Triangulating
Bryoni Trezise, Performance
Triangulating – when a third thing sharpens, intensifies or complexifies the relationship between two preexisting things. In geometry and trigonometry, triangulation is a way to find the location of a point by creating triangles to that point from known points.
How might this be applied in creative practice? Perhaps in creative practice – a little like in maths – the location of a point is known to exist somewhere, but not-yet. Triangulating brings that point (the point of the work, the point of its resonance) into clarity. As a method of making it might help you to source what needs to come forth, without knowing exactly what that coming forth is or should be.
In writing, you might consider triangulation as a complexifying of perspective, of symbol, of space or of temporality. It might convey what is ‘beneath’ or ‘outside of’ the plane of what is spoken, the running of everyday temporalities, and instead offer a way to access the internal, the subconscious, the alter, the in-between. Narratively – and perhaps more simplistically – it can produce a form of erotic tension, as in the relationship between a lover, their beloved, and the thing that separates them. A love triangle (‘yawn’) is what my teenage daughter finds so boring and predictable about many of the young adult novels she reads. But something like temporal triangulation, or material, textual triangulation, or medial triangulation, in which there is a weaving of matter, concepts, fibres in relation – well, that kind of pursuit seems to be one of the underpinning principles of making and thinking through making performance.
In intermedial practice, triangulating is deeply connected to resonance, or, in my mind, what I would refer to as the vibrational qualities of things-in-relation. Theatre scholar Freddie Rokem considers energy as ‘the potential for causing changes, the work done by a certain force and how some kind of machinery or technical aid through physical or chemical changes produces “labour” that has an effect’ (Rokem 2000, 129). Carl Jung, of course, has considered energy as that which is produced by a ‘tension of opposites’ (Jung 1917, para 78). Jane Bennett also emphasises this kind of energetics as not only between, but as internal to, material and immaterial things, when she writes of the ‘energetic vitality inside … things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics’ (Bennett 2010, 8).
In teaching performance, the ‘rule of three’ was a phrase coined by now Honorary Lecturer at UNSW Clare Grant, to encourage makers to deepen and complexify their offerings (and in turn, perhaps to get to the root of what they were in fact trying to mean through their making), because it would encourage them to not only add another ‘meaning’, but another medium, so that the frission between different media would reverberate or ping in relation. The point here was not to add more of the same (and thereby to replicate, assert, flatten, explain) but to find a way to hold things in tremulous relation, so that the audience was also held in this gentle and exquisite form of questioning – delighted to be so carefully unmoored and unfixed.
References:
Rokem, Freddie. 2000. Interpreting the Theatrical Past.
Bennet, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter.
Jung, Carl. 1917. ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’ in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology