I've been working on a lecture presentation with Hugo and Adrian, titled Intangibles and concerning presence and other hard-to-quantify aspects of performance. Seeing as how I'm in Brussels most of the time these days my contribution was a series of video fragments which Hugo and I recorded on various early mornings in Essen, Vienna and London, usually in the space between breakfast and a taxi to an airport. So I was doubly absent I guess. I also wrote a letter to Hugo and Adrian, which they read in Exeter last week, as a part of the presentation. An excerpt:

What you know already (but i hope you dont feel it too much in the moment) is that some of these words [in this letter] which seem to form a flow, a coherence, a more or less solid Tim that is speaking/writing, some of these words, in this flow, were rather written as insertions, not part of any flow at alland in fact not even written in the scene i described - my sat on the bed - but written much later instead perhaps added whilst I was in transit to brussels (airport, plane) or added (still later) in Brussels itself (in the apartment there)insertions - a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph or two in some other place - which are by now indistinguishable from the rest of the fabric of this writing.

There so many insertions and rewritings in fact that its probably wrong to think of what's written here as anything other than a layered accumulation of tracesnot so much a single thing as an unruly concoction, an assemblage of voices, the pressed and gathered sum of many moments, somehow tricked into one place.

I had to that same idea about that watching the dancer Fumiyo Ikeda in rehearsals today
she was dancing something connected to the word 'forgetting' (we're working from words somehow)
and she was doing this thing where (she said afterwards) "all the corners of the room were calling" to her
like she was trying to be (somehow) in relation to all directions
her body contradicting itself, if you can imagine that
limbs stuttering, arms heading one way, head another, legs dipping and turning
not especially forceful or angst ridden this, just a body flickering, layering its own intentionalities, belying its own impulses
even in short bursts all this was exhausting to watch...
a kind of muliplication of presences produced by one body, a strange quantum maths.

I even had a simillar feeling weeks before even when she stopped dancing during one rehearsal
and in silence simply re-walked, re-traced her journey in the room - marking its ups and downs, walking and silently pointing the twists and turns of her progress
before stepping back up and into dance again -
i said afterwards "like there were two Fumiyo's" - once dancing, the other following behind....  some tricky maths again.

[Rough layouts for a publication project I did for Frascati Theater in Amsterdam who are currently running a mini-season titled CRISIS].

Sheffield. Late in the night/early two mornings ago, woken by a drunk bloke yelling to his mate in the street.

I tell you what John Man (or maybe John John) you are a fucking legend. You are an absolute fucking total legend. You are a fucking legend.

He speaks with that special quality of the voice reserved for drunks and the guys who voiceover movie trailers - where the emphasis falls on every single word equally and with great force and enthusiasm never once not even for one single moment letting the constant patina of vigour or animation drop - only in this case, that of the voice that pulls me out of sleep, all hideously slurred.

*

In another city two girls are sitting on a bench in the railway station. As your train pulls away you see that one holds her mobile out to the other, and sat together there on the bench in the sunshine, they watch the tiny screen, on which it seems from their gestures, that a picture is moving. They discuss what's in the image, the one whose phone it is explaining something, laughing, smiling at the other, then the fingers of her hand touch the screen for a moment, a kind of contact with this person that is absent, the gesture soft and practical at the same time, its intimacy to the surface of the screen maybe connected to love, or to desire.

*

In a dream I'm watching the start of a horror movie. Teenagers are entering a high school. From the haircuts it's 60's and the film quality (analog, rich in browns and yellow, half chemical, half autumnal, backs that up). The clip plays in slow motion. Not sure if that's part of the film or part of the context - we're watching the movie in some kind of film studies class. There is discussion of this opening sequence. We're watching it again and again. One shot down the corridor, a second shot at an angle, kids rising from a stairwell, turning right towards the camera, some of them turning away. Watching this you don't know yet which of them will be the protagonists, which of them will enter whatever tangled web of terror and entrapment the movie will bring.

Re ghosts.

Back in Belgrade after the thing they now call the balkans conflict. A friend who himself had been transplanted from an area of lush green beauty by the sea and a family home and farm where the life was dictated by the seasons stared up at his new home of smoke and concrete, a tower block of proportions and disorder that is only known in eastern europe. His family had all had to move with threats of certain death from a place to this. Mother was dead, but father grandfather and grandmother all hung on as shadows and ghosts in this new place which affronted their very existence. Undead. Granmother and grandfather used to climb down the stairs from the summit daily to sit on a bench on a green verge by a main road. The lift had long since begun a new life as a home for rubbish excrement and dogs. The verge beneath their bench was now the farm, a stick digging a furrow amongst the litter. Hushed tones as they talked of the planting, the season, the crops that they should be harvesting. A daily event, the rain of Belgrade to them was a good thing for the seeds they had planted, too wet for a harvest. The sun was good for the plumbs in the orchard, September a time for slivovic and jam.Conversations and love of a time and place, now gone for ever in real life, but that was all they had now. Darkness would begin to come and they would help each other from the bench to begin the ascent, after their day on the soil. Two tiny pieces of something precious stranded in the mess of blackness and unnatural disorder.