A bright world full of light and sand.A young woman in white, veiled, spins slowly.
She looks like an angel or a prophet or a nun or the virgin Mary or the sacred whore Magdalene or a particularly poised belly-dancer or the Western fantasy of a mystic Hindu saint.
She starts to sing, at first so quietly you can barely hear her. No words, just wails and warbles.
Her song grows louder, filling with strange resonances and dissonant overtones. Soon you realize that it isn't her singing after all. It's a recording, you can feel the amplified reverberations in your bones.
She stops abruptly. Suddenly the world is dark and silent and the woman is on her knees. Her muscles clench, her body heaves, and from her throat, past her lips, into her hand emerges a crystal-clear jewel, dazzlingly brilliant.
She heaves again and, like a cosmic hairball, coughs up another jewel.
Holding one in each hand, she rises quickly, as though she's heard something coming. (Do you hear something?) She turns around in the space, listening intently.
The music begins again and the woman begins a slow-motion battle with an invisible enemy. She wields the jewels like weapons and they seem to glow in her palms.
Shadowboxing.
Sciomachia.
She fights for so long that the audience eventually gets up and wanders off.
She keeps fighting. It's beautiful and sad. And boring.
(Written 1/21/11, after Solo Training Session #2)
I like this more than your first. Not to imply that I dislike your first in any way, I just like this one more. Broken expectation is one of my favorites. Shattering the expectation of an ending is both glorious and thoroughly boring.
ReplyDeleteIt echoes stories from my mentor at Colgate (Jacque) of the "plays" and "performance pieces" he watched and worked on in the East Village 60s and 70s. Beautiful, epic, urgent, hopeful, sad, and ultimately boring.
Her sister, who coughs up slugs and snails, is not present here. Perhaps she is busy elsewhere in her own fairy tale dimension.
ReplyDeleteHi Joy! To me this is beautiful in the sense that is poetic, but... it's less useful for having an "objective" idea of your work (if I got yo well, according to what your aiming in the embodied-practice research). My imagination is influenced by yours, and gives little space to a general perception of the work. Ciao, Giulia
ReplyDelete