A durational dance work exploring time, distance & memory through T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

Monday 6 June 2011

little bird in love in liverpool

Tuesday 31st May

A year ago to the day (if not the date) since little bird was first performed in Coventry and I am walking to the parish hall to rehearse again through bright sunshine. (I'm revisiting the piece for the 'poolside Emergency festival at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on Saturday 11th June.)

In a rural idyll you couldn't make up if you tried, I leave my home on the Herefordshire farm to walk across the fields, up the steep steps through the woods, over the iron age hill fort, past the trig point, over the cattle grid, down to the black and white gamekeeper's cottage opposite a thatched church ['So, while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel/History is now and England'...] to collect the keys to the hall. They are hanging on a hook outside, with the wellies...



The poems have been inhabiting my head for over a year. Released from the urgency of knowing and recalling them for the assessed performance for my MA last year, they have become a sporadic soundtrack to my life... a source of a relevant quote to be drawn out of my mind like the white stuff of memories in a Pensieve; a challenge to boredom on a long journey; an accompaniment to seduction; a mantra for a run; snatches of lines spoken in enthusiastic sterero with my mother or my friend Sara who is starting to become as obsessed with them as me. I know them so well now they have taken on a life of their own, a meaning beyond meaning ['We had the experience but missed the meaning/And approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form, beyond any meaning/We can assign to happiness...']

I'm excited; I'm nervous. But as I begin to move, with breath, with heart, I realise I'm in charge of the poems now. They have become mine and I can dance to them with utter conviction. The voice of the long dead (male) poet has been assimilated into my (female) memory and dancing body and become 'renewed, transfigured, in another pattern'

I move into and out of the sunlight as it streams into the hall, through windows either side of a ticking, chiming clock measuring 'time not our time' noticing the synchronicity of the words I am speaking as I do so:

'For most of us, there is only the unattended/Moment, the moment in and out of time/The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight...'



(and thanks for the joggers Adam)