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The ever revolving doors of inspiration.  This week has firmly lead me to dance. I’ve always been obsessed with dancing and the internal world that music can create, especially when its you and your ipod against the back drop of everyday life.  Sometimes I feel like an actor on stage walking through various cliched films dependent on what I’m listening to that day.  For some reason listening to music through headphones creates a feeling of an invisible force field, as if nothing in the physical world can touch you at that moment.  Your imagination is given a happy clappy stomping ground to ping back and forth between the images in front of your eyes and the ones being brought out of your head via the music.  Like a sleep walking version of a daydream.  Music is so intensely personal to each person, and one persons high in a song is definitely not for everyone. people can detect or be privy to certain emotions apparent in different music, but that doesn’t mean they will feel it.  intellectualising emotion is very different to the experience of it.

Untitled

The crescent shrieks,

A creeping cloak of cloud

Irks over the lip of rusty humps

Sand so slender; the pores suck it up

And feet become satiated with heavy bloated beach

Waves hesitate

Click forward and back again,

My tongue rises to fall and I bite at it all,

Plump cushion of boscage

Mustard yellow and croaking green

Puff outlandishly; a big hilly scene,

Cutting their hairy heads against the moon strewn sky

It mooches out, ever over the horizon

A lazy cuddle on the blackened highs

Inhaling ruptured lights and snorting out frog filled soot

Green sneeze and fortune find; over sod and soil.

The wall ends there

A rigid page of gritted matt black

I pick at the edges and tuck them into my skirt,

Billowing wombs with juicy flirt

I weigh down over thee

A fallen winter tree,

Bark and bathe in me

Rise, and be enslaved to me.

Tuesday 17th November 2011

Saw the amazing play ‘A Place at the Table’ at the Camden Peoples Theatre, London (www.cptheatre.co.uk)

I joined the actors round a large table and they created a powerful discussion around us, which led the way for participants to get involved.  Several times, I felt the urge to storm the table, jump up and join them.  Which led to a discussion with some of the performers afterwards about how far could the participants go and how would they control their actions, or bring it back to the scope of the play?

This led to further discussions with fellow artist Priya Saujani, (www.utopriya.com) about creating a performance that created itself as it went along, using the audience as active catalysts.  How and where would it go?  Would you still be able to have a tangible narrative?  Would the performers become obsolete amongst the audience?  And would it just descend into total chaos and be pointless?  Although the idea of creating something that is pointless and just exists in that moment and between those people, is quite a beautiful experience.

Other discussions had that night between artist Jennifer Muteteli, Priya and myself were the idea of whether creativity comes from a place of darkness or trauma within a person, or whether creativity can sometimes cause this.  Its a chicken and the egg scenario.  The idea of contentment maybe leads to a lack of edge, drive, or force that sometimes creates the most poignant honest work.

Another slightly more pretentious and contentious discussion was the idea that artists are a completely different breed of person altogether, and maybe only artists can ever understand, listen to, or ‘get’ what goes on within the mind of an artist and why they create in the first place.  But maybe that level of understanding holds true for anyone in any field, as birds of the same feather seem to flock together.

I recommend the books ‘The Gift’ and ‘Trickster makes the world: How disruptive imagination creates culture’ by Lewis Hyde.