I’ve done a few very short stories now for this project by artist Barbara Campbell. It’s an on-going work in which she’s web-casting short text-based performances each night for 1001 consecutive nights. She’s reached number 693 at this point – nearly two years work.

Each nights performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone who is logged on to her website at  the appointed time – sunset where she happens to be. 100s of different writers and artists have contributed to her project – each writing a story (or stories) for her to perform.

The seed for each story in the project is a prompt word or phrase selected by Barbara from journalists’ reports covering events in the Middle East. She renders these prompts in watercolour and posts them on her website. Participants then write a story using that day’s prompt as inspiration. This is the one I did yesterday – a rather bleak tale, from the already bleak prompt line ‘generally unsmiling’ and these are the ones I did before, here, here and here. These other stories are also pretty bleak so you can see that I’m consistent.

There’s something quite exhilarating about the process of writing for the project – depending on how your time-zone synchs with the one Barbara happens to be in you get more or less time to write, and you get the prompt at different times of day/night. The previous one I did (from the prompt ‘wanted to get a good look’) I was in the UK while Barbara was in Australia. So I think I got the prompt at about 9pm and had to complete the writing before I went to bed. The other contributions I did were when I was in New York and Barbara (I think) was in Europe, so I was getting the prompt mid-afternoon and having to turn the writing around by midnight or so. For someone that travels so much it seems I get quickly confused by timezones.

I really like working against the clock as a writer and also on 1001 Nights Cast really enjoyed the fact of having to deal with some random stimulus. Barbara always lets you know where the quotes she chooses have come from but I never look at the larger news stories that she’s drawn on until after I’ve finished the writing. There’s something about the prompt – always a super-brief fragment – that’s very inspiring to work with, a level of incompletion that’s highly generative.

There are also some really great stories at 1001 Nights Cast from other people I know – from the writer/academic Adrian Heathfield, the director Peter Petralia, performer Cathy Naden (Forced Entertainment) and from the science fiction writer M. John Harrison – as well as loads more by people that I don’t know. My friend Sara Bailes just did a story there too. You can search for these other stories, and check out how to contribute to the project at http://1001.net.au

In Brussels already for the opening of That Night Follows Day. All looking good so far. The fact that we had to make decisions about text (and almost everything else) months ago so that the kids could have fair chance to learn it and feel confident, means that things for us have been pretty relaxed in this final period. The kids are doing an amazing job. Last night’s rehearsal was kind of weird though because throughout it the kids were dropping like flies with minor variations on the old ‘stomach bug’ and ‘it’s hot in here I am fainting’ routine. Started the run with 17 onstage (how it should be) but within twenty minutes we were down to 15 and ten minutes later down to 13. As the last of these left the stage clutching his stomach I think I let out an audible ‘Christ’ – fearing I guess that soon we’d be down to a mere handful of kids in the lines, all of them tottering on the edge of hysterical/sympathetic collapse.

Things picked up after a while though and by the end we were back to 15 onstage, the other two lain down in the dressing rooms. Post run-through there was a photo-shoot for which, by some magic, everyone managed to be well.

After rehearsals we head to the square outside Vooruit where in the last three days, Meg Stuart and her company Damaged Goods have been staging a series of four hour improvisations. In the theatre at least Anna Viebrock’s set for Meg’s Visitors Only (a piece that I contributed some text to) was always hugely imposing – a monolithic two storey house-structure – but here, placed outdoors between the library and some other public building it almost looks small – as though a dolls-house has been bisected by Gordon Matta-Clark and set up here beside the road in this small Belgian city.

Sat facing the house Paul Lemp and his musicians are playing a kind of endless not-changing and always-changing whirlpool of cello, bass and echo – a circular tide into which the dancers ‘on stage’ and those of us watching are drawn alike without a chance to escape. For this final day the dancers work four hours around a single section of the old Visitors performance – a task that involves them, like the music, forever spinning and rotating either solo or in constantly recombining groupings. Observed from the street the dance is people spinning alone, spinning together, circling, walking, twisting, knotting, freaking out, pacing softly, running, all in circles, clockwise, anticlockwise; ones view of anyone only ever partial, framed up and fractured by the architecture of the set – windows, doorways, cutaway walls.

I stand next to the group’s manager John Zwaenepoel and look in, soon very much wanting to climb into the house there and join them, and then realising that in a strange way, like all of those watching, I am in it already. Looking up at the eddies and flows of movement, sometimes the dancers at the top circling clockwise, those at bottom anticlockwise, sometimes both levels working in the same direction, its like the house is haunted by a desire or need to drive itself out of itself, to torque its way down into the earth, or wind its way into the sky. Watching the dancers they seem like loners on a mission, or like lost ravers at dawn, like caged animals, transcendentalists, kids, zombies, and delirious technicians of spin. It goes round and round. The music swells and falls, and from amongst the street drinkers sat to one side of the crowd on the library steps, from time to time someone gets to their feet and also surfs the movement and the moment, spinning, and dancing to their own tune, in their own time. Meg, Tonya, Vania, Davis and many others move in different rhythms, in different rooms. It’s pretty incredible. At a certain point I’m weeping for no particular reason – like the way I’ve cried at a certain point in Tarkovsky’s Mirror for no reason I can ever describe, each time I’ve seen it. Some combination of the music, the energy, the lack of words, the sheer ‘ongoing-ness’ of it all. There is a cop car going by. There are people chatting laughing. Its broad daylight. We’ve stood talking about this and that, making jokes, and now suddenly, tears. A joy that’s also a kind of sadness, or more like vice versa. I don’t know.

Much later, early hours of the morning, a few of us go back to the house, through the barricades and up the stairs. All pretty quiet outside, on the street down below. I’m chatting to Meg and to Vania who is laughing when she talks about her two long long bouts of walking strong determined circles in the top-right room of the house, as a pilgrimage in two parts. Pilgrimage One and Pilgrimage Two. Someone clambers out of the haunted house and heads off to a Night Shop, returning afterwards with beers and paprika chips. From the top storey of the structure our view is into what I think is the darkened library and in any case to a series of regional flags the shift around only a little in the still night air. Sometime around 2.30 I go home.

(thanks to Frieda Schneider for the photos)

Oh. Here’s some of one of the other days of Meg’s outdoors performance (not the spinning) on YouTube.