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… In the book I’m launching next week [ ‘IS ing’ (Veer Books 038) launched at Prague Microfestival 2011] the improvised performances had to find a book form, for the most part they were improvised read/writing so didn’t make use of the visual but towards the end I started to introduce other resistances while reading in order to keep facility or a reliance on facility at bay…

… I’ll have to deal with how I can read from a book which is mainly a transcription of improvisations, we’ll see…

… There are questions I’d like to ask in bringing this performance to a blog, web, or vimeo version.  It may well be that very little needs done, a sense of archiving…

How is the host genre if you like or ‘platform’ to be considered when moving say from book to web, from performance to book, and i mean from your perspective, i have a sense of how i would ask questions of it as a poet/performer…

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… The use of Irish that in the words of Theo Dorgan, ‘places us out of the language set of the boat’ specifically appeals to speaking and identity.  It speaks to the individual ‘saying’, in the act of ‘saying’, not only in Irish but as an individual voice speaking out of its own boat.

The investigation for Ciall represented initially by this powerpoint presentation ‘abair’ points to the Gaeltacht sensibility depending in the end upon one premise that it keeps speaking that it keeps saying, that it keeps sounding.

Within my own register of voices the poet Maggie O’Sullivan speaks of growing up in Yorkshire with Irish Parents and how that has skewed her relationship to language. To paraphrase John Hall [1] this work places itself as a gerund ‘an action’ caught as a thing’.  A performance of it would anticipate itself as a thing in action. The sensibility of the Gaeltacht is or has to be that of an action, an anticipation of a ‘we’, of a making of a present. Otherwise it ceases to be.

This work will use ‘abair’ as a score for an improvised read/writing that anticipates a reader, a viewer, an other making a meaning.  That meaning is a present of activity. The Gaeltacht makes a present out of its own body of language, language of body, of I of mé, of tú, of muid.  The world exists as and how we sing it into existence, anticipate its present. While it reaches graphically towards voice this work must retain its link to writing and reading, its focus is on the making of meaning and identity through language and the material bodies present in that activity the graphic sign and the reader /viewers body in equal focus. Senses and sense as poetics of the body.

NOTES

[1] John Hall, Thirteen Ways of Talking About Performance Writing (Plymouth College of Art Press, 2007) p.27.

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VERYSMALLKITCHEN writes: The anarcheology here does not have to follow the temporality of a project that concluded in the event at  An Gaileraí, Gweedore, Donegal, on 9th April 2011. Here, score comes after the documentation, and/or the proposal can be a conclusion.

Whilst the original purpose and function of each remaining fragment is in many cases evident, I think the opportunity of transition to a blog format like VerySmallKitchen is that these pieces can be (re-)figured into a sequence that offers new ideas about where and how the work is work is functioning.

Perhaps this is a non-hierarchical treatment of the different components that comprise, to adopt Joseph Grigely’s proposition [in his Exhibition Prosthetics (Bedford Press Editions, 2010)], the “prosthetic body” of language as it runs through all stages of the exhibition (and performance) process.

I have, though, whilst working with sequence and shifting temporalities, kept the various stages distinct, so that movement and adaptability also encounters and negotiates with the specificity of score, event, proposal, performance, document…

… with the further proviso, of course, that any transformation into a new context is a possibility embroiled with loss, gaps, (non-) human error, constellation up and down grade, deletions themselves erased by further dis-/re-/placements, provocations….

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… the one thing missing and turned down a bit too much during the performance on the vimeo is the multi voice pieces during the métúsésímuidsibhsiad transitions, but i’m always open to interpretation, there is a direction of development in some investigative sense so the poem sort of digs towards an unknown goal considering the call by the gallery so the gaelic comes more at the end but very much in concordance with the poetics of the opening, that is the transgression of the grammar which nearly all gaelic work I’ve seen overly adheres to.

The breaking of the grammar, how that considers language is purposefully basic in part to allow space for performance but also to allow greater opening into the language as a future project…

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Part 1 of this project is here.