from FAILSAFE: a choreography

  

Amongst them I found behind whenever you remember: prepare a meal for God. A lighter touch, toy soldiers rescale. This edge, again, of how far to dress up, curate and present the desperate and contingent. Realised I’d interpreted space behind as moving backwards.

 

 

*

Held at home, air is dance; both truth. How to do it for range, permission, decision? I will make it align not by knowing. At the shed, takes time to distinguish at this stage. Open we fall back. Decision is not levels of safety. No need to dream.

 

 

*

Does not get disturbed, doesn’t tolerate. Give up some control. Not exactly not knowing. Transition between phrases – content of move. Learn to want more – if the ideal to stay in that space, could I take it? Virtual head work, fear has manifested inside the rhythm.

 

 

*

Continuation of contempt – various contemporary factions, a less encumbered state. Again today feeling. Daily lines just now, a better foil. The table, the sign, the silent scream. Holes in the space of the words. Awareness and naming of disgust – at least two generations of blocked artists adapt to the idea of the dream.

 

  

*

Thinking of reading an idea, a trigger in the body means up. Holding breath, core muscles, works for us. Trying to connect to everyday movement – the invitation to expand passes through us. How to use last night’s trigger? Have I rejected it for so long I can’t change?

 

 

*

How to start to unravel? Cut out from forms into goals: celebrate, complain, commemorate. Slip in a varied formal history to suggest options. Neutral tense hopeful, polarity of body and form. The point of the form of the body is to move. We can’t reach partners now.

 

 

*

Present inside the moving unfolding: oblivious, aware, hiding. Can’t see who’s looking. Fall into space as if surrounded by it entirely, move as it. Where is your pleasure? Vulnerable in our headlong progression. Moving with and into: take it in turns to suffer.

 

 

*

Softening to receive the space in front: quiet steady flame tending pliant. What have you missed? What do you not see? Comparing a key principle, same game: cross the threshold. Risk shame, transducing spiral of sound, echolocation. Tether yourself, turn the page: taken by eminent domain.

 

 

*

i.m. Louise Woodcock 

In the blue hour: thread inside the available giving being received. Impress, surrender to impulses which do not contradict. In the blue hour, what is it other than to live, drop to integrate? Technique to instigate courage to sink deeply into the real. The blue hour: where does it initiate? Let go of naming.

 

 

*

Love and its inevitable plurality: when memory spits in the face of power. Lapwings, sorrel, lady's bedstraw beside the reservoir. It feels like I've done everything right to be here today. Large reverse strides with alternating legs, transferring weight, changing direction. The grass lit by the lantern in the park – as if tenderly enfolding the night – how to be a good friend? How to remember what you love, how to love, how to remember? In our reduced state, mist rising in the field at midnight.

 

 

*

Sustained radical simplicity, continuous present, combat burnout. Slow, weighted mind of organs, counter-cultural. What are you touching? Make sense by moving and leaving traces, take responsibility for your physical self.

 

  

*

for Tiago Gambogi

‘How can we create a decentred self as social reimagining?’ – Thomas Kempe

How to honour our land, be worthy of it? Mud roads, deforested hillsides, hydroelectric dam. Blocking doors. Images of mutilation. The more I expose myself – the more fragile, open – the more I feel safe and protected. The police were friendly and kind.

 

 

*

I lose the connection but decide to just leave it. I only land, lean. Your interior is my exterior -- what is hidden stays out in full view of the throng. Extraction economy: for me I live there, exceed what it looks like about our ill bodies. Make it rain in the hands, everything depends. Point the way, stand for something – train at night.

Know that life demands: give it across 'gainst all disasters. Earth is my blind in the earth, possibility of sight. Touch accrues to them in the open, envisioned cloudy naming. Just step across – we unfold as this: choices familiar and other at once back into space bring back home whatever we find in depth already here, already transformed. 

 

 

*

for Jonathan Burrows

Instead of structure, transition. How to get from one moment to the next and endure what degree of change? One state to another, make each change of place in favour of acts. Transitions become structural, structure ephemeral: the feeling of it. The text reappeared in my body as the faintest version of itself.

Scott Thurston

Scott Thurston is a poet, dancer and educator. He has published sixteen books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Phrases towards a Kinepoetics (Contraband, 2020) and Terraces (forthcoming, 2022). Scott is founding co-editor of open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organized the long-running poetry reading series The Other Room in Manchester. Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him studying with dancers in Berlin and New York and collaborating with three dancers in the UK. Scott’s dance-poetry film Terraces is currently hosted at Pamenar. Scott is Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford where he has taught since 2004.

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