Spaces of movement require a reorientation to spatial phenomena. Boundaries, for example, cannot be conceived as rigid and impermeable (keeping some things inside while keeping everything else outside). Rather, boundaries are constituted in a way that is flexible and porous. When subordinated to movement, spatiality is given vaguely. In a vague space, something is always moving. Movements between and across vague spaces are abundant in both performance pieces. Schutzman’s Joker is a locus of paradox and transformation—both of which serve to unhinge ontological commitments and insert vagueness into space. The Joker is a character of vague spaces, a vagabond providing an element of surprise and an encounter with an event. In Raikes’ description of the “cosine” performance, a vagabond orientation to space is central to understanding that piece: a primacy of motion is attributed to the spatial explication of the performance itself, which is, just like the documentary website, presented synaesthetically as a space of sights, sounds, and tactile experience that moves around audiences while audiences simultaneously move through the performance. Here, the notion of boundary is further expressed in terms of movement. The space itself is literally in motion.

In a space of movement, a boundary is never more than a suggestion, something tentative. A space of movement is more like a fog or a mist than something stable and inert. Such a space is alive, yet fleeting. To inhabit a space of movement—to try it on and wear it—is to occupy a place both familiar and alien. You can’t get too comfortable unless you get comfortable with change. It’s an art of encounter, an aesthetic of orientation. Its occupation is the embodiment of the force of process.

A vague space is characterized by approximation. This is not because some pure essence is being glanced upon and assessed in a tentative way, but because the tentative and the approximate is the essence of a space of movement. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain this by positing two forms of cultural processes to explain relationships of power, knowledge, and transformation in various discourses. On the one hand there are “royal” or “state” forms. These are the more static forms that articulate structures of political and social power. These are the received views, standard methodologies, official histories, and accepted logics of arts, sciences, philosophy, and literature. On the other hand, there are the “vague,” “vagabond,” or “nomad” forms of cultural processes that constantly flee, challenge, displace, and usurp state forms. Each form constitutes a different orientation to its object (static vs. fluid, for example). Interactions between these forms (state and nomad) occur in a vague space—a field of relations. Deleuze and Guattari write that a royal form “continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad [forms] while nomad [forms] continually cut the contents of royal [forms] loose” (367). In other words, the function of vague process and spaces is to bring about multiple operations of change: supplying creative ideas to structures of power while devolving these power structures into transgressive fragments for rearticulation within a temporary vague space. By contrast, a royal space is a striated space that reproduces idealized objects and constructs a rhetoric of progress. A vague space is a smooth space that produces fleeting events and constructs a rhetoric of encounter. This is just the sort of space—a space of movement—that Schutzman and Raikes promise can be supplied by performance. In this type of space, performances have nomadic effects. Everything is active yet tentative, forceful yet fleeting—contingent, contiguous, continuous. How effective! How affective!