If this were choreography

17 December 2008

You dream that you have woken but that soon you are slipping back again, not into sleep but into unconsciousness. Vague panic reactions. Layerings of different kinds of unconsciousness. A mechanical bird brings the answer to your questions.

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M. watching an almost motionless Jim Fletcher in the drifting, dramaturgically flat and rather circular monologue Sight is the Sense… says to me afterwards that she had spent some time during the performance thinking “what would this be, if it were choreography?”. I was so happy with this thought, and with the perverse but beautiful image of her sat there listening and thinking, hard at work translating the shifts, turns, spirals, associations, jumps and flows in the text into steps, gestures and moves through space.

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Afterwards the rain seems to blurr everything and soon pretty much all that remains is the image of a beggar on the streets of Brussels – a guy who sits on Anspach every day with a beat up set of bathroom scales set out on the ground in front of him. It’s as if (you guess) these scales at least nod to the chance that his presence here – with downcast eyes and torn paper cup – is work rather than beggary.