I am the Mountain and the Mountain is Me!
The next phase of devising Total Eclipse…….
From our improvisation the moon, a mountain and Wales emerge as central to the piece. I have many memories of the Welsh landscape, a longing to be back home close to my parent’s initiative – to leave London in the 70s and become self sufficient farmers.
Gradually a Welsh accent, dissolved from years of travel and living in the South of England reasserts itself. It feels great to revisit the body of a more fiery nation, to peel away superfluous boundaries and be in the face of life.
I Am the Mountain and the Mountain is Me!
The mountain holds so many memories, it’s like another parent; a place of safety and return. Lily is Welsh and she has come home to meet her mother again.
Paco is a visitor to Wales, his relationship and often to himself. The mountain is an obstacle to nourishment and links with his own home and culture. There is the constant threat of wild boar….wild boar in Wales? Yep…..it’s a clown show!
Lily and Paco have ‘odd’ moments of meeting; calling out into space at the top of the mountain.
Mostly they are lost to each other though retreating into textures of a metaphysical world or what can be tangibly seen, tasted and touched.
It is a struggle to be in a clown state, to be full sized and to fall…really fall. We connect to a residual shock seducing us away from the body and presence – away from the reality that from whom we originally came no longer exists in the world.
We float ……lost in space. Images of an umbilical cord disintegrating, all reference points gone. It is darker than dark…..darker than it has ever been before…..anything could happen.
Another poem
What happens to detail?
The passion for strawberry meringue
Grooves in your nails… soft roundedness of the tips
That are entirely you
The intricate contractions of muscles around your lips. Narrating, negotiating
Is it transposed?
Where is this energy that can not be eliminated…. the detail of it?
That is entirely you
What has happened to the rhythm of your heart? The unpredictability of it? Is it now the flutter of tiny bee wings or ripples of objects lost at sea?
The contents of your small black handbag that can only ever belong to you. Your inhaler, glasses, the dust of your life…..
But what of your dust. You as dust? Are you scattered? A loose web of your life. A translucent fragmented version of you
The constellation of storyteller, the Samaritan, the politician, the teacher, the mother.
The entirety of you. Where are they?
Your depleted teeth, worn like sea rocks. Dancing, leaning figures that can only be held in the cave of your mouth. Your flat bottom and sturdy legs, a tummy still swollen from lives channeled through you.
The pathways of scarring, small perilous ridges, tender redness and soft silky sand.
The quality of depth and distance in your eyes. The clarity of your smile; shyness of your chest. The boldness of your hands, a secret elegance in your fingers.
The detail and entirety of you
Where does it go ?
How are you transposed if you are not to be nothing….not anything anymore?
Dropping into grief, flailing back up to the surface with more questions – is this enough ? Am I honouring the memory of my mother enough ? When I described what she looked like dead there was a hint of comedy …..some laughter…..is that OK ?
Would mum laugh ?
Lily prepares herself and waits for the eclipse. Her mother is coming….all the signs. At last she will not have to endure this loss any longer; all the questions she is left with answered.
Paco is exhausted from rational explanations of what is about to happen in the cosmos and a terrifying night of having to confront his own darkness alone.
