Charlotte Street Arts Centre Auditorium
Both Mathieu and I reworked our performances last night in Fredericton. Mathieu resolved his crushed charcoal and paper bag performance with the piled disorder of the bags full of air (see photos) instead of the balanced paper bag circle created in Edmundston. Lungs, filtered air, pollution, the ecological importance of trees, and uncaring forest destruction stayed in my mind as I watched this performance. It connects seamlessly to his carving of the 2 x 4 wood at each performance, which slowly eats away at its singular integrity. Mathieu also plays it for its resonance as we listen to its being, its woodness, its treeness. Mathieu’s intentness adds greatly to each work; he is an action in the performance, building ideas with clarity and creativity.
I remade my approach to the chocolate tongue performance with life-size casts instead of one gigantic tongue. In Edmundston, my chocolate tongue when partly eaten (sucked, licked), revealed a pearl and a razor. While in Fredericton, a pair of dice came out of another tongue; the dice I then threw, threw and threw again. Language is full of beauty, terror and chance....In the next performance, my poem translated into Morse code, written with Bay of Fundy mud onto paper, is a call in the wild for few could read it or write it. The words exist, human and tidal, organic. A line is written every performance now with the Morse code also sounded out with my hands. So far:
There is sound in the unsaid (Il y a du son dans le non-dit)
waiting to be sung (attendant d’être chanté)
ochre hard terra (ocre dur terre)
a wispy blue and glacial green veil (un voile vert et bleu glaciaire)
The coding of language/ the many languages of signs and symbols which we all understand, taught from childhood in our particular culture–we are inundated with referents in our day to day lives. And we have lost many as well, like understanding Morse code.
Like understanding the earth’s signs. ... --- ... (SOS)
[lrd]
