Am writing this groggy on the circle line, not so fresh from the other side of eight hours of GATZ, and rushing through these tunnels feels strangely continuous with this stupendous, immersive, earth-boring show.  Which is odd because GATZ is a show about text, and I’m not sure I can go near a text again until I’ve had a breath of air or a luxuriant two, to clear the head and work out what I’ve just seen.

From one perspective Elevator Repair Service have come at a fundamental textual issue of how one moves full text into performance, every word, with such lightness and judicious levity; that the entire thing seems borne on the currents between those two covers. Using a quotidian setting of an office they enact the dissolution of the world into text, its uncanny shadowing of the book you’ve just read – the sheer power of the novel to forge a break in your reality.

At the same time they use this distance to add a critical component. The performative modality of the narrator was quite, quite superb; measuring the distance from the text as if chalking numbers on a ship’s slipway. With his elegantly halting delivery, he moved from reader to narrator back to reader seamlessly, and these wonderful moments coming out of these two guises – for example, returning to the reader to question his own contradictory love of Gatsby, or give an ironic twist to a particular piece of description, so that this sort of unreliable narrator became a performative critique: like an unexpectedly sarky audiobook or Keith Richards falling asleep reading his own biography, or something like that.

These are two kinds of distances, but perhaps the most intriguing movement for me was not a space but a collapse – the way in which the performance, and the ostensibly non-performance text, became the same thing.

I think we sometimes forget about literature that it is a form of performance already, just one encoded onto a page. So obsessed with the history and horizons of time that accompany its scratching into surface, we neglect its reality as a set of once-embodied responses, a point of authorship that had to wake up that morning and in between sips of coffee exist within all the social flows, the politics, the subjectivities and possible articulations to their time and place. It is the performance of Fitzgerald which makes possible the performance of ERP, just as it’s the reverse, and that both of these happen at the same time.

GATZ was one of the Marquee shows of LIFT festival, wrapping up our first systematised and curated coverage of a given festival on this site.  This began with a meeting over juice at the ICA and with the LIFT guys we quickly thrashed out some basic rules: three elemental discourses of “internationalism”, “participation” and “form” which would structure our coverage. We then took this to our writers and in each case they did sterling work, and yet it always felt like something of an imposition. Perhaps our ideas were too hasty, no contouring the festival in interesting-enough ways, but more importantly I think we hadn’t behaved horizontally as editors. We’d forgotten that our writers would be performing their criticism: to their own requirements, their own very plural sets of critical values, and that our dictats would not necessary provide stimulating obstacles when travelling to the place in which the criticism would happen.

Balancing the variety of our critics umwelts and the shared conditions that make our project possible and historically novel is almost my entire job here – it’s lines on the chalkboard for me to scratch out in rote: criticism is a performance like any other, and the next festival coverage preparation (along with our Provocations section for experimental reviews) should become something much more like instructional notes for performance, a product of discussion, its success measured by how well criticism can be realised together in the embodied moment.