What happens when the characters from this play drop the words that up to this point they’ve been speaking, when they forget the expressions and gestures they’ve been rehearsing, and leave the play behind altogether, to walk, like children in an enchanted wood, through the story of Semele, picking their own lines as they go?[Semele]
This project explores the rift between the play, organised for its characters, and the poetic text, an arrangement of words. It asks, once the two supporting structures have been removed, what is left?
It finds, in places, a vestigial tracery of cracks, like a pattern in iron sand; in other places, a chasm opens, deep as a mountain-range is high, but again with its own delicacy and natural harmony. The poem and play have been pressed together. The project runs into the sometimes infinitesimal, sometimes gaping, difference between them, following the movement and process of differences, looking for a life outside the self-organising principles of the play or poem.
What I have not mentioned is story or drama, in the hope that these things will live inside the structures which eventuate and inhabit them with a sense found rather than forced. For structures that are at once a leaf skeleton and the instantaneous brush-stroke of a master calligrapher preparation is what is most important.
