation and reflection on
the emergent possibilities of a new order of experience between the machi-
nic object and the active subject. The artworks in question in this study
employ and engage with images, machines and objects – what Verdonck
calls ‘figures’ – in ways that suggest alternative modes of making and
understanding experiential art that unleash the latent agency of the materials
at hand, and also echo out into the emerging cultural world more broadly.
The ‘new’ in the context of this book is a new that emerges in the inter-
stices. It is a ‘new’ developed as a result of (or in tandem with) these
advances in systems, media, material forms and technologies, when com-
bined with new ways of thinking about and mobilising these – of generating
new dramaturgical assemblages or possibilities. It is at the same time a ‘new’
emerging from the cultural and social processes that both surround and are
embedded in the work of art. Furthermore it is a ‘new’ that seeks its political
edge – one that pushes the limits of form and function within the artistic
space in order to test, bend and extend the realm of the possible, and at the
same time to probe, question and consider the state of things: relationships,
connections, networks, and structures.
Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, the ‘new’ in
NMD is practised and performed in the work of a range of important
contemporary artists – artists who are radically altering the order of things
through their work with objects, actants, atmospheres, visuality, sound,
machines, and systems of various kinds. The formation of NMD is the
product of an aesthetic ‘flat ontology’ in which the making of the work
depends as much on non-human as on human agency, an agency that
operates through – or often mobilises collaborations between – artists and
things. These artists are engaged with the materiality of objects and with
exploring, pushing and extending the substance of materiality. As
Marianne Van Kerkhoven, an influential dramaturg who worked exten-
sively with Verdonck, explains, they are telling us to ‘listen to the bloody
machine’ (Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens 2012). In the process, these artists
are profoundly changing the nature and limits of each work’s form as well
as its aesthetic concerns, as they engage in processes aimed at activating
the senses. These are processes that involve concrete, literal and material
objects rather than figurative explorations that point to more abstract
philosophical notions. They are processes that occur in a range of spaces,
and which mobilise these spaces and those who enter them in ways that
alter the parameters of relationships between the work, its performers, and
CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 5
its audience. Indeed, in some cases, the alterations are so profound that
the categories of the phenomenal and the technological blur, or, as Chris
Salter suggests, become ‘entangled’.
In effect, then, while we describe what we see as a paradigm shift in the
languages and practices of performance studies, we do not do so in terms of
an epistemic break or rupture, splitting off radically from the history of
performative art forms. Rather, as the media of performance develop new
kinds of agentic relations, both with audiences and their human co-workers,
we remain concerned with the evolution of old preoccupations (lighting,
scenography, dramaturgy) into new contexts, new institutional environ-
ments, aesthetic forms, and spectatorial experiences – assisted by some
new ideas from the speculative realists and other new materialist lines of
inquiry and reflections on recent practice. Specifically, we explore drama-
turgy as a conceptual approach to art-making and practice, with diverse sites
of application but grounded in a live-art aesthetic. We argue that this
aesthetic is itself changing and expanding from within, and in response to
the tensions outlined above – between the dystopia of techno-determinism
where robots threaten traditional forms of labour and the more utopian
techno-poesis where self-expression and experience are enhanced and
amplified. NMD therefore designates an expanded practice of conceptual
and creative labour across arts institutions and industries facilitated by recent
technical developments, mainly but not exclusively in digital media.
An important illustration of this changing and expanding aesthetic is
signalled in this chapter’s title, ‘Cue Black Shadow Effect’. This cue and its
associated technological innovation emerged from the 2008 contempor-
ary dance performance Mortal Engine by Chunky Move, choreographed
by Gideon Obarzanek. The standard practice to call cues as sequential
changes in the lighting states, sound effects, and properties during the
running of a performance is revised here by the unpredictable behaviour of
the visual effects developed for the show by Frieder Weiss – including the
eponymous black shadow effect. What is normally the most regulated and
repeatable aspect of performance is made conditional in Mortal Engine,
and a new way to operate the show that allowed for this was required.
Stage manager Lydia Teychenne recalls how the technical processes asso-
ciated with developing and running the performance of Mortal Engine
overturned long-established protocols: ‘Particularly as the actors who are
now involved in theatre making have changed (i.e. [Mortal Engine
included company members with backgrounds as] mathematicians and
visual artists). The mechanisms for theatre need to adapt to accommodate
6 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.
There are generally two distinct but related ancient Greek derivations sug-
gested for the word ‘dramaturgy’: drama-t-ourgos (the ‘composition’ of the
drama), and drama-t-ergon (the ‘work’ of the drama). . . . But both words
were so rare in Greek that the derivations are virtually nonsensical.
Nevertheless, these two ‘derivations’ reflect two different understandings as
to what is meant by the word, and consequently two different practices: one is
concerned with literary text (hence ‘script doctor’, ‘literary manager’ and so
on), the other includes the text along with all the other elements of perfor-
mance – space, light, movement, and so on (whence ‘production dramaturg’,
‘technical dramaturg’). In addition, the practice has been divided between
one based in aesthetics (the text and/or performance by itself, according to its
own internal coherence) and one based in sociology and ideology, or socio-
political, cultural and historical contexts. (Monaghan 2014, 3)
[I]s there a dramaturgy for movement, sound, light and so on, as well? Is
dramaturgy the thing that connects all the various elements of a play together?
Or is it rather, the ceaseless dialogue between people who are working on a
play together – or is it about the soul, the internal structure, of a production: or
does dramaturgy determine the way space and time are handled in a perfor-
mance, and so the context and the audience too. And so on. . . . We can
probably answer all these questions with Yes, but. (Van Kerkhoven 1994, 5)
BOOKENDING NMD
We deploy the terminology of new media to consider its deployment
across the visual and performing arts in the last two decades. Our first
examples are from dumb type and their 1989 analogue-industrial machine
performance pH, and we end with more recent examples from the work of
Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company. Bookending our study with
dumb type and Verdonck illuminates the shift in approaches to experience
design in the use of theatre and performance technology in the past 25
years. The shift might be characterised as one in which the human sense of
what occurs, the overt anthropo-scenography of our traditions, is gradu-
ally diminished in favour of an object-oriented scenography informed by
what the technology itself seems to want to say. In this study we see
technologies that are overtly visible, externally mechanical, operating on
and against bodies, centrally regulated and controlled alongside dispersed,
multiple, interactive, liquid media.
For example, in dumb type’s pH, the stage design is structured by the
use of two huge purpose-built mechanical armatures constantly sweeping
the stage area. With the audience looking down onto a white rectangular
stage, the performance choreography is dictated by the need for the
performers to slide under or jump over the perpetual robotic glide of the
lower beam. Fast forward to Verdonck’s Box (2005) and the contrast is
evident. While the design of the work is similarly based on the distinctive
presence of a machine, its effects are less overtly material, simply the
production of a light so blinding it cannot be seen, only experienced as
something beyond human apprehension, since to look directly at the
source of the light without the protective glasses provided could cause
serious side effects and possibly lasting ocular damage.
While both of these works can be understood as performative responses
to technology, their different approaches to dramaturgy are instructive.
12 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.
Artistic processes are, for Verdonck, ones of discovering what the machine
‘needs’ and ‘wants’ to do. This leads directly to the question of dramaturgy
CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 13
and the desire to think about the materiality of the machine as a part of his
dramaturgical process. This is a firm point of orientation for our book – the
discovery of the importance of objects in performance for their own sake,
their materiality, and their spectrum of performance parameters. These
machines are not as deterministic as they are in pH, but they are relational,
transforming of matter, fluid and effortless, also perhaps sinister and con-
trolling.10 To understand the significance of Verdonck’s dramaturgy, to
account for the ideas and the action, is to listen to his machines.
what Scheer has called ‘performative media’ (2011). This term refers to
assemblages of bodies and media that, in their mode of production and
reception, involve and invoke ‘meaningful gestures, symbolic acts and
significant behaviours on behalf of human actors’, such as the example
of motion-capture systems (Scheer 2011, 36). NMD is a way of analysing
performative media in just this sense, by proceeding with the understand-
ing that the body/technology nexus in performance functions to amplify
rather than negate bodily and affective experience. In effect we argue that
the interaction between live forms and mediated experiences reintensifies
both media and performance in the context of NMD.
This type of work clearly raises questions about the limits of live
performance, since the only live component in an installation is the spec-
tator and their remixing of the elements of the recorded performances.
The dislocation of the familiar roles assigned to viewers and performers is
for media artist Jeffrey Shaw the essence of contemporary art practice as he
understands it. Shaw describes a kind of ‘euphoric dislocation’ arising
from the perceived friction that occurs when our bodily senses start rub-
bing up against our projections and fantasies; ‘representation is and always
was the domain of both our embodied and disembodied yearnings’
(Hansen 2006, 90). This conception of NMD as a new materialist aes-
thetic is exemplified in Verdonck’s most recent production, In Void,
described by the artist as ‘an uncanny experiment’ and an attempt to
create ‘a performance without human presence’ and ‘a reflection on the
end of humankind’. The design of the work features Verdonck’s machines
imagining the world without us as his embodied machine agents come
into contact with the disembodied yearnings of the spectators to experi-
ence a more liberated mode of addressing the performance event:
At the cash desk you don’t buy a ticket, but a code that allows you to unbolt
the door of the theater building. You wander around freely in an obscure
world full of surprising machines, objects and images: a combustion engine
that goes all the way until it spurts flames, a bath of light of 400.000 lumen
and floating, composing sousaphones. (Verdonck 2003)
projection in the context of NMD is something that has its own agenda
and agency and is not simply at the service of a story or a characterisation.
The discussion of illumination is continued and extended in Chapter 3
where we explore the development of outdoor lighting systems, large-scale
projections, and light and video displays in installation works exhibited in
gallery spaces. We draw on Sean Cubitt’s idea of ‘organised light’ (2015,
45) as the functional ability to focus and amplify light in parallel with
developments of the technologies of luminescence in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. We argue that these developments predicate a com-
plexity of aesthetic and political relations that have bearing on histories of
urban space, political economy, and ideas of community and nationhood.
Our discussion touches on the rise of spectacular lighting events that
featured at expositions, civic events and world fairs, as well as case studies
by artists including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, dumb type and Ikeda Ryoji.
The chapter comes full circle in a discussion of Verdonck’s Stills, a large-
scale work projected onto the sides of buildings in post-austerity Athens in
2015. The early termination of this work at the behest of the authorities
created a media frenzy, and our analysis of this scene shows how these
manifestations of public projection incorporate and extend technologies of
performance to animate ideas beyond the work itself.
Chapter 4 engages with what we call ‘the theatre of atmosphere’. This
idea is in some respects the centre of our study of NMD, considering the
ways that familiar atmospheric effects used in theatre, such as haze, fog and
smoke, are deployed beyond the stage to produce mist and clouds in
installation works all featuring a medium that is simultaneously material
and immaterial, present and dispersed. How these conditions are gener-
ated in situ is necessarily a dramaturgical question. The studies in this
chapter are therefore of artworks that produce fragile and sensitive
essences. We consider Nakaya Fujiko’s Fog Sculptures, Berndnaut
Smilde’s series of works under the title Nimbus, Blur Building by the
architects Diller and Scofidio, and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project.
Dramaturgically these works have in common a fluid and even deterritor-
ialising effect. They are also directly affective and immediate; to be present
and move inside these works is to have one’s field of vision severely
constricted, and to reach out to others sharing the space. It is also often
to feel a coolness on the skin. Their concern with weather brings the
politics of global warming to a close and personal level. There is also a
politics of the non-human turn here, an atmospheric scene that is also an
ecology in microcosm. This chapter explores how and why artists develop
CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 17
such high-tech systems to produce these simple effects and what this
means for new media dramaturgy.
In Chapter 5 we look at the use of robots in recent theatre and argue
that, in some cases, robots are ideal vehicles for performance based on new
media dramaturgy as they can translate between the informatic and the
organic, facilitating meaningful transactions between human visitors and
autonomous or semi-autonomous machines. But they also raise significant
questions about aesthetic representation and audience response. The chap-
ter considers recent work in creative robotics that gestures towards some-
thing beyond the robotics of industrial design and performance based on
efficiency (speed and productivity) and beyond the comparatively simple
question of the representation of robotics in the world. This involves a
rediscovery of the larger representational function of robotics in imaging the
enhanced qualities of human experience rather than simply its visual man-
ifestations. We argue, through analyses of robot and android theatre works
by Hirata Oriza and Ishiguro Hiroshi, Mari Velonaki, and Verdonck, that
the experience and meaning generated by this work is a result of the entire
systems design and dramaturgy, and that it is dramaturgically constituted as
a result of the interactions between entities rather than as a feature of one or
more of the constituent entities. Recent work that explores what Braidotti
calls ‘a displacement of the lines of demarcation . . . between the organic
and the inorganic’ (2013, 89) will also be discussed in reference to theoris-
ing a political perspective on NMD and robotics. In short, we will demon-
strate that we do not need identifiably human actors as guarantors of
meaning and intimacy, either in robotics or in performance.
Chapter 6 is concerned with Michel Chion’s notion of ‘superfield’, a
term used to describe the overly present and autonomous effect of
sound in film (Chion 1994, 150). With the development of high-
fidelity sound systems, sound presence in film (‘projected’ in cinematic
speaker arrays and even via headphones inserted into the ear canal) is
super-abundant; it is a resonant field that can be more sensorially
compelling than visual effects. What is its correlation in performance?
We consider a range of artworks that utilise distinctive acoustic registers
as a primary means of surpassing representation. For example, our
discussion of Romeo Castellucci’s work with the composer Scott
Gibbons asks if it is a rejoinder to Antonin Artaud’s plea for an
aesthetic field of sonic disturbance that activates the limits of human
organic perceptiblity. The extreme superfield effects made possible by
digital technologies are also discussed in relation to Ikeda Ryoji’s
18 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.
— Semjon!
— Hä?
Semjon virkkoi:
— En osaa mitään.
Semjon oli ihmeissään ja sanoi:
— Mihail.
VI
Päivä meni, toinen tuli, viikot kuluivat, ja sitten meni vuosi umpeen.
Mihail asui yhä vielä Semjonin luona tehden hänelle työtä. Pian
sanoivat kaikki, ettei matkojen päässä ollut parempaa suutaria kuin
Semjonin uusi oppipoika; kukaan ei muka osannut tehdä niin siistiä
ja kestävää työtä. Kaikkialta ympäristöstä tuli ihmisiä Semjonin
luokse teettämään itselleen saappaita, joten suutari sai kootuksi
itselleen jonkin verran omaisuutta.
Poika toi heti käärön. Herra otti sen häneltä, laski pöydälle ja
sanoi:
— Avaa se!
— Otetaanko?
Mihail vastasi:
— Kyllä ne ovat valmiit silloin kun pitääkin.
— Hyvä on!
Ja Matrjona sanoi:
VII
Matrjona tuli pöydän ääreen. Hän katseli, kuinka Mihail teki työtä,
ja oli ihmeissään. Hän ymmärsi jonkin verran suutarinammattia ja
huomasi, ettei Mihail leikannut nahasta varsisaappaita, vaan kevyitä,
matalia kenkiä.
Matrjona aikoi kysyä häneltä, mitä hän oikein tekee, mutta ajatteli
kuitenkin: »Ehkä minä en ymmärrä, miten ylhäisille tehdään
saappaita. Mihail tietää varmaan sen paremmin. Parasta, etten
sekaannu koko asiaan.»
Hän oli tuskin alkanut nuhdella, kun joku koputteli ulko-oven ripaa.
He katsoivat ulos ikkunasta ja näkivät miehen ratsun selässä
pysähtyneen mökin ulkopuolelle ja sitovan kiinni hevostaan. He
avasivat oven: ylhäisen herran renkipoika astui sisään.
— Hyvää päivää!
— Kun läksi teiltä, niin matkalla kuoli rekeen. Kun oli päästy kotiin
ja tultiin auttamaan herraa pois reestä, makasi tämä kuolleena ja
kankeana. Saimme hänet suurella vaivalla nostetuksi pois reestä.
Rouva lähetti minut sitten tänne: — Sano suutarille, että herra, joka
äskettäin kävi siellä ja jätti sinne nahkaa, ei enää tarvitse saappaita;
saappaiden sijaan olisi kiireesti ommeltava tohvelipari ruumiille.
Odota, kunnes tohvelit ovat valmiit, ja tuo ne mukanasi! Sen takia
minä olen nyt tullut tänne ja odotan, kunnes tohvelit valmistuvat.
VIII
— Hyvää päivää!
— Mikäpäs siinä! Ei sitä ole meillä vielä koskaan tehty kenkiä näin
pienille lapsille, mutta osataanhan ne tehdä. Minkälaiset vain
määräätte. Tältä minun apulaiseltani syntyy millainen kenkä tahansa.
Hän oli yksin, kun lapset syntyivät, ja yksin, kun veti viimeisen
henkäyksensä.
Ja Mihail vastasi:
Ja Semjon virkkoi:
Ja Mihail vastasi:
Lapset liikahtelivat äitinsä vieressä, mutta äiti oli niin heikko, ettei
jaksanut ottaa heitä rintaansa vasten. Kun äiti näki minut, ymmärsi
hän, että Jumala oli minut lähettänyt noutamaan hänen sieluaan.
Hän itki ja virkkoi minulle: »Jumalan enkeli! Mieheni on vastikään
haudattu, hän jäi kaatuvan puun alle. Minulla ei ole sisarta, ei tätiä
eikä isoäitiä; ei ole ketään, joka voisi kasvattaa lapseni isoiksi. Älä
ota sieluani, anna minun elää, jotta voisin elättää ja kasvattaa
lapsiani. Ilman isää ja ilman äitiä he eivät voi elää.» Tein kuten hän
pyysi, ja panin toisen lapsista hänen rintaansa vasten ja toisen
hänen käsivarrelleen ja liidin ylös Jumalan luo. Tulin Jumalan luo ja
sanoin: En voi ottaa tuon äidin sielua. Isän surmasi kaatuva puu
metsässä, ja äiti synnytti kaksoset ja rukoilee, etten ottaisi hänen
sieluansa. Hän sanoo: 'Anna minun kasvattaa lapseni suuriksi! Ilman
isää ja ilman äitiä he eivät voi elää.' Ja niin jätin ottamatta tuon äidin
sielun. — Ja Herra sanoi minulle: 'Mene, tuo hänen sielunsa! Sinä
tulet käsittämään kolme sanaa: tulet ymmärtämään, mitä ihmisissä
on, mitä ihmisille ei ole annettu, ja mistä ihmiset elävät. Kun olet sen
oppinut, saat palata taivaaseen. Liidin jälleen maailmaan ja otin
äidiltä sielun.
XI
Mitä ihmisissä on, sen minä jo tiesin. Nyt minulle selvisi, mitä
ihmisille ei ole annettu. Ihmisten ei ole annettu tietää, mitä he
ruumistaan varten tarvitsevat. Ja minä hymyilin toisen kerran. Sillä
minä iloitsin, kun näin toverini enkelin ja kun Jumala oli ilmaissut
minulle toisenkin sanan.
XII
Ja enkelin yltä putosivat maalliset vaatteet, ja hän verhoutui valoon,
niin ettei ihmissilmä voinut häneen katsoa. Ja hän puhui kovemmalla
äänellä, ja tuntui kuin se ääni olisi tullut taivaasta eikä hänestä. Ja
enkeli sanoi: