Mobile park

Sunday:  14.3.2010


Walking over the terrain. The ground leaps up at me. Catches me on an upturn. Then suddenly drains away. I stumble. Between this upbeat and downward pouring there is a mismatch. I can't bridge the gap. Between the searing rush and the sudden extinction. In the light it is blindness and black-out. A rushing urgency that is compelling and magnetic, then it falling away. A sudden vacuum. In the rush and freeze I am captivated. There are different temperature currents that come up and around. In the warm streams the body relaxes; melts into the fiber of the current. Reaches through. Then the slam of cold. The hard definition of unbreakable surface. The ground is spongy. I go down. Then suddenly it withholds. I break my foot on the barrage.

I am in the park. I stop and look over at the bowl where the sound of skateboards rolls and swooshes. Kids go into the fall momentum. The more they do the more they stick to the side of the board, the board to the side of the concrete. At the upturn they are exotic fruit growing laterally out of the upper crust of that bowl. Everything waits in the pause. Then the down-current surge which they ride like the innards of a vacuum cleaner that sucks them up as particles and carries them through as part of a wider pattern. Their arms are held loosely, hands turning and re-orientating from the wrist fold, fanning outwards this way and that. That creates and guides a springing reflectivity right into the interstices of the spine and in the area below the sit-bones. There are these small minor sitting adjustments that then kink and turn creating a swivel through the length of the back and into the neck muscles and so the board re-angles. There is a wide flatness of the chest that fronts the operation. On each flexion of the board the ankles give so that the flat match of foot surface against board surface is never plied apart but rides into and through the momentum plunging downwards into this sticking affinity as a reaction and further rooting to the cross-current speed that would otherwise tear it away.

I go into the Arts Hut. Sit on one of the chairs. My hands on the surface of a drum. Others are already there. The music has started. I find a way in through the intervals and into the tangible fills that I work against. It gives definition. A constraint through which to feel a reversal. There is a responsivity that builds between players. I am listening. I feel it through my hands in the surface to surface contact with the skin of the drum. It is beginning to warm. Through that warming, inflection becomes possible. I am insinuated in the layerings of that inflexion that is not a sound or a thing or a person exactly but this coming together into different complexes of affinity and separation. That begins to occur in more and more detailed instances as if the pixels of the surface broke into all the capabilities of growth and decay in the life of this meeting. We are articulating nuances. This sense of personal engagement ebbs and flows as each individually, battle or address this question of presence and absence. I cut in and out- ride into an attraction of beats that multiplies into a volume that is one, then drains and slips in places, separating out into a million derivatives, add-ons and abstracted possibilities, hinted at but then re-worked in their very making, a disparate sound across the room to clash, tease and engage. Something about existing here on this brink of change where a tension between holding together and coming apart is lived out in the music. We gradually begin to take account of one another through this process, like cloud formations that fall into relief the affects of light and so give a sense to what would otherwise be blindness exhausting all definition. We come into existence like scared children. In the small falls and absences of our own meter we instigate this known hesitancy by giving way and sometimes by simply stopping. Then the rush of a re-emersion engulfs once more. It plays itself out in that way.

A man comes into the centre of the room. He shuffles with the flat of his foot against the floor. Seems then to give way. To break fractionally. Then braces and halts the fall into a slow turning; a meeting of these counter- intuitions. His eyes are closed. Turning inward he addresses us.