Press coverage: The Vertical Line

The Independent, 6 February 1999:
“A collaboration between the writer John Berger and Theatre de Complicite director, Simon McBurney, The Vertical Line takes you on an imaginary journey backwards in time and downwards in space to the Chauvet cave in France. It was here, in 1995, that paintings of animals were discovered which, dating back 32 000 years, constitute the oldest images created by man yet found.

“A spooky combination of intrepid potholing and reverberating meditations on time and art, this powerful experience begins with saturation bombardment by images flashed up on a bank of television screens and ends in a tunnel of palpably dense darkness where we join in the attempt to recapture what it was like to discover these ur-paintings, collapsing the concepts of ‘then’ and ‘now’. “ (Paul Taylor)

The Guardian, 3rd February 1999:
“There have been many theories about the Chauvet paintings, Some academics have declared that the paintings were simply a registration system for food killed; others tat they were a crucial part of rituals or initiation ceremonies. McBurney and Berger’s starting point is that we know nothing at all about them, and that a little knowledge is far more dangerous than no knowledge at all. McBurney talks of visiting a site of rock paintings in Australia, believed to be 30, 000 years older than those found at Chauvet. ‘We went and looked at these places and we said to him, “What are they?” and he simply said, “Sit and wait, and after a while the painting will speak to you.”

“[...] I remember when I first saw pictures of the Chauvet drawings, I was convinced that the animals depicted were not so much representations of animals as the appearance of animals from within the rock. It was as if the rock in its density contained everything that existed,’ says Berger. ‘If you think of the process of drawing on these paved walls, we must remember that they are not flat surfaces. There are protuberances and gullies, crannies and corries, and these are all incorporated into the paintings. In order to create the painting, the hand must be lost in the rock itself. It is adjoining all that a rock contains, and that joining is an affirmation of being. Take the hand away, and you have another affirmation, because what is left behind is a self-portrait.’

“This is a rather comforting thought – a kind of connection between them and us, the past and the present. As McBurney says of The Vertical Line: ‘It is a journey into intimacy. The further we go into the past, the more intimate it becomes.” (Lyn Gardner)

Plays International, March 2000:
“This 40-minute CD, accompanied by an illustrated booklet that includes a transcript, lets you follow the journey in your own home, with voices whispering in your ears – brittle-toned Berger, McBurney edgy and carressive, crisp and soothing actress Sandra Voe. Berger tells us that the Renaissance Philosopher Vico believed that ‘humanitas’, the Latin word for humanity, derived from ‘humare’, to bury. ‘To hold together, to preserve from dispersal. To shelter.’ The Vertical Line burrows down into buried, sheltering humanity, into lost love, into images of the dead who are waiting to keep the living company. It might have become a sentimental exercise, but Berger and McBurney usefully quote a poem about the dead: ‘They’re sarcastic now, they ask questions.’

The project invites us to question our sense of individual and collective past – as McBurney points out, ‘perhaps the most startling modern discovery is the immensity of the past’. “