Mess, exhaustion, and collapse: incommensurability and survival in Bullyache’s TOM (2023)

TOM (2023), a performance by UK dance company Bullyache, is set in a dystopian waiting room of the Government Department of Work and Pensions; the performers compete in a pageant, their bodies continually driven to and drawn back from the brink of collapse. In attempting towards success as normatively defined, the performers reveal the lengths subjects go to merely obtain the conditions of survival. Assembled and waiting, seemingly indefinitely, the performers transform their holding space from one of competition into one where they might be held, and held up, by one another. With nominal ‘winners’ only momentarily held up as singularly talented or resilient, individual winners or losers are not sustained for long; the performers circulate, come into focus, and fall away again, an undulating collective body that is not altogether lost but is held up by their togetherness, their performance of enduring and of being-with.

Messiness, in this context, might characterise the bending of individual will – that which demands precision, compliance, synchronicity – to that of the collective, which moves towards and sustains incommensurability. This is what I see at work in TOM. Exhaustion might be caused by an eventual failure to keep up one’s boundaries, by the gradual softening or weakening of barriers, having reached a limit at which those limits are collapsed. In TOM, we see exhaustion and we see the inexhaustible. The performers lean on, hold up, and step in for one another, allowing individual dancers to recuperate but not to hold up the collective movement of the show. Drawing on Joshua Chambers-Letson’s proposal of “a communism of incommensurability” as a practice “of being together in difference” (Chambers-Letson 2018), I suggest that messiness lingers on the edges of and participates in a practice of incommensurability, both in the sense of encompassing entanglements or assemblages “that are rich with ‘partition and particularity’”, but which “may yet produce new forms of proximity and affinity, giving way to diverse, collective practices of mutual care, survival, and world-creation for and amongst different minoritarian subjects” (Chambers-Letson 2018), and retaining a commitment to the complexities of mess and of difference (or mess as difference). Rather than move over and away from the messiness of mess, my proposal is to stick with it, to sit with it, and to practice an ethical attunement to the difficulties and possibilities of messy subjects, contexts, and practices.

My proposal for Bullyache’s TOM is that the performers no doubt practice and perform dissent, but might more accurately be said to be enacting choreographies or corporealities of mess, which place exhaustion, instability, and collapse as the point of origin and not of its ending. This paper engages with exhaustion and collapse as subversive yet powerful strategies of survival and argues that attending to messiness, becoming entangled in its intricacies and refusing the possibility of working towards clarity or precision, is not an admission of defeat so much as an acknowledgement of refusal and dissensus as sensible states of being in and moving through the world.