Writing

Words

Writing as a way of thinking and of sharing ideas has formed an essential part of the creative process for Oceanallover.

Words are used as one way to generate choreographic ideas as well as a way of processing performances after the fact. Poetry in particular has proved to be a form that mirrors some of the abbreviated and condensed emotional content of the live work. Included here are a number of pieces of writing that are associated with specific performances given by the company. All of the words are written by Alex Rigg as a tool for direction and explanation.

Some words are posted on a blog and you can click here to read them:

Feathermammy.blogspot.com

............ or read on...........

Geology

Walking, I passed between stones
unnoticed leaving left and right
divided by geography.
An accident of place or time?
It wasn't clear but crystalline.
My hemispheres are cut through.
Thought is hard and ordered,
slow; blood seems
an unnecessary fluid,
heart beats a series
of shocks across
tectonic continents of skin.

John Balliol’s Heart

Love in a box kept
safe from me
love in a box my
antipathy
love in a box you’re
hurting my arm
love in a box is
that twisted ?

Love in a box boom
boom box baby
love in a box
did I say maybe ?
Love in a box I’m
contorted
love in a box your
heart’s distorted.

Love in a box please
please release me
love in a box I’m
shrinking
love in a box needs
mouth to mouth
love in a box has
palpitation.

Love is a bind oh
tie me tighter
love holds you down and
deals with you later
love with your heart now
cut that out
I’ve told you before I’m
not faking………..

(not faking stupid – ken ?)

Metal (my father)

Blood is like rust, crawling in crystalline
forms, unmaking geometry as benign
and calcareous kaleidoscopes
across the skin of human thought and hope.
Hopes are forged and riveted together,
children cast like coins or fathered
by a hammer swung in rhythmic comprehension;
a pattern to be copied through generations.
So I was made in the fire of my mother.
I am melted and reformed through ardour;
orange iron bones, ferrous flesh –
a conscious corrosion of all histories past.

-
Wood (my self)

Standing straight in bound fibres,
muscular trees are cut and dried like flowers,
roots and heads discarded. A stolid torso,
doughty arms sawn straight by metal jaws.
I marry wooden limbs, arrange assignations,
match-make, half-house, dove-tail for tension.
Un carpintero whose eye lifts and measures –
designing a fit for all parts with pleasure.
The passage of my saw through plank and rafter
marks the passage of its future and hereafter.
A creation through destruction, cutting to heal;
a shelter of roof and walls for life concealed.

-
Rope (that held me)

The beginning and the end are difficult,
but chiefly the end, whose strands, laid out,
are hard to unify because it is the nature
of fibres, once twisted, to unwind into the future so
this rope, by which my life hangs,
was made with the stalks of nettle and
each thread rolled between finger and thumb
to sustain a tension once begun
and every thread spiralled in will be
thicker as strands and strands, three on three,
together give the strength that hold me
clear of the earth

-
Paper(that holds me still)

An elegant summary, this sheet,
a temporary suspension of disbeliefs.
My life reduced to lines and flat,
sheaves of information caught, stacked.
A page is made from all the little pieces,
all the ends and scraps complete it.
Swollen with water; confused, adrift,
then squeezed and held until they stick.
My skin reproduce upon a skin,
pierced by points and cut thin;
a bold tattoo that beats the drum
of my life in words and pictures.

Stairs

Each block of stone is chosen and cut from the earth,
Dressed and placed by hands bruised and aching,
Built into a cascading wall of rocks to make
A fall whose proportion fits the measured tread
Of all who pass and repass:
A mountain of graded crystal carried to form
Infinite potentials, energies locked with mortar
Giving our legs the power of flight.

I thought that I would speak to each stone,
Extract from its impassive face the truths
Grown through tectonic assault and skeletal collapse;
Offer my own energies in a trade,
Rub off a little skin in an erosion of all sense:
Donate breath, transfer heat, spend time upon.
In descent life is spent, born high then washed
Into the ocean like a grain of sand.

through and through

searching for a space between
now and now
a breath, in and out
that lasts a day
I dance through
states of change with
bare hands and bare feet

	If you click on the beetleman here you can read a short story that was written as an idea for a piece of theatre. The story and the theatrical project have remained as fragments but you might still find them interesting...........

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