crawling, skipping, swopping, shuddering, skipping, hopscotching, leaping, striding slowly, swinging arms and legs high, exaggerated motions, side gorilla walking, kneeling and pivoting back and forth, using the walls to lean agains and twist around up and down the alley. pressing against the window, reaching, zigzagging back and forth, squatting. moving through squatting in a duckwalk. It came from being at Clonmoney national school outside painting their mural and the bell ringing and small children spilling out for their break time. they move constantly, hopping one foot to another, or jumping, or swaying, or spinning or twisting. They trotted/ran/skipped along. The non stop movement was so interesting and made me think about how stillness is an adult thing we adopt over time.
key elements to incorporate throughout–
series of childlike movements- skipping, hopscotch, jumping, horsey riding (AKA monty python) running, pushing, pulling
forwards/reverse movements, start in the middle, make a movement, reverse it and come back to centre, add on, repeat, etc.
spelling out this is not the end, and MATURE and EMERGING in my own alphabet sporadically throughout the work at different times. Pause periodically in front of the gallery window to do this
I have gone through some movement practices twice now. not feeling right at all about it but if I did fell alright then that also would not be right..
Main performative goal for tonight: to move non stop. that is my endurance goal. can I keep moving. using the actions as listed above. I see performances where its all about the slow gesture. No slow gestures here, first it will be too cold, second I want to challenge the norms of how an adult should behave in public, the societal rule that we walk in public, we don’t bump into each other, we maintain a space between ourselves and the next human. Move within the space- use the narrow alley, kind of like pacman around corners, negotiate the obstacles (people) and move around them. I want to liberate my narrow middle class anxiety of offending anyone simply by my existence or for taking up too much space. Red dress for power and red eye mask for super hero humour and slightly silly play on mature emerging heroine, saving the mature emerging hordes from fading into inconspicuousness.. and to signify strength and the ability of the mature emerging people. By dressing up you change the narrative. It makes me more Other. More non normal, for the time I inhabit the costume. Encourages a certain spectrum of behaviour. Allows passers by to quickly ascertain that a non normal happening is occurring near them so they can prepare themselves to encounter this however they may choose to.
Right now have that sick churning in my stomach, and the familiar voices of negativity are knocking around upstairs. They are saying- this will be stupid. You are too old for this. People will be hostile to you in the street. You will get too cold and will have to stop. You will cut your feet and slip and fall. You won’t last long. You will panic and fuck it up. You will run out of actions. People will be bored. you wont be able to do it without the music. You will look like an idiot. You will look a bit pathetic. You are not interesting enough to hold anyones attention.
It’s impossible to silence these voices, I have to let them play out, They will be gone to a certain extent when I start, and they will be fully gone by the time I finish. They will come back a bit straight after and very soon after that they will be gone again as I wont care anymore. it will be done one way or another.
A good way to manage them is to remind myself of that fact that ultimately none of this matters and if it all goes to shit thats ok. Also, it wont please everyone or perhaps anyone, and anyway pleasing people is not the goal here. Nor is entertaining others the goal. I want to make actions in the moment as a response to the material discussed above, and as a celebration of my own physicality. I can move and I can run and I can skip and I can hop scotch and jump around and that is to be celebrated. I just need to keep going. As long as I can move I can do this, even if I have a brain freeze and I go blank I will just repeat the movement in the opposite direction and repeat again, etc and then can plan the next move and go from there. Also this is all also hypothetical as there is no predicting what will go down until I am there, in the space doing it. It may all go in another direction. If I get too bad I will remind myself that from high above, we are all small grubs crawling around a rock, going about our business, some in a more privileged bubble of existence than others. And I am definitely one of the privileged ones. The sheer fact that I can do stuff like this cements that.
And it’s all transient, it’s all shifting its all ephemeral, and it will not last long, And then it will only exist as a memory. It’s an acknowledgement of what Henry Joy McCracken, who joys entry is named after, fought for, the freedom and democracy to do as we please and how culture is to be celebrated as it was fought for.
An Muc Dubh 