Heres the text from the
making space project Antti and I undertook at The Nuffield in Lancaster Last year -
When The Curtain Falls.
Keep your chin up – keep your cover up – don't let it fall. Its dark – there's nothing here
except what you want to see – blink and you could miss yourself. Where's a black cat in a dark
room that isn't there.
Space, time, corporeality and passing over.
Make a body in space and time. Borrow your parts. Make it on your own. Hurry; gather up the
pieces – little Frankenstein. Build muscles, fuse joints, pull skin hard over flesh and bolt your
teeth down onto your jaws. Stand up tall. Don't listen. Don't feel the pulse – the drag – the
slipstream of the nothing from which you came – nagging at you – pulling you down like a
black dog. You can't hold out forever. Your body wont last: you have to give it back.
A space like me doesn't talk. It doesn't need to – it's you who remember. I just echo the
sounds – the vibrations you leave behind. Listen to yourself. Close your eyes – what are you
doing with my sounds – what are you making – what do you feel? In Your body: No words. In
these echoes – can you feel the very flesh of your future? Where were you past? Am I what
remains when everything else is gone?
Fill your space. Fill you body. Fill your lungs. Breathe at me. I enter the creases – the spaces
you leave behind. Ghosts breed in the folds in the fissures and cracks of flesh – in the warped
coils of a grasping fist. Like a thief through an open door. Like a slave crouched to a
brandished whip. Leave a gap and I will enter – after all I am simply you. I was never here.
Am I the best friend you'll never have? You can't possess me. Try to hold nothing in your
hand. Leave me and respect me – offer me your ghosts, you memories your senses. Let me
remake you – cut the chords – let the curtain fall. Drop the whip and close the door. Grow out
of me. I am the night of your birth.
Each moment. Each sound. Each new second is my child. Like Space. Like a universe born
from nothing, flower and wrap round your spaces – your sounds – bodies and senses with my
infinitude. In the heart of the earth buried deeper than your fears I am the eternal spring.
Beneath the pain – I am the hidden place. Fall into me. Let your flesh hang like a dead man.
Pieta.
What is the space of (our) existence?
"Truly I say to you, if a seed of grain does not go into the earth and come to an end, it is still a
seed and no more; but through its death it gives much fruit. He who is in love with life will have
it taken from him; and he who has no care for his life in this world will keep it for ever and ever"
Time, space, and linearity.
The body is a whole , an organic living unity of form and function. Each body mirrors our
social body, which in-turn reflects our world as a whole. The narcotic brokenness of our
culture flows in and out of our disconnected physicality. Compacted and ill aligned, our
body's become the carriers for our madness and despair. The space and effortlessness of a
child's posture and movement is broken, etherised and eviscerated by our shared experience
of "adulthood". By uncovering the residual calm of theatrical space and relearning how to
respectfully occupy our own physical space, we can begin to recover a social health and
wholeness. The very nonduality of our theatre space - its ability to confront and comfort -
exemplifies the wholeness of mind that a balanced society must exemplify. Our shared
history has merely been the exclusion of possibilities – the restriction of space, intellectually,
culturally and ethnically. In the past we have attained our view of ourselves by exclusion
and definition. In the third millennium, we can explore how we can view ourselves through
the catholicity of inclusion and mutability.
The only constant thing is change. "All things are in motion and nothing remains still " –
Heraclitus. The movement of one thing into another: of becoming "not-a-thing", and in turn,
something else: This is the substratum of our bodies, world and universe. Cultures, which
build their values on halting this inevitable process ; Cultures, whose goal is to possess,
freeze and contain experience, into pleasure, wealth or sexual gratification; these Cultures,
inevitably become the victims of the natural processes they are trying to halt or manipulate.
Pleasure can weaken the body - wealth distract the mind. It is the glutton who howls with
hunger. The rich become the poor ,and the downtrodden become the oppressors. The cycle
is whole, even in its brokenness.The body is a whole , an organic living unity of form and function.
Each body mirrors our
social body, which in-turn reflects our world as a whole. The narcotic brokenness of our
culture flows in and out of our disconnected physicality. Compacted and ill aligned, our
body's become the carriers for our madness and despair. The space and effortlessness of a
child's posture and movement is broken, etherised and eviscerated by our shared experience
of "adulthood". By uncovering the residual calm of theatrical space and relearning how to
respectfully occupy our own physical space, we can begin to recover a social health and
wholeness. The very nonduality of our theatre space - its ability to confront and comfort -
exemplifies the wholeness of mind that a balanced society must exemplify. Our shared
history has merely been the exclusion of possibilities – the restriction of space, intellectually,
culturally and ethnically. In the past we have attained our view of ourselves by exclusion
and definition. In the third millennium, we can explore how we can view ourselves through
the catholicity of inclusion and mutability.
Antti Sakari Saario
& Robert Penman.
14/09/07.
