Steve Dixon
Revisiting T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’
Video / 3:00 mins
ABOUT THE WORK
Trailer to a full-length film interpretation of Eliot’s iconic poem, featuring original music by Joyce Beethuan Koh and performers Kristina Pakhomova and Milenko Prvacki. The dioramas at Haw Par Villa have a starring role, providing a perfect complement to Eliot’s allusions to folklore, myths and Eastern religions, but also to his darker message that cities, traditions and cultures are crumbling.
REFLECTION
Eliot’s 1922 meditation on isolation and alienation was written following the trauma of World War I. It takes on new meaning a century later, grappling with themes that echo uncannily amid the pandemic, from feelings of melancholy, loss and longing to the fear of death and the promise of rebirth.
Credit:
Music and sound design by Joyce Beethuan Koh
Studio camerawork by Khalid Al Mkhlaafy
Voiceover audio recording by Justin Hegburg
Performers:
Kristina Pakhomova and Milenko Prvacki
Director, camera and narrator:
Steve Dixon
Changing Everything—COVID-19 and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
The COVID-19 pandemic changes everything—so it has been said numerous times; and during the lockdown I decided to revisit something that in its own time equally changed everything: T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.
Published in 1922, it tore up the rulebook not just for poetry, but writing itself, announcing the modernist avant-garde in literature with a devastating flourish. What Stravinsky did for music with The Rite of Spring in 1913 and Duchamp did for fine art with his 1917 urinal The Fountain, Eliot did for literature with The Waste Land.
The 434-line poem is a densely fragmented mosaic of classical allusions, social critiques, philosophical musings, and splintered narratives ranging from the sexual to the spiritual. Together with James Joyce’s novel Ulysses the same year, it entirely changed the concepts, limits and ambitions of artistic writing.
Coming to Southeast Asia eight years ago provided the initial inspiration to attempt to audio-visually interpret the iconic poem, and I created a solo multimedia theatre performance in 2013. During lockdown I have reconceived it as a movie, 40 minutes in length.
While largely set in London, the poem frequently alludes to Asian cultures and religions. The vivid landscapes, cultural traditions and images I’ve encountered while travelling the region have ignited surprising connections and counterpoints to the poem’s ideas, and the film makes use of imagistic juxtapositions between England and Asia (e.g. see the end of the video trailer). The poem also resonates strongly with the experience of the lockdown—for example, one character asks:
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? “What shall I do now? What shall I do? What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?”
The stark numbness of these existential questions has reverberated loudly, with Eliot’s bleak yet beautiful meditations on isolation and alienation taking on whole new meanings a hundred years after he penned them. The poem arose in the wake of the global trauma of World War I (1914-18) and the personal trauma of Eliot’s mental breakdown in 1921.
Revisiting The Waste Land underlines its currency and potency for our own time, grappling with themes that echo uncannily with the anxieties surrounding the pandemic, from feelings of melancholy, loss and longing to the fear of death and the promise of renewal and rebirth.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Steve Dixon is President of LASALLE College of the Arts, and an interdisciplinary artist working in theatre, video, interactive media and installation. He is the author of an 800-page history of ‘Digital Performance’' (MIT Press 2007), and his latest book ‘Cybernetic-Existentialism’ (Routledge 2020) fuses perspectives from philosophy and systems science to critique contemporary art.