Forever Falling

...Until Morning

Notebook 2000-2002

Open publication - Free publishing - More clipping

Faded Pictures

Open publication - Free publishing - More ellis

Audio Story - 'Snow'

A sample of 'Snow'

Menagerie

Menagerie was a piece created over a timeframe of around five days in response to a request to contribute to the Wake Up! festival (a day of art and performance) at the Worcester Arts Workshop on Saturday 29^th January 2011. The top floor contains three rooms (two office spaces and a junk room), a hall and a staircase leading up to the floor. The performance made use of the staircase and the junk room and was created in response to an hour spent exploring the room and its contents. The room contained a huge amount of different artefacts, paper, art work, electrical equipment, furniture, mannequins and had been filled to bursting over a number of years. For me it felt like the ‘memory’ of the building, placed on the top floor with no windows.  It had a disorganised beauty to it that I associated with the clutter of life experiences and searching through the space, one tried to make sense of much of the objects that were in there. I wanted to know where different objects had come from, why people had abandoned their art work in this space rather than taking it home. This was reminiscent of Jerome Bruner’s assertion that we use narratives to try to understand our lives and for me, for a piece to respond appropriately to this space, it had to be about memory and loss. The limitations of the available space also suggested that, without clearing out the rubbish completely and therefore losing the aesthetic, that we could only accommodate a small number of audience members per ‘show’. For me, the best way to make the performance about memory was to involve the act of remembering and, for this reason, I decided that I wanted the piece to be a shared act of remembering – a conversation between two people, structured within a loose narrative arc. The other aspect of the space was the element of darkness, the lights were some way into the room and so during the initial exploration, one had to trip and climb over boxes, umbrellas and chairs in the pitch black to get to the light switch. This created a sense of uncertainty, of trepidation that I wanted to keep in the piece, obviously whilst making sure it was safe and negotiable by members of the audience. This heightening of the senses through the injection of fear and unknowing is used by companies such as Punchdrunk to put audiences of their guard. There is also evidence to say that perceived threat is understood by individuals in such a way that makes the experience feel more ‘real’ .  Hence, once a pathway was cleared through the space, it was lit with the minimum of light possible. To add to this feeling of fear I attached unsettling pictures of creepy looking dolls to various objects, in many ways this wasn’t really in keeping with the piece or the themes in the script however, I felt like it needed that extra obvious prompt to really say – ‘this is a scary place’.       

    

The script made use of a number of techniques. Firstly, it was retro-scripted – the ideas that I felt that I wanted to cover were reduced to a few key questions to prompt the conversation between performer and audience member. The performer set the question and the audience member responded and then the performer responded in kind so hopefully, the initial prompt instigated the sharing of two stories. It would have been easy to simply write the lines for the performer to speak, however, alongside the pressures of the short development period, I also felt like this was cheating the situation – why should the audience member has to respond spontaneously when the performer had a learned reaction? – it seemed to undermine the notion of sharing memories. In the same way I felt that getting the performer to adopt a character undermined the concept of the piece. The set up was always going to feel fictional but I wanted the performance to feel as real as possible again to give the audience member back as much as they were putting in. For this reason I used augmented characterisation to add a few minor details to the performer’s own personalities. In many ways this was simply a matter of context. The questions raised were not the kind that would normally be discussed in every-day life. Also, there was a loose bit of narrative centred around a card trick that predicted the day the audience member was going to die that gave the piece a bit of structure and a climactic point. Again, the performer wouldn’t normally behave in this kind of way so this was attached to the genuine responses from the conversation to heighten the experience.        

Two Prose Fragments, Autumn 2010

[after Ralph Vaughan Williams]

The specimen trees are canons of limbs, entangled at a level with the aerials; they leap by certain rules through a silver circle of sky, beyond prediction. Already displayed, how long these processes ossify, becoming a national literature; yellowing classics whose leaves are turning an autumn movement, in a notation for notianal lovers: the weather woven over their heads and the stubborn light in its pouring after, bound at the inner bound. Their ownerless dust recombines experiential elements, each refulgent bucket of rain reaving a cord in water, capable of emotional content and nothing exempt from the mill of the earth.

(Early November)


***

Thirty-four thousand seconds since beginning, when the sun is small and confined to a bundle of clouds, the spider returns unconcerned to her silk.

There are tendencies of voice stretching from clrestory to pavement; there are processes that hold in a life without architecture. It doesn't matter. After the history of music as a system of thought, indulge me with your tongue: a sensual approach to the intellect, written out backwards. I listen for signals...

... and I can't discover enough. This body of knowledge, rigged with ligaments, will ravel a rope of endings, ephemeral all afteroon in wishful suspension.

(Late October)

Concept - Shirioshi Monologues

This book will be a collection of monologues to be performed in public on crowded trains. The aim being to confuse, entertain, enrapture – generally to allow anybody who to create a viral fictionalisation of the carriage space for the entertainment of other passengers. A range of different approaches to the monologue concept will be included from stories about unrequited love to the ramblings of mad people – we will not include any work that specifically reference acts of terrorism (the ‘I’ve got a bomb’ scenario), however any other themes will be accepted.

The book will be published as an ebook (numerous formats) and distributed for free. It will also be published via a POD  service (or physically if funding is available) for individuals wishing to buy it. The cover will be black.

Brave readers will then asked to perform readings in trains and (if possible) record get somebody to discretely record them doing it. Videos can be uploaded to Youtube and then linked via the Shirioshi Monologues Blog.

The Lemonade Girl

Daisy-May is stripping the lemon pips off of her knuckles with her thumbnail, like a knife carving seeds outta peppers. Drawing a wrist cross her forehead, she’s gritty-all from the dust-wind. It’s getting up strong, she can feel it, like how static crackles through drying bed-sheets touching each other on the line. Zinging down her bones, like all else from Cherrybrook. Daisy-May is born of the earth, the sand and the dust. Mothers will be thumbing patterns in pie crust, wringing grease from their palms, gathering in their daughters and peeking through their shutters for their men folk, who are all but rodeo-riding spooked and bucking cattle to safety in preparation. The heat, it’s baking into her chicken-white skin, her chest heavy, sweat making a nest at the back of the tangled candyfloss of her hair, a dew of it balls down her temple, splashes her bare shoulder.

Refreshing.

A star winks in the strip-light bright of the day, the star becoming metal which becomes a truck in the flickering distance. Daisy-May is aching for the road, the possibilities it suggests, of getting out of this town.

The truck is rearin up close, chucking up spumes of sand like a raging bull. And Daisy-May, well she’s fetchin to leave. But then there was Donovan to think about, and Mickey-Joe. Sweet, good, kind Mickey-Joe with his gravy brains, as momma was want to say, God rest her. Daisy-May knew there was more to him than that, his lumbering figure and baby boy face. If not for him, she could mount up on a shiny white truck and ride out of town, leave her home, Donovan and her past behind.

Daisy-May remains on the dirt, the only girl about in the disintegrating town, resolute at her makeshift stall. Scallops of her lemon skirt twitch against the back of her knees, the stirrer clinking at the neck of the juice jug. Only sound for miles, it seemed.

As the truck slows, the girl with the chicken skin battered in freckles which were not dainty but fat like hundreds of miniature overstuffed cake cases and the lemon scallop skirt, the strangest pink-red candyfloss hair, buffeting in the breeze, as is the jug stirrer, rocked by the sniffing, snuffling exploring wind, whispering of lands far away, picks up her smile as the truck stops in an explosion of hog-squealing metal and grit sparks and says, ‘Well hey there, sir, y’all thirsty? Got some juice ready. 20 cents a cup.’

‘Darlin, I got some juice right here. Won’t even charge if you’re good.’

‘And where is it you be headin, sir?’

‘The question missy is where you be headin.’

The dust-wind is creeping strong, stronger and Daisy-Mae stands tall, spine straight as a schoolmistress’ cane. The wind pulls back her hair, smoothes over her freckles and curls around her body. The jug stirrer disturbs the buzz of the heat and that sound, that slither inside the dust-wind. It throttles the stirrer livid like a very rattler itself.
Daisy-May reaches out her forefinger, short nails, all practical, and stills the stirrer with a quiet but distinct tink. Her scalloped skirt is uniform, unmoving. The smile gains, eyelashes bat, her lips pull apart, ‘Oh no sir, you’re quite wrong. That ain’t at all the question.’

The truck driver goes bull eyes. He starts for her and it’s then the sky does crack.

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P.F.C

You’re pretty fucking cool

- with your red-rimmed sunglasses

tucked in your hair

and your funeral eye make up

and skid-mark lips.

You’re pretty fucking cool

your top –

            fashionably slashed.

That ring through your outty.

That stab-wound appendectomy.

Hitching up your skirt

and showing me

the bruises on your thighs.

Showing me your cunt.

You’re pretty fucking cool.

The Unconscious Collective

Hello -

We are The Unconscious Collective. This is our work.