Writing: Dear Us 2007

"Dear Us (2007); and Writing Like This (2016)"

in forthcoming publication 2017

Kira O'Reilly: Untitled (Bodies)

Ed. Harriet Curtis & Martin Hargreaves

Live Art Development Agency & Intellect Books 

 ~ writing in response to performance work by Kira O'Reilly ~ 

Dear us      2007      

by Fiona Wright

Written for Untitled (Syncope) by Kira O'Reilly
April 7th 2007        
(SPILL Festival London)
Dear Kira,

you’re asking me about writing about dancing.

Years ago, I wrote:

We write to each other about ease  and  anxiety and the pull between them in a performer’s body... remembered traces, documented versions and imagined, planned, projected, new manifestations. Our bodies are also more than these things. 1

And this was the conversation across the years, our uncertain bodies opening up, entering into the movement of performance time, then looking back at it. Looking back over it and even just looking for a way back. Finding a way back to everyday time and night time – a way through this. Looking for other ways to have this body.

Dear Kira,

you ask me to take the art to the page.

I can’t seem to think straight.

I open the book and I read:

Suddenly time falters.
First, the head spins, overcome with a slight vertigo. It is nothing; but then the spinning goes wild, the ears start to ring, the earth gives way and disappears, goes away . . . Where does one go?2

Dear Kira,

you ask me, what did I see? And I remember how we all stood in the dark to wait and watch. A crowd, a group body observing this solo body heading our way. She is a dim light approaching us slowly. She is carrying a light and she is changing this space, simply by arriving.
    We watch the skin of the back of this woman reversing towards us, looking back at us, looking at us in the mirror.

My words, writing about my performance, years ago, here again, for this moment:

This is how women check their faces in order to survey the crowd in the dance hall. This is how prisoners keep an eye on activity in the corridor. Seeing around corners. I am looking over my shoulder...3

Dear Kira,

you speak about reflection and I recall recognitions. You are thinking about documentation and departure, asking for our remembering in writing as a way towards “some new ground or even groundlessness...”
    Ways to tell about disappearing and continuing.
    What does this remind me of?

It’s been ricocheting around my head –
feeling someone else’s movement by looking.

- so I can’t see it and be sure of it
as I struggle for words 4

There was something that you wrote to me that I then wrote down. Your words used by me, years ago. And here, your words used by you:

the you and the i
the you and the eye

she advises: don’t spill.
you do all your spilling in the work.

falling, shifting, losing my ground.
a wound. unwound. unwinding. 5

Something you wrote. Funny mentions spilling. Sounds like maybe something I would say.

Dear Kira,

I can see you love this dancing that you’re making. You know what to do. Sensation is the image.

Choreography is so much like writing.

I’ll write you a poem then. Now. Here:

the back of a woman reversing towards us
carrying a mirror
walking slow, backing off, but in our direction
backing towards a moment of stepping into the light

light stepping
carrying the light
carry the fire
and then I think:
carry the fire
there will be others
but in the meantime
until then
trust no-one
travel only at night
and keep off the road

carry the mirror
towards a moment of appearing
changing this space simply by appearing
skittering across the stone floor
lurching behind walls
scattering the crowd
changing space by disappearing

and the back of a woman arching
white skin
black hair
and dancing
bloody heels
an untitled dance
bloody heels
one body or two bodies?
bloody heels
what words attach to this?
bloody shoes
is this body bloody angry?
and what does this remind me of?

Dear Kira,

I copied this out for my notes on lying and syncope – I’ll it wrote it down here for you too:

Physical time never stops. That may be, but syncope seems to accomplish a miraculous suspension. Dance, music, and poetry traffic in time, manipulate it, and even the body manages to do that by an extraordinary short circuit. . . . People vie to describe the causes of syncope – circulatory, nervous system, neurovegetative; a cure can be found – cardiac massage, smelling salts, a slap. But inside, what is going on?  6

In the final print version the words dance, time and extraordinary seemed to be in bold. Think they were thinking keywords, lexicons, clues, etc. That kind of thing.

Another poem:

we’ve both been reading this

it’s been passing between us
for years now

and the book
that I carried back
across a continent, across an ocean,
I read mainly the beginning and the end and that particular chapter,
which I remember most for its title,
Choosing Night.

Dear Kira,

When I didn’t feel like dancing, I looked for lying in the subject indexes of all my books.

In the Index, immediately above Madame Edwarda and bridging the gap between L and M alphabetically is a rather more obscure reference to Lydwina, Saint – she is on the line below Love in the Western World (Rougement) and above where lying
would have been. The first of three page numbers sends the reader to images of the Saint’s death rather than her life. Mystic bodies offer wondrous physical narratives, manipulating time and, temporarily at least, escaping death even as they move towards it.  7

I look now for untitled in the subject index and it’s not there, so, as I did with lying, I write it in at the edge - as they say, as marginalia – where it would have been – between Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson) on page 173 and Untouchables on pages 172 &190.

Now I find I scan the pages and certain phrases catch my eye, here and there: “..the Untouchables are still impure..” on page 190 and “..exclusion..love at first sight..” on page 191.

And this, she writes:

Renouncing the world is not without influence on the philosophy of the world one has left behind. Renouncing the world produces a reformed perspective on the world; one does not return from the forest the same person as when one entered. And if I think again of syncope, which as I said has a power of protest, here is one of the first manifestations.  8

Dear Kira,

One more poem:

scandal
scandalous
renouncing the world
shaking flesh
two selves
an open soul
bloody soul
fucking soul
once more with feeling
dance, dance, dance

and two more things we wrote to each other - here, I quote me quoting you and me:

It’s fucking amazing.
I’m going to watch it again.
Can’t wait.
My body itself identifies (with) much of it, almost like your actions
were triggering body memories of mine, my muscles literally
straining inside my skin with a weird recognition.
How can I say this?...
At moments I felt like I was watching myself, what is that?

And then:

It is often the less clear acts (like the cutting) that I want to talk about.
And, can you imagine a time when you won’t do this, like this?

And again:

It’s been ricocheting around my head -
feeling someone else’s movement by looking. 9

With love.



Notes
1 Wright 2002: 89
2 Clément 1994: 1
3 Wright 2002: 88
4 Wright 2004: essay 18. citings from emails and a translation (and a word about nakedness)
5 O’Reilly 2003
6 Clément 1994: 5
7 Wright 2007: 82
8 Clément 1994: 172
9 Wright 2004: essay 18. citings from emails and a translation (and a word about nakedness)


References

Clément, Catherine
1994 Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

O’Reilly, Kira
2003 The You & the I Performance Research 8 (2): 138-139.

Wright, Fiona
2002 uncertain bodies: fragments. Performance Research (On Archives and Archiving) 7 (4): 88-91.
2004 amino essays: twenty short performance papers. Newcastle upon Tyne: amino.
2007 notes on lying and syncope Performance Research (A Lexicon issue) 11 (3): 82-85.

_______________________________________________________________

Writing like this...  2016

by Fiona Wright

For Kira, from Fiona (September 2016)

Furthermore, the four elements which make up the physical body are by nature void; they are like images in a mirror of the moon’s reflection on water. How can they be clear and constantly aware, always bright and never obscured - and, upon activation, be able to put into operation sublime functions as numerous as the sands of the Ganges? For this reason it is said; “Drawing water and carrying firewood are spiritual powers and sublime functions.”

Chinul, Tracing Back the Radiance

Writing like this, takes time. 

Words reach the page as thoughts collapse in on each other. 

Finding a way through this, still. 

Finding ways to be in this body, still. 

We change the space by appearing. 

Writing like this, needs the words that matter most to rise up early on.

Writing like this, takes space. 

Writing like this, reminds me that when we talk we are really always talking about embodiment and presence, as if we know that this is the only real work. Perhaps this is indeed what bodies are for. The conversations across the years are becoming part of this - moving towards performance, away from performance, lingering long after performance. 

Changing the space by disappearing - this can only happen in real time.

Writing like this, is a way of saying: 

Dear Us,

what if we imagine a time when we don’t do this anymore. What kind of a time will that be? Measured in years, now, it is almost a decade since I was writing something like this, to somehow speak about our life and practice, to find a response to the work of art and the work of the artist. And now, this year, we find we are fifty years old, and I am again re-reading some earlier writing, reflecting once more on parallel practices. That was then, and this is now.

Now, am I dreaming?

Now, and all the time, we continue to work, to train ourselves, and to ask: what is needed here? We inhabit beautiful new forms and practices. The forms themselves are transparent - considered and investigated with joy and clarity - and all the time, they are only ever these forms. Over time, we get a feeling for this kind of awareness. Intention connects with the integrity of the practice at hand, and if it resonates as true enough, then we can indeed make an art of that moment, in any form. 

The words slip and almost fail here, and yet my sense of this in experience is that, in this way, we really could do (or even be) anything: something limitless opens up.

Is writing like this something like dreaming?

Experience tells me that my mind can come to know very full and rich images of events and actions that I have never seen or done.

I read this somewhere, or I heard this somewhere - I wasn’t there myself, but this is what I remember. It was a description of a group on a trek, climbing a mountain. One person in the company has particularly severe vertigo. And during the journey, whenever an attack of vertigo overwhelms, by necessity, there is a moment of pausing, waiting, and then, when it feels possible, standing and resuming the walking. Each time it becomes too much, then the group of companions will simply pause too, and wait, as long as is needed, until it is clear that it is again safe enough to continue. This rhythm becomes their walking practice. In my mind this now becomes an image of a slow, patient pilgrimage, regularly punctuated by rests. Waiting faithfully for the moment to pass, for things to change, before continuing the journey, walking on, together.

This account is now, for me, like an experience or something known. It can be repeated and even changed, over time, becoming like a memory.

Writing like this, is not only looking for the right words, it is also something like learning to find the gaps between these thoughts. Noticing thought as it begins, as it lasts, or as it ends, and as it changes. Noticing the movement of the heart, thinking constantly. Listening to how the body experience comes before thought, before words. This suggests a different kind of time.

The word radiance is here in my notes. I have been spending time contemplating this word, and reading parts of Tracing Back the Radiance, a book written in the Twelfth Century by the Korean Zen monk, Chinul. I have also begun to sometimes look for the word itself, in the subject indexes at the back of various books, to see if it is there and also to see which words, listed above and below, catch my attention. This was something I used to regularly do when contemplating a particular word over time: lying, syncope, light, salt, bone... This formed a particular research habit, somehow chasing the arbitrary resonances thrown up by the alphabetical order and the content of whichever book had been chosen - or found, or given. When the word in question was found to be absent, I would notionally insert the missing word - actually writing it in with a pencil - into the gap between other words, where it might have been, if it had been included in the index. Earlier this year, as I cleared the shelves and gave away most of my books, I found many more of these scribbled one-word notes than I remembered. They appeared on the pages like peculiar marginalia and phantom subject headings, directing attention to their absence as well as the other words close by and clusters of possible, unexpected references and associations.

Tracing back the radiance is a sentence which certainly holds my attention. Reading some of Chinul’s text, it is an unfolding of questions and teachings around the luminous nature of mind. It is also a clear instruction for meditation. This seems to describe practices which use a focus on consciously tracing the movement of thought, with a kind of skilful use of memory and reversibility, “back to the source”. This offers a metaphor for looking inward, with the intention of carefully following a specific line of thought, back to where it began, to “follow it home”. Sound is pointed to as a specific phenomenon to be recognised and used, to trace the quality of awareness. The call of a crow or magpie is one example. Perhaps sound vanishes when hearing becomes effortless. Strangely enough, by thinking it through, the tangle of thinking might lose its hold.

Writing like this, I remember, years ago, writing a poem for you and your work and it began like this:

the back of a woman reversing towards us

carrying a mirror

walking slow, backing off, but in our direction

backing towards a moment of stepping into the light

Recently I wrote:

most of the work unseen

what is left out

or left on the cutting-room floor

like good acts that seek no attention

Today I wrote:

returning from the forest 

(or the mountain) 

changed 

she will need to know 

the way back

and this is the art now

And now, there is something else to include, from the century that we were born into. Written in the 1940s and not published until 1977, this writer really gave her work time. This writing is documenting her experience, knowledge and observation, and reflecting on the art of her mountain walking. It is also truly cultivating her practice, in a way which I sense does resonate with our own searches and those of so many of our friends. In the penultimate chapter, The Senses, in her book The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd writes:

Having disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to activity. The senses must be used. For the ear, the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water; and up here that is a sound that one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the watercourses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and if water is still sounding with a low far-off murmur, it is no more than the last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariner’s horizon.

Writing like this, as an ending:

one last thought

a memory

of the woods 

quite alone

and I saw

a young fledgling owl

standing on a branch 

near to the ground 

broad daylight

very quiet

very close

the head turning to follow me

although the eyes were half closed

unperturbed

patiently tolerating 

my presence

I stayed a long time

eventually left

with something 

like gentle enthusiasm

References:

Chinul

1983 The Korean Approach to Zen. The Collected Works of Chinul. Trans. & Intro. Robert Buswell: Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press. [page 146]

Shepherd , Nan

2011 The Living Mountain: Edinburgh & London, Canongate. [page 96]

       

Collaboration links archive: Distant Wars 2013 Becky Edmunds & Fiona Wright

Distant Wars 

an installation 
by Becky Edmunds & Fiona Wright 
2013

http://distantwars.com/

Becky Edmunds and Fiona Wright have never physically experienced war. They have lived through a Cold War, the Gulf Wars, a war with Argentina and one with Afghanistan. They heard the stories of long ago wars from their parents and grandparents. They have been looking for suspicious packages on public transport their whole lives. But they have never felt the physical impact of a bomb nor had to listen out for the threat of approaching planes. They don’t even know any soldiers. War has been remote to them, kept alive in their imaginations by a steady stream of images across an increasing array of screens.

Distant Wars is a project that responds to impossible questions about the presence and proximity of war and the impact of remote technology when the action is far away and out of anyone's hands


VIDEO 10:40
http://beckyedmunds.com/distant-wars/4592704300


http://distantwars.com/words/

Notes from an introduction to the Artist Talk 
 written by Fiona Wright

[....] the frame is always de-realizing and de-legitimating alternative versions of reality, discarded negatives of the official version. (xiii)
Is there another way to act on the senses, or to act from them, that resists both sensationalism and episodic outrage at the limits on the visual imposed by techniques of war waging? (xiv)

Judith Butler Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Approaches
Speak from the present here, even while giving some background and perspective on the brief history of the work. Bring things closer; more focus on the depth and detail.
Move straight into the work itself, the process. Don’t be distracted.
Look back at the making from where we are now. And look to the audience as they listen and look at this too.
The work approaches the audience and the audience approaches the work and we acknowledge this as the collaboration, as much as our own exchange in working together.
The interaction that is our process as artists making Distant Wars has developed and evolved across years. Yet this is our first collaboration that hasn’t been initiated directly from one of our own discrete projects or particular commissions.
When considering an Artist Talk I find myself writing and speaking with the intention of resisting assumptions of biography and modes of self-presentation. An overview becomes all too linear, explanatory, chronological.
History, I do love. Status, I can leave out.
We offer a collection of thoughts around what feels most vital in the piece soon after it is first shown, beginning to tell something of the story of this work.
Remoteness
We were thinking about what it might be to make a work about war, proceeding from our own histories, the similarity of experience that we can recognise in our early personal memories and political consciousness as we became adults. This point of commonality that we have now as women in our late forties – both born in 1960s England and growing up with a sense of war as only ever in the far distance – this becomes the key to the intention and sensibility of the piece.
We lived through the second half of the Cold War and also during several decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The threat of possible nuclear war was linked to a distant society, the looming presence of the Soviet Union, while on these islands British troops were only just over the water in Ulster. There were bomb threats from time to time here on the mainland and occasionally near the cities where we were living as children. Some wars were nearer than others and yet from childhood into adulthood we knew a kind of dual logic. There are always wars but we are not living through a war. ‘Peace in our time’ perhaps only ever meant that there was no World War. We were not living in what was called Wartime – a word that sounded as much like the name of a particular place in my child imagination as that historical time period when our parents had been young during a monochrome 1940s Britain.
We say we have never experienced war directly and yet we are both conscious of having lived in more or less remote relationship to several phases of threatened and actual ongoing wars. At different moments over the years, throughout our lives, we have been acutely aware of this country’s involvement in various wars and also at other times aware of our own ability to choose to be quite detached from that reality. Many times we have felt angry and very opposed to Government, we closely followed International crises and marching on demonstrations. During other periods we might well have been so absorbed with our own youthful lives that we could look away and remain quite out of touch with the developments in a far away war zone playing out on the Evening News.
Years ago I stood on stage and a fragment of text in the solo I was performing included these words: I don’t actually know any soldiers.
We look at each other now and agree, we don’t actually know any soldiers and have had limited connection to anyone in the military.
Sometimes it seems we are all ‘gone to war’ whether we like it or not. I also recognise this in the suggestion that we are somehow ‘conscripted’ by the imagery and the framing of war.
Although the frame initiates (as part of weaponry) or finishes off (as part of reporting) a whole set of murderous deeds, and seeks to subordinate the visual field to the task of war waging, its success depends on a successful conscription of the public. Our responsibility to resist war depends in part on how well we resist that daily effort at conscription. (xiii) Judith Butler
Judith Butler brings forward this idea of the ‘conscript’ as including not only the soldier who is headed for the battlefield. Her focus on the frame connects to questions we have about working with and through certain found images that are from, about or around war. So much of the material we are finding is part of the ‘recruitment’ and is gleaned from the stream of Media that forms an ‘assault on the senses’.
A sound recording of a long paragraph from Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? becomes one of the voices in Distant Wars. We want to hold onto the emphasis on bodily and sensory experience.
The apprehension of the precarity of others – their exposure to violence, their socially induced transience and dispensability – is, by implication, an apprehension of the precarity of any and all living beings.
xvi
During our discussions one day Becky handed me this book (Frames of War) and I carried it around with me for weeks, along with several others including, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin.
Precarious lives are everywhere, inside the frame and outside the frame.
The audiences’ body is outside the frame.
The threat to bodies who are dangerously caught in potential and actual zones of war continues whether they are visible inside the limits of the frame or not.
My ambivalence about Artist Talks and giving an account of myself with any narrated version of what I’m ‘about’ also collides with the experience of reading and writing and researching for this piece. By this I mean, we had a strong and inspiring process, we are pleased by the work and how it has spoken to people. But throughout the time I was regularly sitting on trains having to close the book or watching a video on the Internet and having to close the laptop. So angry. Reminded of so much destruction that is enacted apparently ‘in my name’.
How will we speak? Are we trying to make sense of this?
No, we say we are staying with the not making sense, the not knowing.
Making a response from a place of not knowing how to respond.
Gathering found material, footage and sound, continues while we make some of our own images. With these few small gestures we place ourselves, as the artists, in the frame. A fragile and seemingly insufficient kind of signature amongst the bold images sampled from the vast and endless resource of mainly online materials.
The physical materials look modest in scale, the small iPod screens, the delicate balsa wood boxes and small table. The subject matter contained within seems impossibly heavy. Yet the effects of editing bring peculiarly light touches and space even for the eye to be drawn to the pleasure of colour, movement and music.
Counting
War brings with it body counts. Protests against war also by necessity involve body counts. We struggle to see how some people have come to not count, or not count as much. Many individuals and organisations seek to account for the civilian deaths and many people make it their business and life’s work to count the cost of acts of war.
The remote operator of the drone or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) is often based far away in another country and is not necessarily someone who has ever served in a war zone. They might never have piloted a real plane in combat and yet they will watch a screen, across hours and days in shifts. The operator can see detail at the scene before, during and after lethal attacks that no bomber pilot would ever be able to see. In this way they have a very unique remote experience combined with a clear visual contact.
This was not a piece about drones. Yet all the time we are pulled in that direction.
Drone warfare really has crept up on us.
________________________________________________________________________
A possible list for Distant Wars:
counting the miles
counting the thousands of feet
counting the limbs
counting the compounds
counting the missiles
counting the women
counting the vehicles
counting the rifles
counting the protests
counting the soldiers
counting on bad weather
counting on a rainy day or a gust of wind
counting the night flights
counting the missions
counting the bombs
counting the words
counting the hours
counting the shifts
counting the pilots
counting the weddings
counting the minutes
______________________________________________________________________________________
Developed from notes before and after the Artist Talk, 18th October 2013 at Birkbeck School of Arts, London, during Stray Gifts at Dance Umbrella www.distantwars.com

 fragments - notes in process by Fiona Wright 2013

imagine a sound of constant buzzing
you have no control
no way to shut out the noise
n way of knowing
if you will be killed
there is n0o where to be sure of being safe
there is no safe
will a missile be fired
or is it just a buzzing
you heard that they are watching

I’m writing this because there’s very likely not much time left
now that I’m old and most of my life has been lived I keep noticing how I don;t expect to die of old age, even though I have reached a very old age

The air strikes are so numerous now
it’s hard to believe we won’t be hit
i remember when they first appeared - UAVs they called them

It’s worse for younger folk - in every way
The fear, not least the noise
I’m awake more than I’m asleep now anyway
they used to say, well, one of the burdens of old age, time to sleep but now it eludes you
but I can’t tell if I would sleep more if I could find a quiet enough place.
Not that it’s such a big noise - just constant, persistent..

when did we stop ever gathering in a group in the street?
no-one would think of standing around a car together for more than a minute - even to ask directions or to repair the vehicle

it’s just automatic behaviour now - simply not doing what was ordinary or natural before... when did it really change? Seems like it just shifted, like weather, not quite noticeable until it catches your attention
so many way we used to do things differently
now every action is reduced, patterned around the safe routes, safe times,
as if anywhere is safe now days..
sheep tracks and desire paths
now we’d just know they are the only path
scuttling about

“It’s continuous, watching us, especially at night [...] You can’t sleep. You can’t watch television. It frightens the kids. When they hear it, they say, ‘It’s going to hit us.’”

We hear tell of of the operators - I don’t know really where the news comes from. Apparently they still don’t last long, not the human ones anyway. It’s well known. Fast burn out. Another kind of casualty. Burn outs and burned up.
No sense to any of it.
Casualties of war - the damage, collateral they used to say..

Soon, in some regions already it seems, but more and more, we are all sure of it, this will become a dilemma solved by the artificials

The ground crews are mainly engineers, not even soldiers
I remember when we first realised...

Performance links archive : On Lying and Behind Doors

On Lying - solo performance by Fiona Wright

http://www.aughterlony.com/projects/curatorial-projects/festival-des-urbaines/fiona-wright/
photos: Nelly Rodriguez
 
On Lying 2007 CHICAGO OPENPORT FESTIVAL

photos: John W Sisson



Behind Doors - solo performance by Fiona Wright

http://www.aughterlony.com/projects/curatorial-projects/house-without-a-maid/fiona-wright/

Performance links archive: salt drawing

salt drawing 

2013 France  LINK:
http://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/en/salt-drawing
video by Becky Edmunds

 (photo credit: Ana Rita Rodrigues)

salt drawing 
 a solo performance by Fiona Wright    2004 -

a body weight measured in salt (and twice her weight as a girl)
one handful dissolved inside a skin - a close-up, uncovered
and covered, quietly now

A short solo performance (5 minutes) designed for a solo audience presented various festival contexts and sites including studio theatres, galleries, a castle and a ship’s cabin.
A short work for the audience and a long work for the performer.
(Serralves Museum for Contemporary Arts, Oporto; Bonington Gallery Nottingham 2004; Navigate festival, Baltic 2005; Gresol Art, Girona 2006).

Supported by Arts Council of England


salt drawing developed after an earlier series of short solo performances/live installations designed for a solo audience, titled:  the small stolen dances. A series of small works, drawing attention to questions of intimacy in performance, adapted for different sites and contexts; a back stage dressing room, a kitchen, a seminar room and a gallery. The performer used a compact mirror to view the audience who were invited to look at the work through opera glasses. (Inbetween Time Festival, Arnolfini; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Dia E Vento, Oporto 2001; Connecting Principle, Newcastle University 2002; Sensitive Skin, Nottingham 2003).
    This body of work was connected to …kneeling down softly/And what is something to cry about then;  a previous solo which was first performed with audience at either end of a 20 metre performance space and later for just 2 audience members as a 20 minute piece, repeated for several hours. This was the first of various pieces using mirrors and also the deadweight of 54 kg of salt, the equivalent of the performer’s own body weight. (Tramway, Glasgow; Chisenhale Dance Space, London 2001; Arnolfini, Bristol 2002).
A Tramway and Arnolfini Live co-commission.

VIDEO
salt drawing: close edit
camera & edit by Becky Edmunds

(photo credits: Ben Ponton & Lee Callaghan)

Performance links - drawing (on ) how the sun lights the earth 2015

drawing (on) how the sun lights the earth
- durational performance version: circular walking on charcoal

DECEMBER 2015 Wroclaw Poland  - Think Tank Triennale - IMAGINE
http://ttt.wroclaw.pl/en/wystawy-ttt/imagine

A solo performance by Fiona Wright

In this part of the world, at the end of each day, the solar system gives us the setting of the sun. Somewhere out to the west, not necessarily visible but perhaps in some way always present in our imagination, the nearest star sinks below the horizon. This is a moment in the day when many things still shift - we go home, we switch on electric lights, and sometimes we walk in museums.

The making of this work is held within an ongoing series of different pieces seeking to talk about not-making, ageing, disappearing, and what seems to last; about not-becoming and non-attainment.

With thanks to Lucy Cash, Andy Smith and Sonia Hughes. Supported by Arts Council England.

Fiona Wright (b. London 1966) has been making solo and collaborative performances since the late 1980s, working through choreography, writing and installation. The interest is around the (this) particular body in performance, with attention often on the detail of functional and stylised movement vocabularies and using simple resources, close to the body. This practice touches on theatricality, questions of intimacy, often bringing the audience close to the live performer.

some thoughts on the relationship between performance and drawing
the connection is process
and the connection is time
and timing

and spaces

spaces between lines, words, bodies - including all the hands and all the feet

spaces
movements

all the movement and all the restlessness

performing and drawing both become a way of being in the world or a place to be at or with it, at least for now

the actions leave traces
some kind of document manifests
necessarily uncertain and temporary

some thoughts looking for some thoughts
nothing very solid in either or in-between
yet resonating

Fiona Wright
March 2016

Awareness Through Movement 2017 WYLAM (Tyne&Wear) Saturday 22nd April

near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

2017
Awareness Through Movement
Feldenkrais Method
Dynamic Stability in Movement

for somatic learning

the next Wylam day: 
Saturday 22nd APRIL 

11.00am-4.00pm

Wylam Institute, Wylam, Church Road, NE41 8AP, Tyne & Wear, UK
11.00am - 4.00pm
Fee only: £45 standard / £35 concession.*Booking recommended 3 weeks in advance*
CONTACT :  fionawright.05@btinternet.com
 
With a focus Awareness Through Movement we will work in gentle guided lessons with the emphasis on independent process, always finding our own pace.         
The workshops aim to offer an accessible opportunity to take some time and space to explore easier movement and somatic awareness. No particular training is necessary, just an interest in discovering through your own experience.

Bring a mat and/or blanket for floor work and warmth.
[There are regular trains, two stops from Newcastle Central to Wylam. The village is West along the River Tyne, a short walk across the bridge and up the hill. On street parking available.]

pause:reflect:awareness 2017 Workshop LONDON Saturday 11th March

pause: reflect : awareness
Spring 2017

   

with
Fiona Wright

Awareness Through Movement
 Feldenkrais Method

SATURDAY 11th March  1pm-4pm
Venue: Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, 85 St Georges Rd, SE1 6ER
(SOUTH LONDON - near Elephant & Castle / Waterloo)
**there are mats already available at this venue**

Cost: £30
ALL CONTACT, BOOKING & ENQUIRIES DIRECT TO FIONA:  fionawright.05@btinternet.com
**Good transport links and access**

pause: reflect : awareness

A short yet 'gentle intensive' 3 hour Saturday afternoon workshop, to allow space and time to go deeper than a single class might allow.

In Awareness Through Movement (Feldenkrais Method) we work slowly in guided lessons with the emphasis on independent process, always finding our own pace. Any level of experience is welcome and no particular training is necessary, simply an interest in discovering through your own movement experience - this can support other practices and generally offer more enjoyment, ease and spontaneity in everyday actions. http://www.feldenkrais.co.uk/what.html