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| Five Senses 1934 |
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| The Yoke woodcut, 1954-75 |
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Gertrude Hermes (1901 − 1983) THE WARRIOR’S TOMB 1941 Bees. Colour woodcut, 1963 |
Tuesday 30 June 2015
I was excited to discover the work of Gertrude Hermes today while viewing some of the beautiful first editions from the Gregynog Press that was set up by the Davies sisters in 1922.
Wednesday 24 June 2015
Down by the River
With thanks to Arrastoneglade www.arrastoneglade.wordpress.com for the inspiration to place text and image together.
Wednesday 10 June 2015
To Be is to be Percieved: experiencing Beckett's later works.
The theatre is in utter darkness.
A spot-lit mouth seems to float disembodied on the stage.
Almost immediately the mouth begins a deluge of sound, a stream of consciousness you can barely understand. Like being cornered by a lonely stranger who gushes torrents of words at you as if you can somehow expunge her pain, it is exposing, disturbing, bewildering, yet strangely compelling.
"Out into this world …" it begins. Did you turn off the gas? Your mobile? "This World …"
Footfalls, in contrast, sees the actor obsessively pacing up and down the stage like Hamlet’s father, doomed for a certain term to walk the earth. It has a very musical structure, the walking like a metronome, one length measured in exactly nine seconds. I can still hear the rhythm of her shoes on the boards.
The mother asks of her daughter, May: "Will you never have done? Will you never have done revolving it all?" But May cannot stop walking, searching for something that happened, a secret or suppressed memory, an "it" that remains forever elusive. She may or may not be a ghost and is undoubtedly a haunted individual. The womb as also being the tomb is a recurring theme with Beckett who was very familiar with the work of Munch and May’s pose is reminiscent of Munch’s Madonna.
Rockaby is a performance poem in the shape of a play. The title refers to traditional lullaby where a baby's cradle falls from the treetops, again bringing together Beckett's favourite juxtapositions of life and death. As she rocks herself towards death in her mother’s chair, a woman hears a dull, expressionless pre-recorded voice – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother’s. One rock back-and-forth per line plays against the recorded narrative, the movements coming in and out of the light. As with Not I, the voice speaks in the third person. Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived. The woman sees no one and is seen by no one. Voice has become her own observer, without whose surveillance any claim to existence would be invalidated. As the woman descends deeper into the depths of her self, the voice gets progressively weaker.
Afterwards, emerging, the audience was bewildered, disorientated, yet it was a strangely bonding experience. I found myself walking no where in particular with Cormac Sheridan, a student at Goldsmiths college who happened to come from Enniskillen, the town that hosts Happy Days, the annual International Beckett festival. He told me how he'd seen Waiting for Godot performed in Yiddish, and had taken part in a John Cage piece in the underground caves of Marble Arch.
As we parted with a hug, Cormac said, I might see you there some time, and I said, yes, probably, because somehow, after the magical intensity of the past hour, anything seemed possible.
Not I, the first of three short plays by Samuel Beckett that I saw at the Barbican on Saturday as part of the month long International Beckett season, is inspired by the woman covering her ears in Carravaggio's Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and the numberless muttering old crones one sees in the streets ("Ireland is full of them," Beckett said). It is the sound of a woman unbridled, telling the truth about how it is to live the fragmented life of women, perpetually having to stitch the pieces together to attempt to make a whole.
The mother asks of her daughter, May: "Will you never have done? Will you never have done revolving it all?" But May cannot stop walking, searching for something that happened, a secret or suppressed memory, an "it" that remains forever elusive. She may or may not be a ghost and is undoubtedly a haunted individual. The womb as also being the tomb is a recurring theme with Beckett who was very familiar with the work of Munch and May’s pose is reminiscent of Munch’s Madonna.
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"another creature there
somewhere there
behind the pane
another living soul
one other living soul
till the end came
in the end came
close of a long day"
Rockaby is a performance poem in the shape of a play. The title refers to traditional lullaby where a baby's cradle falls from the treetops, again bringing together Beckett's favourite juxtapositions of life and death. As she rocks herself towards death in her mother’s chair, a woman hears a dull, expressionless pre-recorded voice – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother’s. One rock back-and-forth per line plays against the recorded narrative, the movements coming in and out of the light. As with Not I, the voice speaks in the third person. Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived. The woman sees no one and is seen by no one. Voice has become her own observer, without whose surveillance any claim to existence would be invalidated. As the woman descends deeper into the depths of her self, the voice gets progressively weaker.
As we parted with a hug, Cormac said, I might see you there some time, and I said, yes, probably, because somehow, after the magical intensity of the past hour, anything seemed possible.
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HAPPY DAYS |
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