Our work on Always Already (performance installation with embedded one-hour performance) had to be done remotely during the lockdown with online check-ins. This had the potential to go in a number unexpected ways, in a more productive direction with a singleness of individual thought, in a more productive way with the doubleness of our preparation and always with the other carried in the mind, in a less productive way with a feeling of fracture and disassembly as a result of the pressures of fear and isolation, in a playful and carefree toss of the head and an ambivalence toward rules . . . the following is part of one set of directives we assigned ourselves.
a template for the directives:
in the form of ______________
in the style of ______________
with activation of either 1) a part of the body of the piece, or 2) a part of the human body
(which part of Always Already material) or (which body part)
suggest a dynamic
(rhythm, speed, volume, size, texture, etc)
We each completed five of these directive templates giving us ten templates all together. On five days per week for each of those two weeks we were to follow a different one of the completed directives and post a report of our response to the directive we’d chosen for that day. There is a secret blog on which these appear. It is a little hope chest that we’ve never re-opened together. It’s not too late but there is possibly something about the manner and the smell of pandemic and lockdown around the responses to those directives. We’ve seen them in the separate pieces that they are but we haven’t yet pulled them out. Like clothes in a suitcase after a long trip away—when you finally open the case after your return home the smell from away brings back the somewhere else where you have been.
a wavering song for the dandelion growing in the ear
[dynamic] [form] [part of the body of the piece]
in the manner of a field of grass, blown in a windstorm, discover how the weaving begins
[style] [dynamic] [part of the body of the piece]
design a protest of feet with a rising and falling of ocean swells
[form] [part of the human body] [dynamic]
in ring composition, activate 100 questions with the breath that blows the dandelion seeds
[form] [part of the body of the piece] [dynamic]
in the style of a market trader, bring the speed of an ant to selling hands
[style] [dynamic] [body part]
Or maybe we just had other things to work on. The big November work sessions have been cancelled and our attention on this work is running thin and taut like a silken thread, like spider silk stretched inside a telescope to mark the thinnest line across which a planet crawls leaving no time to spare.
