Skript/Opus 49

Skript 050313: While watching an online version of the live performance of Opus 49 by Miguel Pereira (Portugal)

shuffling the collective group of heads, shoulders... is it hot? they remove outer layers - I notice myself scanning the back of necks -- who might i know in the audience? what a egotistic thing to do i think but their we are. a sharp cut. alone. sitting. alone. like us here. watching. but distanced on his chair with microphone in hand. cut. the sharp cut. I am ready for the sharp cut this time.. i feel less thrown by it. i notice myself thinking - ah yes, this is purposeful. him. they. me. the same. connected. as he stands he feels weak, well no not weak. but his back is to us, to me. and he --- i cannot find the word -- he -- well seems unsure. i am drawn the the back of his neck, cast in shadow it is open, well it seems open, exposed somehow. i notice that i am noticing not only his neck, but the other one, in the audience, in front of him... two shadowed exposed pieces of skin - intimate somehow, but also, unrealised. unrealised how? unthought perhaps.


The microphone is like a touch... rather a torch! his steps uncertain, or just creeping, easing forward into the darkness. the microphone as choreographer. he / it searching for the next thing.  i watch and listen. waiting for the microphone as choreographer to find, realise, the next thing.

As i watch the screen i realise i am in it.  my reflection right there large in the centre of the image. i look at myself, in the image... correct my hair. he stumbles. i lose       lose my concentration. bang-like a rock star.  ah yes, she was talking about bands, music, manchester.....
manchester, fills me with grey. damp. industrial - yes she said that. grey. seeping in to the skin.


a military marching tune.. odd. the self importance of it, rattles me... if...annoyed. i forget what he was doing, doing. the music loud, self important, pressing. it bothers me, bothers me in a scratchy , way, i need to irritate it, bother it, the it of me that is bothered that i cannot recall him in that moment. the music overpowering the image.... ha ha. given it is labeled op.49 i guess i shouldn’t concern myself.  but the gap, yes it is a gap in my recall, like a little hole does bother me....
it makes no sense, darkness, figures in the darkness, the floor moving...moving...i want to look again, look closer, find the answer, i don’t, i can’t.
move on.


he jumps and wiggles, like a school boy i think. those boys that are yet to grow into their bodies. ad o les ance. painful really. searching for sound, he whips his beat, shimmys at the waist. rubs on the wall like the bear... your know -- the one in jungle book. i notice his body soft of the hard wall. i find myself, drifting... what does it feel like to rub on that surface. (it is clean!! - oh dear - ocd stricks sticks, strkes, strikes!)
wiggling, jiggling, as i sit here in stillness...i feel your jiggling belt your microphone captures the image of you in my mind ear...i jiggle too. .


it is loud, too loud, the floor keeps moving, i sit and sit and sit...he falls and falls and falls. the music begins to fade. i see the fade, hear the fade, see the emptiness, the openness of possibilities. i notice the space behind my eyes and just above my eyelids. as the sound fades i feel a weight in my chest, close my eyes and wait.


coldness, darkness. the shadows of the space, on his skin in the tinie reverberations of the space... .I feel that cold, dark shadowy place...it seeps into my bones and sinew, keeps me still, stiller, still. the sound is everywhere, overpowering my other senses. pulling me - like a physical tug from a rope to different places.  and yet my bones, my dark shadowy bones scream with the falling, the falling of the chair, i am a chair falling. catch me if you can. catch me as i fall. shattering into bits, i shatter, i shudder. the destruction, wasted, violence.


Do you imagine there were people under the floor? to be a person under the floor, what would that be like? that other shadowy place, where no one knows or goes and yet so completely in charge of everything that follows. seeping out, like a peeling away of skin, unfolding and revealing... exposing. illusion wrought.   with pain or just the desperate need to emerge from the dark, i feel my own still moving body longing to move, i sit forward a little, take a deeper breathe, hear myself thinking, yes, we are doing this, our little dancing writing. and still i long to dance. and how would you dance? i run, as he did, i wiggle, as he did, and then i continue, continue, continue... 

sitting with him and he with us..i hold the microphone...hold it out to you...to hear your bones, hearing makes me see better...my moving is my seeing...my feeling is my hearing...And as he searches the space, his body, our bodies, my body for their own songs the muscles in by belly tense... will the song emerge? what will it lead too...
stepping forward i feel a tentative creeping, a sensing out, a peeking into the darkness, and then, bam... the sound of the space and the very walls hits me. the sounds take their own journey into me, into my sitting bones, into my seat. do you feel sound in your bones? The sound seems to make me see more clearly, sounding as seeing...searching out the sounds, searching for what...the dancing...the dancing molecules...i feel into the darkness, my own emptiness and expectation. what do i want from him? what is he doing? can i find what he is looking for, what he wants me to see/hear? him punches the space,,, the boy boxer rasping the breathe of the air across the mic rushing as his gestures sway through him, me. the punch punch... punch pa pa pa... all boy...papa...can you see me?


throwing a chair, beating it, bashing it, bashing, beating...the microphone draws me in, my eyes become sonic, i find myself wondering is the microphone on?


pa pa pa...bash...crash...bam...bam...bam...but she is there too...it is her dance... a dance for her...her manchester...her music...her...me...she...yes, she is very there too... she story, her story the manchester of her memories, and is the sounds of the space ours, hers, theirs? who is the beat beat beat of the marching song?


Authored by Vida Midgelow and Jane Bacon
Link to Opus 49: http://vimeo.com/44389571