Hello! This is my first contribution to the Performing Worlds blog. Mega-kudos to Morgan for setting up this blog in the first place, and for her commitment to posting every day during the festival week, i.e. almost single-handedly maintaining an online presence for the Performance Platform group.
Huge respect to everyone who contributed to the festival in other ways… too many to list here, but you know who you are.
My main personal contribution (other than enthusiastic participation) was the Tent of Life project, which I will post more about once I have collected some decent photographic / written documentation.
In the temporary absence of the aforementioned, I have decided to document my experience of the festival through another medium, namely poetry, specifically sonnets.
Why poetry? I find it much easier to organise my thoughts if some existing structure is in place, and poetry is generally more structured than prose. In the hunt for structure, poetry can also prompt some interesting and unexpected deviations.
Why sonnets? Primarily because they are fun to write, and have a pleasing way of unfolding, with the central turn and the final couplet. I am following the Shakespearean formula: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.
Also sonnets traditionally concern themselves with the subject of romantic love, which I consider the perfect foil for the artistic, social, political and economic conflicts within Dundee.
So: I will attempt to write a sonnet for each scheduled (and unscheduled!) festival activity in which I participated, and post them up in an order corresponding roughly to the chronology of the festival.
Here are the first two sonnets, reflecting upon the pieces Time’s Rope (devised in collaboration with Jonathan Baxter, Emilia Giudicelli and individual members of the D-AiR Performance Platform, http://www.d-air.org/content/9th-june-performance-platform-times-rope) and Spinning, Wait… Curses, by Ruth Aitken (http://www.d-air.org/content/9th-june-ruth-aitken-spinning-wait-curses), both of which took place on the opening day of Performing Worlds.
Time’s Rope
I am the blind who leads the blind – what larks!
I drag them through the repertory square
To where my supervisor sometimes parks;
And leaning from her car, we find her there,
Our faux-jute rope beribboned with the blood
Of coffee-morning stories, metal hoops
And feathers. Is this work as understood?
We wake, we rise, and coil in snaking loops
Around the city: Maslow’s hierarchy,
Circles, squares, a wave, an intervent,
To shouts of That looks like a right malarkey!
Yes it is, but is that what we meant?
The path down to the waterfront is steep.
We drown in mud we thought was ankle-deep.
Spinning, Wait… Curses
We’ll walk for an hour, she said. It’s a ritual.
The axis of the field: a wheel. Circumference
Is key. We swallow our discomfort, our habitual
Self-centre, or self-censorship. The present tense
Is recommended, often sought; though lost
As frequently as not. A flash of sense
Might radiate the scrubland – borders crossed,
Smallholdings hailed across the sodden fence,
A toe dipped; and what begins as idle mist
Torrential. Upped umbrellas, camera views,
And colours – after you, no I insist –
Might we arrange ourselves in open pews?
And afterwards, peruse the clouded lens:
Here is the art, and here the group of friends.
And finally, a real sonnet from the master, with a suitable tempest reference…
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare
Performing Worlds 