night flying

Night Flying: a performance conceived, devised and performed by Jane Mason and David Williams. Dramaturgical support from Luke Pell, Paul Carter and Wendy Hubbard. Lighting design: Mark Parry

Residencies at The Point, Eastleigh; Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth; Mark Bruce Company, Frome; Dance4, Nottingham; The Phoenix, Exeter; Exeter University

Premiere at Exeter Phoenix, then Bristol Old Vic, and Siobhan Davies Studios, London (as part of the ‘Open Choreography Performance’ programme 2019). Further touring in spring 2020 (Plymouth, Cornwall, London) - details to follow

For a review of Night Flying in Bristol, by Ian Abbott, see here

Photographs in tour pack (above) by Benjamin J Borley, Aaron Davies, Tessa France. Post-performance photograph below by David Williams

the sea: wave 4

Noticing, looking up with my eyes still closed as I was, that the sky was above, as it is, and that the sky was something too. That it was like The Sea but with more uncertainty. The Sea’s reflection in a dusty mirror, the something on the other side of our conscious world, a world that only rises a few stories above the ground, a thin membrane covering this earth. Planes and submarines, fish and birds, our waste and our carbon dioxide. 

There is sand in this Sea, and it used to be a parish church, or some other thing, and there is dust in the air, and it used to be the sand that used to be the parish church. And that sand was in this Sea, and now that sand is in the air, and it’s moving around this earth and finding the folds of our Sunday best, the gaps in our windows, our momentarily open doors. It has not given up, it can’t, like machinery. And it has been everywhere … everywhere and elsewhere, seeking its place, and this journey isn’t entropy, this journey is the system. We chase out of our bedrooms buildings of the last millennium with a broom and a dustpan, their slow insistence on coming in. There are particles of sand, dust, everywhere. Breaking free of the corner stone with the help of the water, the other stones. Setting off on an adventure of currents, ground even smaller climbing some far off shore, seizing the wind, travelling inland. The grains struggle to remake the Sea’s image on land, drenching landscapes in the dryness of desert dust, homing in on our freshly built free radicals, the clock of timing the struggle started with the last coat of paint.

*****

Elsew/here the sand drawing is now complete. Over the last week, the shaven-headed monks in the saffron robes have patiently tap-tap-tapped millions of grains of coloured sand off the tips of crafted copper tubes into complex geometrical patterns. The sand flowed like liquid paint. White, black, and three distinct shades each of red, yellow, green and blue: fourteen colours in all. A pure experience of colour, and an elaborately imagined sacred space. While they worked, the monks wore linen masks to cover their mouths and noses, so that their breath would not disturb the sand. They have been building an elaborate spherical cosmic map from the centre outwards. Circle square square square circle circle, a spiralling form structurally similar to the petals of a flower. 

For the monks it represents a movement through levels of confusion towards enlightenment: an unfolding from two dimensions to many. In short, it is a cosmogram, its width the size of an adult human, with the emblem of a deity at its very centre. In this case, the deity is a goddess, both protective and given to explosive rage. It is said she is dark blue, has three eyes, and rides on a mule through a sea of blood encircled by the fire of wisdom. The sun nestles in her navel, a sickle moon arcs across her forehead. She is associated with healing through knowledge, and is consulted through a system of divination by dice.

The finished mandala is consecrated through prayer, chanting, meditation, and a series of visualisations. Each particle of pigment is charged to contain the image in its entirety, each fragment the whole, each grain a macrocosm, like the individual shards of a shattered hologram. One of the monks scatters a handful of six-sided ivory die to one side; the meanings of the numbers and symbols in this particular configuration are discussed at length. Suddenly, one of the younger monks sneezes massively, theatrically; the others laugh. 

Finally, in a ritual that stages the impermanence of all things, the monks dismantle the drawing by sweeping the sand into small piles. It’s a very practical dispersal of the image, almost casual. Four little grey piles are left, like tiny cartoon volcanos. The monks bless each of the piles, bag them up, and carry them on the short walk to the meeting point of river and sea. One final monotonal chant describes a teardrop shed into an ocean of suffering, and suffering’s release. Then four monks wade into the surf up to their knees and pour the sand into the water. Slowly, they release dry into wet, all the while visualising each coloured particle’s infinite possible trajectories, carried by the sea’s currents and flows to every corner of the world. They stand in silence, the ends of their robes bobbing on tiny waves like slopping pools of ochre wine in slow-motion.

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give. ‘Seesoo, hrss, rsseis, oos …’ (1)

*****

Elsew/here a fleet of steam dredgers removes tons of granite and flint shingle from the seabed beneath the cliffs to provide material for a new sea wall further down the coast. God-fearing fishermen with furrowed brows look on from their village at the foot of the cliffs, wondering what repercussions this might have, this ‘tampering with nature’, this modern arrogance to dream of ‘playing god’. No good will come of it, they say. Look at them: they couldn’t navigate a turd around a pisspot, they say. Some years later ferocious winter storms whip the sea into a frenzy, and the slate sky is thick with spindthrift, like a snow storm. As dusk falls, towering black waves blast away at the unprotected village. Never seen anything like it, they say, like the end of the world. 

Overnight most of the community’s buildings are devastated, gouged and pulped to dust by the walls of driving water. The whitewashed slate-roofed fishermen’s cottages, all of them decapitated and ground down. The small grey stone inn, its fireplace doused forever. The workshop for making lobster pots and mending nets. The stables and piggery. The chapel. The tiny Post Office shop. The village hall, for community meetings and wedding receptions and evenings of songs and shanties. (Remember? ‘I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking’). All dust now, carried away tirelessly by the sea. Even the beach is gone.

Every now and then deep in the churning bay, minute sandy particles and splinters fleetingly reconfigure to form the skeletal outlines of what they were once part of – a shed, a kitchen, the furniture of a bedroom – before a fresh undersea gust tears through these ghostly outlines, shattering them anew, and the grains disperse and disappear into the ocean’s depths.

On this journey, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

Elsew/here a ghost net drifts across the ocean’s surface, a floating island unconsciously gathering its catch. From a distance it looks like a small reef breaching the surface. Close up, it’s another story. Caught in the net’s mesh are seaweed, drift wood, plastic bottles, lengths of blue polymer twine, twisted drinks cans, a paint can half full of toxic sludge, empty crisp packets, an aerosol can, dead fish, various bird carcasses, a dolphin cub, and a fluttering tern, its feet caught in the fine nylon filaments: its wings are the only visible sign of life. 

This is how it happens. A length of pelagic drift netting, one of the instruments of choice for those barely-legal fishing fleets engaged in a kind of maritime strip-mining, breaks loose and floats free. As it drifts it entraps whatever it encounters, gradually ballooning until its mass of waste and putrefying flesh finally sinks beneath its own weight. Over time, this material then breaks down or falls free to allow the net to rise to the surface once more - and the cycle begins again.

Elsew/here dozens of rusting metal barrels dumped out at sea are washed on shore by a terrifying freak wave. Some of the containers carry the stencilled word RIFIUTI on their ruptured flanks; others carry a warning symbol that looks like a three-blade spinning propeller or fan, black on a yellow background. Nearby, a man with his head swathed in blue cloth and an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder stares out to sea; he chews his khat leaf and spits on the sand. (2)

Elsew/here an innocuous brown glass bottle is washed ashore on an island beach. Over the next three days, eight people from a tiny tribal community will drink from it and die. (3)

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

Elsew/here, another kind of sea far inland. The travellers arrive in ones and twos, sometimes a small van arrives in a dust cloud and disgorges an unsteady gaggle of people, shrouded against the sun. They carry light bags for the journey, just the barest of essentials. They have long since said goodbye to their families. Those that stay behind never say their son or daughter or husband ‘left’ or ‘migrated’; they refer to them as ‘the burnt ones’, those that have burnt the law, the past. At the meeting point in the dunes a man in sunglasses shows them the pre-fabricated kit from which they will build the boat. As he explains the process, he traces lines and swirls in the sand with a stick. Lengths of untreated pine are laid out on the ground; to one side on a white cloth, a variety of bolts, screws, two screwdrivers, a hammer, some bags of plastic ballast. The wood looks like the ruptured rib cage of some extinct beast, bleached by the sun, then buried by the tidal movements of the sand, and only now disinterred. 

Many of them have never seen the sea; with diverse images of ‘boat’ in their minds, they start to assemble this mysterious thing in which they will entrust their hopes and their lives. Gradually separate pieces are linked together and the boat’s outline emerges. Their tap-tap-tapping is sometimes interrupted by the low throb of a military plane scouring the dunes; they hide under camouflaged tarpaulins, or lie flat on the sand to try to make themselves invisible, just more fragments of unremarkable desert flotsam. When the boat is finished, they stand around it with a mixture of astonishment and trepidation. In silence they wait huddled against the cold night until dawn, unable to sleep, then at first light they drag the boat through the sand towards the sea. We go looking for our lives, they say.

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give. Soo, siessr, ssrh, oosees … seesoo, hrss, rsseis, oos …

---

(1) James Joyce, Ulysses, London: Penguin, 1992, p. 62.

(2) See, for example, Jonathan Clayton, ‘Somalia’s secret dumps of toxic waste washed ashore by tsunami’, The Times, 4 March 2005.

(3) See, for example, Sanjib Kumar Roy, ‘Bottled chemical on beach kills tribe members’, The Guardian, 12 December 2008.

shuttle 16:2: tracking

Photos by David Mcnew, David Roossien, Alberto Arzoz, Richard Misrach; tracks by animals including kangaroo rats, a desert tortoise, various insects, and vehicles; marks made in the Mojave, Imperial Dunes, Black Rock, Tenere/Sahara and Namibian deserts, and on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

shuttle 6: the book of sand

'He told me his book was called the Book of Sand because neither sand nor this [book] has a beginning or an end' (Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand)

'We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine; and yet at the same time everything is in motion' (Teilhard de Chardin)
____________________

'Sand is formed when rocks are ground down by weather or when they simply dissolve. Many of the commonest rocks are actually made of small crystals; if you pick up a stone at random and look at it closely, chances are you'll see small bits and pieces of slightly different colors. Different minerals dissolve at different rates, so rocks that are exposed to the air will gradually start looking like sponges, with tiny pits and holes where some minerals have dissolved away. Other rocks are ground down by rivers or cracked by ice or abraded by wind, and slowly pummelled into smaller and smaller pieces.

The sand you see on a beach or in the desert might have been freshly extracted from some mountain nearby or it might have been brought there by a river or an ocean that has long since disappeared. One of the wonderful things about sand is how far it reaches into the past ...

It used to be thought that sand grains became round by rubbing against each other in the surf or being tumbled together in riverbeds. Recently, geologists have realised that it takes millions of years of abrasion even to begin to round a sand grain. That means that a well-rounded grain ... may have gone through several 'cycles': first it was a crystal in a rock, then it was dislodged and ended up on a beach or in a riverbed. It may have been tossed around in the ocean for a couple of million years. Eventually, it settled somewhere - say at the bottom of a lake. As smaller grains of dust and dirt settled around, it became impacted and eventually hardened into stone. A few more millions of years and the lake might have dried up, exposing the lake bottom. Again the little grain would have sprung free and been washed away to some other beach. Again it would have been tossed around and gotten a little rounder.

A round grain ... might have lain about on different beaches three or four times over the course of a hundred million years - an amazing thought. It would have sat on a beach long before there were dinosaurs and then again millions of years after the dinosaurs vanished, and then one last time in the late 19th century, when an amateur naturalist scooped it up and put it on a microscope slide. The smaller the grain, the more slowly it becomes rounded. A really tiny round grain could have been at the bottom of a lake and then - in the scale of time that only geologists can appreciate - it could have been slowly lifted up into a giant mountain range, and then broken off the mountain, washed down to an ocean, stuck in a deep sediment, turned again into a rock, and so on ... at least for me, the aeons are too long to imagine.

"Sand grains have no souls but they are reincarnated", is how one geologist puts it. He says that the "average recycling time" is around two hundred million years, so that a grain of sand that was first sprung free of its first rock 2.4 billion years ago could have been in ten mountain ranges and ten oceans since then. Even the giddy numbers of Buddhist reincarnations (some deities live billions of years) can't bring home eternity for me in the way this simple example does.

Think of it next time you hold a grain of sand in your palm'.
__________________________

Extract from James Elkins, How To Use Your Eyes, London & New York: Routledge, 2000, 176-81

Photographs: top - 'archive sand' from the Vatican archives: 'Walking through the storerooms of an archive containing documents dating back to the 17th century at the latest, on the shelves holding registers, volumes of letters and strings, one can notice a very fine type of sand, or sediments from other materials, mainly iron dust. Before blotting paper was invented, the “polverino” - as the sediments were called - was spread on freshly-written paper in order to dry the ink more quickly. Even nowadays, on desks in archives and libraries that preserve manuscript collections, as soon as they have finished looking at their desired item, researchers are likely to find a considerable amount of sand grains on their table. Flipping through the pages, the sand which was still adhering to the ink, falls from the sheet. For this very reason, in conservation labs, it’s a good rule to dust the documents in order to remove the grains that hold a strong grip onto the ink, even though the manuscript is often used. In order to remove the sand, a “dusting” is carried out with the so-called “Japanese brush”, a small brush deprived of its metallic parts, with very soft bristles that act in an extremely delicate manner on the paper, without causing any damage to the material'.

Bottom: Charles Henry Turner, 'Sand Dunes', c. 1890: cyanotype
 
For an earlier post about slowness in art practices, 'The little by little suddenly', see here 

shuttle 1: what will be ...

‘ … can't tell what's right, better hit the ground running …’

(Calexico, ‘Quattro’)

‘We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world’ (Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, New York: Bantam, 1981, p, 6)

"American cars invariably carry the names of animals, or aggression and, if possible, a combination of the two: Impala, Thunderbird, Stingray, Mustang, Firebird, Charger, Corvette. In Albuquerque I hire a beast, a powder-blue Ford Mustang, and slipping a cassette into the stereo drive out along the interstate into the New Mexico desert. 

The desert seduces us with the idea that we can start out over again, begin from zero: a myth dear to the hygienic rationality of pure reason and not completely absent from the demonic aestheticism of Nietzschean thought. But it can also suggest the idea of the infinite, the infinite language of Jewish thinking where, unlike the rational finality of Greek logos, we are always dealing with the question of what will be: an infinite future that conceals its origins, where the inscription of sense never concludes; for writing “is not a mirror. To write is to confront an unknown face’ (Edmond Jabès).  

In the end we recognize that there is no possibility of going back, of starting over again. All we can do is confront ourselves and our histories. In the clear light of the desert, where our actions are overexposed, where, among the bits and pieces of our existence, time and space dissolve into one another and the wind blowing up from the past uncovers patterns in the deposits of our lives, we find ourselves in a landscape where there is no interpretation seemingly powerful enough to present itself as the unique truth. 

The metaphor of the desert – a privileged topology for the nomadic sentiments of modern thought – can also become the place where we get lost, where our existence is swallowed up and cancelled. For the moment, the only truth on which we can rely is the immediate contact between the asphalt and the wheels of our car as we move between towns, motels, TV screens and billboards, elaborating local “maps that matter”, travelling down the provisional road we construct between what has already occurred and the possible …"

Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: journeys in postmodernity, London & New York: Routledge, 1990, 87-8
_________________________

'"In the Mojave Desert, on the border of Nevada and California stands a phone booth. The glass is shattered and the frame has six bullet holes". Each day, there are over one hundred phone calls from every single continent, most often wrong numbers ... "Over the past few years, the aluminum phone booth, which is owned by Pacific Bell, has become the great switchboard of the world".

It is the focalisation point of the multiple solitude of the invisible community inhabiting the limbs of virtual space. Sometimes, as if by miracle, someone answers: "I am here", and the unknown caller replies: "I'm glad you're there, that you answered".

Paul Virilio (quoting Jean-Paul Dubois), 'The Twilight of the Grounds', in The Desert, London & New York: Fondation Cartier/Thames & Hudson, 2000, 111
_________________________

For driving music, see here: a video of Quattro by Tucson residents Calexico

For an earlier post about driving to work elsew/here, through the deserts of West London, see here

your moon in bella luna and (love dog)

Lonely little love dog that.

No one knows the name of.
I know why you cry out.
Desperate and devout.

Timid little teether.
Your eyes set on the ether.
Your moon in bella luna and.
Howling hallelujah ...

Nameless you above me.
Come lay me low and love me.
This lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the name of.

Curse me out in free verse.
Wrap me up and reverse this.
Patience is a virtue.
Until it's silence burns you.

And something slow.
Has started in me as.
Shameless as an ocean.
Mirrored in devotion.

Something slow.
Has sparked up in me.
As dog cries for a master.
Sparks are whirling faster ...

Lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the ways of.
Where the land is low is.
Where the bones'll show through.

Lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the days of.
Where the land is low is.
Where the water flows to.
And holds you.

'Love Dog', tv on the radio / tunde adebimpe, dear science (2008)

For tv on the radio's myspace site, see here

Photos: Bantham, Devon, 31 December 2008

for sue

material imagination

"Direct images of matter. Vision names them, but the hand knows them. A dynamic joy touches them, kneads them, makes them lighter. One dreams these images of matter substantially, intimately, rejecting forms—perishable forms—and vain images, the becoming of surfaces. They have weight, they are a heart” (Gaston Bachelard)

In a cavernous iron warehouse at the back of the old Brunswick brickworks, behind the vertiginous chimneys of the kilns and the blackened skeletons of derelict machinery, an island of moist white sand floats in a sea of powdery grey brickdust and rubble. Prefiguring its future performance space in the city, the rehearsal space for To Run—Sand has been installed in the bowels of an abandoned industrial workplace—a site still palpably ghosted by its former function, and by those that worked and sweated and dreamed there. The only sounds now are the muffled wingbeats and cucurucus of pigeons far overhead. Until the digging starts.

Every session begins with digging. The island of sand, both setting and generative source for this dance-theatre performance, is on the move again. The impact of footfalls and bodies disperses the sand, it flows outwards, a slo-mo crystalline liquid. We rebuild two mounds, one as conical as a Hokusai Fuji, the other slightly flattened, volcanic. Our digging is punctuated with jokes about (im)possible careers with Vicroads. The remaining sand is raked, and the rehearsal begins.

Heraclitus suggested that one could never bathe in the same river twice; similarly, every time the performers return to the sand its reality shifts, literally and metaphorically. It possesses the pulsional mutability and discontinuity Gaston Bachelard called “intimate immensity”. At moments it suggests a pocket of coastal dune or beach, a lovers’ retreat, a children’s playground, or an island of enchantment and imprisonment, like Prospero’s; at others, it becomes battlefield, labour camp, post-industrial wasteland, mountain range, moonscape—or desert, that core postmodern metaphor for the nomadic and the dis/appearing. And it is the fluidity of the sand’s topographic referentiality that allows the performers (and those watching them) a remarkable associational freedom in narratives enacted and images inhabited.

Material is generated primarily through games, tasks, structured improvisations and free play; once Alison has set up an activity, she rarely intervenes. Images cluster around primordial transformations of status in the flux of inter-relations: playing, working, running, fighting, falling, burying, birthing. The three performers are developing quite different relationships with the sand, each one contradictory and polyvalent. And it is the materiality of these relationships that generates narratives, images and ‘characters’. Today Evelyn’s actions suggest elegant entrapment, a kind of perky buoyancy against all the odds, like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. Adrian is both ever playful and consumed by reverie, encumbered by the gravity of possibility; with the smile of Sisyphus, he moulds his desires and memories in the sand. Yumi is explosive, she leaps and digs with an energy that irradiates far beyond the outer edge of the sand—but her contact with it is consistently light, she touches and brushes with quiet patience and focus.

In many ways, the group’s recognition of the sand’s active role as trigger and co-performer celebrates Bachelard’s “material imagination”, which, “going beyond the attractions of the imagination of forms, thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materialises the imaginary”. In Bachelard’s phenomenological poetics of the elements, matter (“the unconscious of form”, the “mother-substance” of dreams) reverberates to become “the mirror of our energy”, producing images “incapable of repose”.

In rehearsal the sand becomes a register of the actions and emotions that it has elicited from the performers; it mirrors their energy. Intimate, substantial afterimages of what was are retained within what is, although these trace impressions of the contours and gravities of presences-now-absent are always temporary, fleeting. Like memories, like identities, the marks in the sand are continuously overwritten or partially erased. But in the materiality of the instant, for those that work and sweat and dream there, they have weight, they are a heart.

To Run—Sand, by Alison Halit, was performed by Adrian Nunes, Evelyn Switajewski and Yumi Umiumare at the Economiser Building, Spencer Street Power Station, Melbourne, April-May 1997. Article originally published in RealTime issue #18, April-May 1997, p. 33. Photo: Brad Hick (Evelyn Switajewski in rehearsal)