Recently myself and friend/collaborator Andy Jackson took our work of poetry and puppetry, ‘Ambiguous Mirrors’ on tour to Ireland. It was an extraordinary experience – but a twofold one. Here you will find two short essays – one about performing and its pleasures and revelations, the second about the overwhelming nature of travel, fatigue and depression.
~
Naming.
Pauses can be as dynamic as action – this is what I discovered while performing in Ireland. To simply be and breathe with and through the puppet in response to emotions expressed on stage is a daring and potentially transcendent dramatic gesture. To resist the impulse to ‘fill’ space with movement is a difficult thing to do – and to maintain ‘aliveness’ in a moment of emptiness demands absolute commitment to and belief in the life of the performing object.
In these moments I came to know the puppet I had created in a different way – he seemed to be an entity unto himself. He became something other than a puppet –
The most startling and intriguing feedback I received from an audience member was;
“Now that I have seen him I am sorry that I called him a puppet.”
So what then do I call this thing I have made? – a simulacrum, a doppelgänger, a sculpted actor, an inanimate impersonator – a decoy?
This instrument of expression that straddles the thin divide between life and non-life is hard to categorise, to name. Perhaps the puppet is the ‘ambiguous mirror’ – or as I suggested in my recent Masters thesis, an ‘existential mirror’.
In Ireland audiences were generous, astute and quick to enter into discussion. Voluble and intelligent, here we found a culture steeped in poetry and music – here we felt welcomed with our offering of poetry, puppetry and song. Andy and I felt greatly affirmed as artists and were reminded of the reason behind the desire to make work and keep offering it to audiences. It is the deep satisfaction of communion –the acknowledgement of our shared humanity.
The transfiguring of loss and vulnerability into metaphor and poetry; the joyous triad of a tiny sculpted man, his living, speaking flesh-double and my hands, our intentions – flowing.
~
Wheeling
While wandering in Ireland recently, I came undone. The low diffuse sky and bare boned land, marked by thousands of years of human occupation caused me to sink into the gap between continuity and its absence. It was a long and painful free fall.
The bodily recognition I experienced towards this landscape existed outside of logic and time. It sang from deep within the unexplored spaces of my ancestry -it’s inaudible hum evoking a nostalgic grief I scarcely understood.
Although the land was alive with the markings of past eras, silence hung impermeably between the past and the present moment. Ruins stood open to the elements – churches, tombs and broken castles; grey stone walls traversed every slope, slicing the land into ancient claims.
Here was a wilderness infested by signifiers of religious and cultural meaning – in every crevice stood a dour Mary, in every window a chipped, plaster saint. On lonely escarpments Jesus thrust his ribs to the low grey sky, stick-thin arms flung across a crucifix. On the stony expanses, cairns tilted and endured; the rocks stacked like thoughts, one upon the other. At the sea’s perimeter the remnants of prehistoric forts made concentric circles in the grass.
In draughty backstreets archaeological digs yawned open, dusty post-mortems, fenced and floodlit. In the museum bog bodies lay desiccated and inert in their glass booths, as brown and amorphous as coconut fibre. They lay twisted in eternal rictus, lifeless beyond the hot, deliquescent vitality of decomposition.
Travel is a metaphor for life; we pass through but once and must relinquish what has been learned, loved, or passionately apprehended. Life and travel both are then lost forever. As I wandered Ireland I became a ghost, a citizen of no place. Ireland ran through me like water – I was porous and could not contain it.
Its ancientness and accumulated layers rendered me infinitesimal. My presence disappeared into the silence of the bogs; it drained away with the colour of the sky, passed across impassive exteriors of buildings as shadow and was carried away by the mute swan. The sky above an elm turned black with the bodies of rooks as they wheeled and screeched for roost at sundown and I, just like incalculable multitudes before me, was of no consequence.
rimofacup 