Text and performance
Performances & Publications:
Morphe Arts, March 2020
The White Review, November 2019
Poetics in Commons, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, 2019
Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen, 2018 (Part II sound work in collaboration with Susannah Stark)
Phrase is a provisional text and ongoing notebook that is performed in public. It contains multiple pieces of text pieced together that span vast distances and times, ranging from sacred texts to pop music, snippets from conversations had and heard in supermarkets, pubs and at home and fragments of poetic lines that don't fit elsewhere. It is reiterated anew each time it takes place and is always being written.
I use and experience it as both tool and a symptom of the individual subject that frustrates and yet propels attempts to articulate, to organise, to be in common. The voices, texts and sounds form a chorus which plays with the narrative 'I' as an accumulation of experience, citation and repetition. By both dissolving and re-establishing the split between public and private, self and other, between different internal and external drives, the text acts as a political, poetic and possibly, a liturgical space and mode of address.
An early version of the work consisted of two parts, the second of which was written and performed with artist Susannah Stark. It utilized sounds from the digital commons to form its core rhythm - from the sound of an ancient bullroarer, a fetal heartbeat, a moth taking flight to a forest at night. Our own vocal work, poetry and songs then drift through this, adopting a range of voices, from the satirical to sincere, the personal to the political address.
*Phrase refers to both a linguistic and musical device as a formal structure for writing/composing the work, as units of expression which form part of a larger whole. It is also a book by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in which he uses the word phrase as a marker for the limits and origin of language. Phrase Part II contains a sung version of Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Ditty of Desire.'