Skin, Ground and Beckett

Skin and ground are both important parts of our perceptions, they both imply contradictory physical, psychological and emotional states and have both been conceived of and confronted through performance strategies.In the work of Samuel Beckett there is a challenge on the notion of gravity and a desire to escape from it. Gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly.

At one point in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot all four main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, collapse into a struggling heap on the ground. (Beckett 1986-p.38) For some minutes, the action threatens to stop altogether, with none of the characters able to get back on their feet. An early example of constriction and restriction appears at the end of Beckett’s novel Murphy, where the wheelchair-bound Mr. Kelly imagines flying his kite out of sight, and beyond the reach of his ruined, wheelchair-bound body. Mr. Kelly is detained in his wheelchair; the ground continues to organize the work, even in its absence.The same aspiration is to be found in Happy Days, in which Winnie, buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, speaks of her sensation of being pulled or sucked up into the air.

Skin and ground are time intrinsic and slowed into space, a stay against the passage of time. It is that towards which all movement tends. The dimension of downness and underness, can never be fully in mind, or in view, but always at work.