Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Ideas for "LOVE" - textual 24/8/10


 why is the measure of love loss?
   
The room is not mine.
    One window frames an ash tree. One window lenses the world.
    From the wide lens of your window I can see an album of ordinary life. There's a woman unfolding a music stand with metallic determination. She picks up a flute, begins to play, and soap bubbles of notes break against your glass. The music is floating but the woman is standing very still. The strange thing about her is that she is naked. Yes, quite naked, her spine as long and straight as her flute, her vertebrae like the keys of the flute.
    I pushed up the window to let in the music. We were floating Mozart. Why is it that the real things are fragile and tough, destroyed so easily, but never damaged? Lost to us endlessly -  stupidly, unknowingly -  but in themselves always found again, when time opens like a door.
   
I walked into you.
    
    Where is the green door in the green hill? Summer and winter I marked paths that led me nowhere, blind trails that tunnel ground the way moles do, sniffing it, scenting it, digging it sideways with both hands, reading the ground like the palm of my hand.
    Upturned, I have tried to follow the heart line, but the way has been closed. Wait patiently, without hope, for the miracle that cannot be coaxed.
    All the stories advise me that one day the hill will open, in the shining hour, when time and space and desire hinge the solid world into a door.

  The white room is a chapel
 Like all sacred spaces, it does and does not exist. It has joists and floorboards and damp and doorjambs. It can be bought and sold. At the same time, what is valuable here cannot be traded in the market place. What is valuable here is a quality of light. Light that changes as we do. Light as subtle and uncatchable as human beings
   We are fallen angels netted in light.
    The white room is a hospital.
    It happens on the borders between healing and pain. The light is as surgical as a laser. The light finds me out. My soft tissue is exposed. Parts of me have been cut away.
    I had a wound that would not heal. You rummaged your hands through it and it bled again. It bled clean this time, and the poison left me. That wound has been infected for years. It will never heal but it is not infected anymore.
    My body is clean.
    The white room is a rendezvous.
    Past and future meet here, if not as friends, that at least not those old enemies, the hostile brothers, warring over the same girl.
    I am jealous of the present. The present is a lover always slipping away. The present comes chaperoned by memory, and lottery to desire. The present is a bartered bride.
    How to love what is now? How to make love to time?

      Time is what stops everything from happening at once
     It's a good explanation but not enough. My life is simultaneous - whatever the artificiality of time. I experience life as calendar, as diary, as anniversary, as event, but when I remember it, - the walls between are as thin as stud partitions.
   The house and its staircase and its rooms have been divided to provide a number of apartments. Here I am in the basement. Here I am on the top floor. Here my lives are living quietly apart, but always in earshot. Here I am subdivided into tenancies that call themselves separate but remain one house. One staircase is all I have - forget the dividing doors. One staircase, and these locks and keys.
    Past, present and future are separate apartments in the same house.
    The white room is a mystery.
    The owner is often away. Time sleeps here - among the sixteenth century furniture and the twenty first century life. Some people buy antiques because they are old - other people buy them because they are still alive. 
    Time can be caught in objects.
    When I touch this table where a woman counted out her past like money, I too start to bargain with life - what will this cost me? What can I expect in return?
     She tells me the old story, her fingers stroking her memories. Time is tarnished, but not where she touches it - where she touches it, time is worn thin from being turned over Time thin enough to lose between floorboards. Time worn bright with love.
    Love is the story. This story. This time.
    The white room is where we nade love.
     
     What is desire?
     Desire is a restaurant. Desire is watching you eat. Desire is pouring wine for you. Desire is looking at the menu and wondering what it would be like to kiss you. Desire is the surprise of your skin.
    Look - in between us now are the props of ordinary life - glasses, knives, cloths, Time has been here before. History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries. The props change, but not this. Not this single naked wanting you.
   Sacrifice time to desire.
    This current of desire was underground and cold.
     Love has sun-warmed me.
     I had been subterranean for too long. I didn't know it, but the river was moving towards the surface. There was a space, an opening, and you were there. The river burst out of its secret waterway, and you were there. 
    My body is a river - swim in me. My body is deep enough for diving.


    She's beautiful - oh yes. Golden and dappled and played over with light. Touch her, and together we unclothe time. Kiss her, and time yields.
    Put out my hand, and time is bone - life's frame, but not its flesh. The flesh is here - on her body - this living moment -  and ours because we claim it.
     Inside her, and time is gone. She is open and empty and free. 
    Inside her, and time liquidises into love.
     Make love to me.
    We lie together, skin close enough for grafting. When I kiss you, I give you all the words that room in the roof of my mouth. When you kiss me, you give me the shape of silence.
   
The theatre is empty. Everyone has gone home. Shall we go home now, to the place where no one is watching? To the place where time stops?
    I love you
    Combing the hill, I loved you.
    Parting grass like an equation, I loved you. I wanted the symmetry and the balance not obvious to counting. I had to work you out, work you until I knew you. I had to solve the problem before I knew what it was.
    What was it?
     This. Listen carefully.
     Enchantment is subject to no release but the breaking of a spell. 
     The enchanted can cook bacon and eggs like anybody else. The enchanted can fill in their tax forms and bet on a winner at the races. The enchanted bear children - who sing in choirs. The enchanted are just the same as the rest of us, unless you catch them by chance - staring into the water as if it were a crystal ball.
 You called me and I came. You unstoppered the bottle and I flew out. I was imprisoned in a tree. I was lost on an island. I had only the memory of desire to guide me. I could not free myself.
    I was walking round and round in circles. The circles of enchantment that are magic and cliché. They are so known, so predictable, even the language we use to describe them is worn.
    Round and round in circles. And then I found the place I had lost. The place where the enchantment started. The place where I sacrificed desire.
    The place where I sacrificed desire to time.
    I thought it would come right. I thought the clock would bring it -as if time ever carries anything in its hands except itself. I thought the seasons might unfold it, but spring can only prompt what is already sown. Summer can only flower what is grown. No tree, no harvest. No stirrings of desire when there is no desire.
    I do not believe that desire is better that love. Desire is not life either. But when desire is so mixed with love and life, that to sever one is to injure all, the wound is too deep.
I should have kept the pain I had, - pain of loss, pain of memory.
  I know I loved and lost. Then I made the mistake of not loving enough, and won.
    How shall I conjure with this? What shall I make of these fragments - each one sharp enough to cut me again?
    When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.
    Is everything in this life about love or its lack?
   I want to touch you. I want the sweat of skin. Salt and blood are better remedies than talk. No talk found me the spell. The need of you and the touch of you found me the spell.
   Time passed. It always does. In the white room there are no clocks. The white room is a lover's room, and we keep time on the run.
    How long have I got? I don't know. The beating heart of our love may stop at any time. How can we hold what cannot be held?  How can we measure what cannot be known?
    How long is a spell?
    But though you enchant me, I am not enchanted. I am free. 
    The white room is a place of freedom.
    No longer love's exile, I claim a closed land. The door is open - pass freely. I never thought to be inside love again. I never thought to kiss the homeland of your body. I know this place so well - I used to live here. My house fell down and I was captured.  Where have I been in these heavy clothes that exiles wear? I am naked now, in the sun of my own land.
    My own land. Not you, love, who none but love can own; but love itself, and you its emblem. Let me wear you on my shield.
    Love has rescued me. Love has carried me home. There is music in the room. You are in the room. Lie down with me under this skin-white love. This love is ours...


Why is the measure of love...loss?

One Minute Piece 25/8/10

HEART SURGERY


 
The idea to use heart surgery footage came to me immediately when conceptually working on my one minute piece for class. I want to have this image playing through the projector while I simultaneously stand in a hot bucket of water.
Both the bucket of water and the open-heart surgery compliment and contradict each other and this is exactly the disorienting effect I hope to create in the simultaneity of showing these images.


THE BUCKET
 



I went to the Japanese bathhouse in Melbourne and this gave me the inspiration for the text to use in the bucket.
I went to many Japanese bath houses while travelling in Japan with my partner during the mid- semester break and in returning to Melbourne we went into a real rough patch and It was looking like we were going to break up - This highly emotional time was intense and overwhelming and my head was so full of noise – I decided to take myself to the bath house as it reminded me of the  good times we had shared in Japan. I bathed in 45c water as well as using the sauna for over 2 hours. This process allowed me time to sit with the grief in my heart and to find stillness. As I was sitting  there my body temperature had risen to such an extent that all I could hear was the deafening thud of my own heart -beat. 


I experienced this as a welcome relief from all the noise in my head. I was left with the sound of the heart and was amazed at its strength and physical presence. The reality that it is beating at all times and yet we are often so removed from this in the hustle and bustle of daily life. I am going to explore the relationship of the physical organ of the heart (open heart surgery) alongside the emotional attachment we have to this organ ‘love’  - 

'Is there any intrinsic connection between the emotional and the physical? or is it an arbitrary signification that we have laced with cultural and historical meaning? 



Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Sapho in 9 Fragments - hope hunger, heart , heat.. 24/8/10


"He seems like a god to me the man who is near you. 
Listening to your sweet voice and exquisite laughter 
That makes my heart so wildly beat in my breast. 
If I but see you for a moment, then all my words 
Leave me, my tongue is broken and a sudden fire 
Creeps through my blood. No longer can I see. 
My ears are full of noise. In all my body I 
Shudder and sweat. I am pale as the sun-scorched 
Grass. In my fury I seem like a dead woman, 
But I would dare" (Sapho). . .

 ( a snippet from rehearsals)



Sapho in 9 Fragments  - 

SAPPHO
MALTHOUSE THEATRE PRESENTS

SAPPHO

…IN 9 FRAGMENTS
WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY JANE MONTGOMERY GRIFFITHS
STAGING BY MARION POTTS
SET & COSTUME DESIGNER ANNA CORDINGLEY
LIGHTING DESIGNER PAUL JACKSON
COMPOSER & SOUND DESIGNER DARRIN VERHAGEN
DRAMATURGE MARYANNE LYNCH
BECKETT THEATRE
JULY 30 – AUGUST 21


As Sappho herself reminds us: all education is a form of seduction. Your lesson begins now.
2700 years ago, Sappho is the world’s first love poet, the tenth muse of the ancient Greeks, and the inspiration for every lovelorn writer and songster since. But history catches up with her, and over time, Sappho becomes just a gap to be filled with the lusts and desires of each new generation...
Sappho...in 9 fragments is a roller-coaster, tour de force through two and a half millennia of Sappho’s story, weaving together the strange tale of her fragmented reception with a contemporary love story in her own words. As a timeless Sappho relives her uses and abuses through history, in the modern world a heart-broken young woman tries to piece together the fragments of her sexual awakening.
In its sell-out premiere at The Stork Theatre in 2007, Jane Montgomery Griffiths attracted passionate praise for her audacious performance and shrewdly intelligent and sensual writing. In a new staging by Marion Potts (Venus and Adonis), Sappho…in 9 fragments continues Malthouse Theatre's project of re-presenting the boldest and best new works from Melbourne’s independent stage.


MY RESPONSE
Love Desire - woman identified homo - erotocism.  Post - modern non linear script - virtuoso acting.

The language in this play is exquisite! The depth of training and the breadth of Jane Montomery Griffiths  made this piece and absolute theatrical feast.
 
I was inspired by this piece to delve more into the subjective 'truth' or the internal world of myself as a performer. 

The one prop was amazing - a bath ( or coffin) rectangular and filled with red (ish) liquid that seeped from a tap below. 

Jane began her performance in the box of liquid and she was totally submerged and the audience could not see that as they took their seats that she was already contained within - She emerged naked - androgynous - like the body itself became the canvas.



A performance of love, desire, identity - fragmented humanity- the contemporary and the ancient.

It is always about the integrity of the performer and their honesty on stage - their ability to make themselves 'naked' for you.





Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Two Dimensional Life of Her

 ( watch me)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WO9EXwog2I



A TROUPE of puppets get their clumsy fingers onto a packet of cigarettes and some matches: Puppets + Fire = Trouble. Within minutes, 2-Dimensional Life of Her, a paper based show, roars up in flames. Projected flames, I should say. Black and white turns to colour and boy is the illusion powerful; I sat nervously eying the piles of paper strewn about the set, lest two dimensions leapt into a third. Concealing its own virtuosity with a beguiling improvised feel, this exceptional show explores the labyrinthine space between images.

2-Dimensional Life of Her is the creation of Australian artist Fleur Elise Noble. Using multiple projections, Noble lets the audience in on the world of her studio. While it’s sophisticated in its questioning, the show does not lose the ‘work in progress’ feel of the artist in her private space with her materials. The projected Noble rebels against 2-D existence by walking around the studio with a mop and bucket; with simple but effective sound design, we follow her footsteps as she traverses the empty space between screens. Traditional rectangles are not the norm here; the screens onto which the show’s live action films, animations, pen drawings, and puppets are projected are irregular and layered. One surface is a cut out of Noble, another is a table covered in studio disorder (including a wine bottle and glass), while a third undulates – the paper momentarily held up by a live actor (Erica Field, Noble’s collaborator).

Projected Noble works hard; the mop isn’t just for show. When she scrubs a surface, a new image is uncovered. The show explores the possibilities of perception and the 
Projected Noble works hard; the mop isn’t just for show. When she scrubs a surface, a new image is uncovered. The show explores the possibilities of perception and the chimerical nature of images. A determined puppet repeatedly rips through a sheet of paper. Quizzical and slightly superior, he stares down the audience, seeming to ask us what we are doing looking at him. Another puppet with a concussion-wish dips his head in ink and creates portraits by beating his head against paper. Each smackdown produces a different line drawing. The process of creating an image can be violent, it seems. In addition to the projection of multiple media, live theatrical incursions – which varied in the two performances I went to - remind you of the show’s real time setting. Like the sound design, the live bodies draw the images into the space, stretching the frame of visual art. 

Multimedia works can get caught up in their many strands, end up amorphous. Not so with 2-Dimensional Life of Her. The show’s various modes coalesced into a performance that had formal power. Original is an overused word, but this was. I saw the show twice. The first time at an architect’s studio on Egmont St and the second in Toi Whakaari’s large basement space. In the latter venue the diffuseness of the audience and the size of the space didn’t quite recreate the immersion of the first performance. 




My Response


great use of projection , lighting , sound.
the audience was made active by the use of all these mediums rather than passive.
by using more than 5 projectors the audience was never sure where the action was going to take place next. 
What inspired me about this piece for our performance is that we can use the projection of images and video to disrupt the traditional audience/actor relationship.
Davina and I discussed of pre- recorded material that not only operates a set i.e still of space that we interact with, but also film ourselves and project ourselves into the space ( on cardboard cut outs) as well as being physically present in the space as well. 
This multiplicity would continually shift the focus for the audience and also expand our presence in the space. 

Friday, August 6, 2010

Enter The Void.



"It is not cinema anymore - it is sensation".
This film brings into focus both an experience of sensory over load and sensory depravation. I saw this as a part of Melbourne International Film Festival and it blew any other cinematic experience i have had to date out of the water. I felt like the images were literally throwing me around. A roller coaster ride that was experienced bodily. This film break ALL convention and taboos without apology, it was truly shocking at times - and i cant say a very pleasant experience - though that does not seem to be high on the directors priority list.  My body was tense for the entire 2.5 hours of the film. The setting being in Japan and the design of the film itself was totally inspired by hyper realism as discussed in earlier blogs. In Enter the Void drugs bring about the internal rupture  - breath, pulse, organ, carnal, sex - all things dark, bodily, human.


see clip from film below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpHw20xMbUU

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

THE WALL ...4/8/10


Butchers paper covering the back wall.

Projection onto paper – perhaps on all three sides of the space.

Multiple Projections – creating an entire ‘world’ through sound and image - immerse the audience.

The white paper to elucidates the sterile environment of the hospital, which will then get overwhelmed, with visual representations of the heart surgery that pulsates and ‘assaults’.



The image above reflects the idea that I am trying to create with the set. I want to really layer the paper - over and over -  to create a visual textural landscape and an aesthetic that is  reflective of the collage. Also the idea of layering the paper correlates to the post-modern nature of the performance as well as being an effective tool to work with on stage.  The more layered the paper the more the projected images will take on a 2 dimensional effect creating a more engaging visual experience.

Text:  - Love interrupts my life -


Bits and Bobs..


More IDEAS   

- Using graffiti (spray paint) onto white paper wall.

- Cultural jamming – (definition)

- Creating obstacles.


Constraints


In each section of work we are going to explore implementing constraints.


- Foreign Language
- Silence/ stillness
- Media
- Meat (raw)
- Blood
- Shopping trolley
- Nudity
- Sweat
-Flour
- Water


THEMES (ideas)


FRAGMENT

HTML

DEBRIS

INTER – RUPTED – BRAIN- STORMING - internally ruptured, connection, inter – relationship, interiority, dramatic shift, altered state, explosive sound, alcohol/drugs, pause, segmented space.


WHAT REMAINS?

APARTMENT