little bird listening by Jess Allen - Tues 1st June, 3-6.40pm

little bird, listening is a durational work exploring distance (in space and time) through endurance (of body and memory). It uses the rich and complex text of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets spoken continuously from memory whilst moving and performing tasks with objects. The words form a continuous sound score that is spoken in relay between the performer (live) and her mother (over mobile phone from Aberystwyth), for the length of the train journey that would reunite them (3 hours 40 minutes in Coventry).

Within this overarching structure, the work attempts to address how and where memory resides in the body-mind; how pre-occupation of the cortex with the conscious act of remembering text allows movement to arise from sub/unconscious; and how text – whether imagery or pattern – can become truly embodied through a regular practice of speaking-dancing.

The Quartets are perhaps the most famous twentieth century poems to deal with the nature of time but are also contained in the one slim volume that I mistakenly picked up age 6 and precociously read out loud to my mother; the book in which she once wrote my lessons in grammar and punctuation and the notes for her own mother’s epitaph. Now these words form the basis for this exchange, exploring, through text about time, the distance between who we are now and who we were then, and how we transcend or distort it through the un/reliable lens of technology and memory.

So I find words I never thought to speak/In streets I never thought I should revisit/When I left my body on a distant shore

T. S Eliot | Little Gidding | Part II