The current is heavier than a mountain.
Resist. React. Exist. Perform.
We are struggling through the various possible identities of this performance. We are giggling jellyfish. We are angler fish with wide gaping mouths. We are an octopus with six arms. We are humans peering into unknown lives. We are struggling against currents and swivelling in the eddies. We are drying ourselves off and starting again. We are waiting. Waiting for a sign. Waiting to have time to focus. Waiting for each other to catch up. We have so much more than can fit in this performance. We have to decide. We have decided. It feels strange.
What are you trying to avoid?
Pretend to be the thing you are trying to avoid.
How is this performance speaking for us? Can it say enough? Will it say more if we say less? What is the use of anything. Three people feel intensely in three very distinct ways. You could be more different from each other than we are. Each of us a country unto ourselves. Make just one statement, just one sentence, just one word. Or, maybe, just say everything. Or, more likely, cut two-thirds out of six pages of sentences. Learn the songs. Shape up the dance. Let it breathe. That’s the work we can do.
Dreams of a dying man.
You are the dogs running across centre court.
We find we are more inclined to slowness and wavy in the moving forward. Are we gentle? are we timid? are we frightened? are we stunned? Do we think the underwater world is just silence and darkness in its deeper reaches? We have more questions than we have answers. But we do have answers and we are none of those things. Working on a section of intensity we struggle to shake it up. We are one way as individuals and another as a group of three. In fits and starts we make it forward. We begin to see the shape of it. We stand and stare as if mesmerised by the largest wave we’ve ever seen.
[performance directives above in italics written by Tara Fatehi, Jemima Yong and myself as part of our making process]
When I was a child
(it’s personal)
As a child everything I saw on the beach was beautiful. Everything was perfect.
I remember lying face down for hours. In front of me a world of small to contemplate, search through, select. My eyes moved over and back on the rounded stones and shell fragments and beach glass and the large grains of perfect sand glittered clean in the sunlight. The sun would have been warm on my back and there would have been a thin layer of salt on my skin. The water sounds gentle, more of a shore lap than a break.
There were no seagulls in my childhood, this beach would not have been filled with their screams and cries.
I would have raised my head from my work, I remember doing so, and I would have looked to see my brother in the same position: stomach to the sand, arms and hands stroking and turning the collection of salt and shell and rock and glass in front of him. My mother too. Hours were spent there in this position. It was quiet and warm and the small world in front of us glittered and turned with a low purr stroking it as we did with our fingers there in the warm and gentle. No one else came to the beach at that time.
I could hear the rubbing of the stones and shell and coral pieces that moved in front of my fingers, this near sound was joined by the far sounds of the water. It might have been only twelve feet away but the world had grown so small that day. I was seeing that a world existed inside the gravel in front of my eyes. When I lifted my head I had some thought about time and spending it. Some thought that burned into my retina the picture from low on the sand, the picture I saw when I lifted my head. Yes we are all still here. After so long and after so many troubles we can still come here and we can still look up and see one another there on the beach. I can do it now. I have done it. But the whole thought is lost to me now. All I have is the picture. I can’t say what process sealed the picture among all pictures to preserve it in my memory. I will think of this moment on the quiet empty beach. It will lie in my mind as a source of calm from a day in which nothing happened. Only just one thing. I lifted my head and I looked around.
late edition:
It was arduous actually, what was happening there on the beach. A tiny sweat shop. My mother always thinking small, always a cottage industry, had us searching for puka shells, hours for puka shells. Hours dwelling on the making of a little more cash. We would find the puka shells, at the height of the puka shell craze, the one in the 1970s, for California dreamers, certainly people out here had them but they made their own. We were making necklaces for people who would buy them. Mainlanders who wanted to look like surfers. People who would pay something for a treasure from another place. It took hours to find the shells and hours to size them and string them and the fasteners, those were hard to attach.