TexT Work:The Practice

Working Version March 2004

Ae Ran / Ash Wednesday - T.S. Eliot
Alison / My Countrymen - Kahlil Gibran
Greg / The Age Demanded - Ezra Loomis Pound
Raymon / coordinator

A: (vibration to voice) What do you seek, My Countrymen? Do you desire that I build for You Gorgeous palaces, decorated With words of empty meaning, or Temples roofed with dreams? Or Do you command me to destroy what The liars and tyrants have built? Shall I uproot with my fingers What the hypocrites and the wicked Have implanted? Speak your insane Wish!

Ae: "In the depths Of this valley our fathers lived, And in its shadows they died, and in Its caves they were buried. How can We depart this place for one which They failed to honor?"

A: I have called you in the silence Of the night to point out the Glory of the moon and the dignity Of the stars, but you startled From your slumber and clutched Your swords in fear, crying,

(silence)

Ae: Lady of silences

(silence)

Ae: Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful

Ae: ACTION

A: SONG

Ae: Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull. And God said Shall these bones live? shall these Bones live?

A: Your souls are freezing in the Clutches of the priests and Sorcerers, and your bodies Tremble between the paws of the Despots and the shedders of Blood,. . .

Ae: And that which had been contained In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

A: . . . and your country quakes Under the marching feet of the Conquering enemy;

Ae: Because of the goodness of this Lady And because of her loveliness, and because She honours the Virgin in meditation,

A: what may you Expect even though you stand Proudly before the face of the Sun? Your swords are sheathed With rust, and your spears are Broken, and your shields are Laden with gaps;

Ae: We shine with brightness.

A: why, then, do You stand in the field of battle?

Ae: And I who am here . . .

Ae: (vibration/chant inside the container)

G: (barely audible) For this agility chance found Him of all men, unfit As the red-beaked steeds of The Cytheræan for a chain bit

Ae:(laughter)

G:(stronger) The glow of porcelain Brought no reforming sense To his perception Of the social inconsequence.

Ae: (laughter)

G:(rising wrath) Thus, if her colour Came against his gaze, Tempered as if It were through a perfect glaze

Ae: The Lady is withdrawn

G: He made no immediate application

Ae: In a white gown,

G: Of this to relation of the state To the individual, the month was more temperate

Ae: to contemplation, in a white gown.

G: Because this beauty had been. The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand Burst in upon the porcelain revery:

Ae: Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness. G: Impetuous troubling Of his imagery. Ae: There is no life in them. G: Mildness, amid the neo-Nietzschaen . . . Ae:(laughter) As I am forgotten And would be forgotten, so I would forget Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. G:(barely audible) clatter,His sense of graduations, Quite out of place amid Resistance to current exacerbations,

Ae: And God said Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen.

Ae: (emerging from the container sniffing) And I who am here dissembled Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

(groping towards G - contact,a searching) It is this which recovers My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions Which the leopards reject. (a call for thunder)

A: (wild drumming)

G: (rising) Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity Gradually led him to the isolation Which these presents place Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination. By constant elimination The manifest universe Yielded an armour Against utter consternation, A Minoan undulation, Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances, Strengthened him against The discouraging doctrine of chances, And his desire for survival, Faint in the most strenuous moods, Became an Olympian apathein In the presence of selected perceptions

Ae: Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand, Forgetting themselves and each other, united In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

G: (leaves)

PostScript

A word about the process.

Each participant chose a text which they learned to an automatic state. The text was used as a vehicle to research impulse, associations, source, energy, vibration, obstacle and as a study to fully engage the self in a living act. This TexTWork was a distinctive and personal work.

The Practice was an exploration of meetings. Individual TexTWork was placed into a shared context. Improvisations led to a fixed, repeatable structure. The Point of Concentration was the Text and the possibility to open to the partner.

"Artaud wanted to make a spoken language metaphysical by making it "express what it does not ordinarily express." If words are to be effective, they must be manipulated like solid objects by the muscles of the chest, throat and diaphragm to act upon each other and upon the spectator. Artaud intended to make use of the language of words: . . . in a new, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; to divide and distribute it actively in space; to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as well as really to manifest something; . . . and finally, to consider language as the form of Incantation." (ANTONIN ARTAUD IN THEORY, PROCESS AND PRAXIS OR, FOR FUN AND PROPHET BY RICHARD LEE GAFFIELD-KNIGHT)

All documentation, pictures and video executed by Raymon Montalbetti