As part of the day-long event How Does It Feel? at Fierce Festival, Birmingham, in October 2024, I presented a 10-minute solo performance multiple times across the day. The event was presented in partnership with performance, possession + automation, with artists exploring ideas of possession and automation and how they make us feel.
Some of the words from my project proposal:
Sometimes (given a chance) [working title]
initial ideas / proposals in no more than 500 words:
I propose to sing a single song line over and over. Not a whole song, just a single riff or line that has a rhythm to it and something to cling to, but not much. The repetition is the action of it. It finds a way to build sense as it unfailingly fails to change. It’s not a song you know, it’s a new one. I propose to be standing in an open area somewhere on the way between other events. Somewhere people might linger for five or ten minutes. If it is performed 3 or 4 different times throughout the day those might all be in different locations within the space.
The inspiration for this offering is a performance I once attended. During this performance I came under a spell. I came under a spell because I surrendered to the circumstances and to the insistence of the music. I fell under a spell. My heart fluttered. It took me somewhere else — a great distance to a moment in time. Suddenly I knew something I’d never known before.
In the piece I’m proposing for How Does it Feel? I won’t have a specific effect in mind. I will be waiting to see what, if anything, takes place in the feelings of audience members as their minds accept, reject, wander from or are lulled by the song line. I have saved myself before with the help of a song. I have entrusted myself to it. I have composed my mind, written the work, survived the despair with the help of a riff. Mesmerising, persuasive, sometimes mindless, these riffs or ear worms, originally nestled within a song, take root in the mind of a listener becoming ear worms. Taken alone they circulate on repeat as if grooved into a vinyl record setting the needle back again to the same line as a result of a scratch leading back to it over and over. Even if it drives a person to distraction initially, over time it becomes a consolation and then a mantra and then a curse and then the solution and the saving grace. Or maybe a person simply turns away. But it could be surprisingly easy to give in and fall under its influence.
photo credit: Manuel Vason, How Does It Feel?, Fierce Festival 2024
Sometimes (given a chance) was part of How Does It Feel?
co-curated by performance, possession + automation (pp+a) and Fierce Festival
funded by Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
