- Title:
- the long conversation
- Author:
- daniel ward
- Date:
- 16.03.23
In July of 2022 I was invited to write a poem responding to a performative workshop facilitated by Alice Heyward, Oisin Monaghan and Maciej Sado titled Tributary. The performance was developed as part of Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements, a two day performance program curated by Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier. On 27 August 2022 the workshop was conducted at Klosterruine Berlin, a once intact Franciscan ministry, built in the late 13th century. The building went on to become a printing press in the 16th century following the disbanding of the Berlin Fraciscan order and some years later became a prestigious grammar school. The building was destroyed by bomb raids, late in WWII, leaving only three walls on the west, north and east side. The program aimed to invite writers, artists, dancers, grief workers and cultural practitioners to “complicate the idea of grieving and to articulate the collective dimensions of a feeling most of us are all too often left alone with”.
In August 2022, one month prior to the performance, I was asked to attend a rehearsal in Mitte, to gain a better understanding of the motivations of the workshop and what I could expect from it. I was given an opportunity to be a solo participant of this workshop. The one hour and 45 minutes of this workshop consisted of sound and movement exercises aimed at exploring one’s body as a living ruin. The workshop was delivered with verbal instructions, inviting the participants to interpret these directions in whatever way they wished.
The following poem is a response to both the rehearsal and the final performance, which involved roughly 30 participants. Immediately after both performances, notes were taken by hand and also via voice recorder. All bolded, left justified, italicised lines are (loose) quotes by the facilitators.
Alice Heyward, Oisin Monaghan and Maciej Sado, Tributary, 2022, performance workshop documentation, Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements curated by Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier, Klosterruine Berlin. Photo: Dijana Zadro. Courtesy of the artists.
the long conversation
“we begin with the breath”
i pull in like a drug
i have learned some things have a small possibility
to dissolve when we ask them to
like manner, time, order and inhibition
so i walk into an hour and 45 minutes
drunk on potential
how strange it is that we have to be told to breathe
in order to breathe
to decide
to perform a few small things
specifically
“try to connect your breath with the person next to you”
so
i grab the current of a stranger’s exhale and press it into another as language
at first timid, polite
and then a total exhibition
“begin to include sound with these breaths”
once it feels good we are loud and begin rustling/trusting
like the trees we are
as if the long conversation of our breath between/as trees was
before now
forgotten
or was quiet
and so beneath the sirens and ideas we make it louder
“feel how the air coming in and out of your body changes its shape”
to be as free as you can for a second
then doubt
then without your approval you are already a new shape
did you try?
now you do
and so you breathe
however you like and
make whatever sound you would like
try not to think what ‘like’ is
try to think about what ‘doing’ is
and then feel the discomfort of ‘doing’
then
‘doing it’ for others!
all proud as the cat
life the dance
“bring your attention to the contact of your body with the floor”
speak to the earth as the ground wall
this wa(r)ll still up
and you are in between
because you are alive
after war comes
which is secondhand to nature
maybe it is important to investigate why we remain as/in ruins
maybe a way in is
breaking and rising with each breath into elegant disaster
and if that has any particular importance
then it comes as quickly as it goes
there are spikes that run the course of the fence
we rest our head upside and see them face the underworld
sharp guards housing the open rubble
seeking permission to land into us
because art is in there
like the centre of a tree
we the lumping sweating bodies and bricks and bodies and
bricks all chatting through cool wind
concentration as the water of yourself
learning from/teaching the unpredictability of weather
the sounds of the small shaking beer stand pressed into the clay
an ulcer on my lip is
the perfect metaphor for doubt and joy
as we begin entering deeply into the rising movements
now, walking between each other and
commanding
back in and conscious
back out and unaware
it needs to be mentioned how empty i feel
it needs to be mentioned that i walked like a catwalk
Alice Heyward, Oisin Monaghan and Maciej Sado, Tributary, 2022, performance workshop documentation, Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements curated by Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier, Klosterruine Berlin. Photo: Dijana Zadro. Courtesy of the artists.
the church is a club, a bedroom, a bathtub, a playground
where any place is a place for suffering
a wall displaces but
the intruder is always
already
inside
the deep quarry of our city brain
for one brief moment
so absurd
and to walk as if against war, but violent
humble, but on fire/working it/moving it/doing it/doing it/doing it/doing it
groaning in the breath language that speaks the
i tucked my tie in
took my shoes off
fell into the sand where
sorrow is in fact a
‘And Anguish – absolute’
and art (war) spiralling
from the whatever eternal
the wobbling conversation between itself
as an operation to catch the wind
as if to name Giolfino’s Virgin and Child with Three Theological Virtues as
three wild pigs deep in a Sulawesi cave
to call margarine a flower
to name the ruins of a 13th century Franciscan minster
a gallery or
a stage or
a printing press or
a school and back to the
spirit again
that long conversation of whatever, tangled in time as a dizzying volleyball of power and buildings and brick
tip
tip
tip
reinvented many times
i make sure to write that line in many poems
as many as days or hours or breaths perhaps
and so if anything/everything is just one long
conversation
then when did the performance start?
perhaps listening to Ani Difranco’s Pulse three times on the train
here
perhaps more to be ruined
hungover and jaunting the daylight
anywhere we see the lived daily collaboration of strength
and agony
as the old friends they are
like ocean between stone
where time gives the gift of compromise
and then i’m out of the moment which is the train that stops
or perhaps i am more in it
isn’t that what i am here to find out
ah moment, that jargon messy measurement of time as
presence/gift/rotating/door
there is a moment in the song where Ani pulls
away from the rehearsed poem of the verse
and
falls
into six minutes of steady improvisation
indeed quite like life or
this performance/meeting/discussion
that steady unpredictable botany of listening to the body in time
and she talks to the band “let’s stay here”
“keep holding”
“stay with physical sensations of pressure and growth”
so we all
do it do it do it do it
then
we check the map
do it again
take charge
settle down
rise up again
before another unending rotation of vulnerability
“the body creates a structure, an architecture”
Alice Heyward, Oisin Monaghan and Maciej Sado, Tributary, 2022, performance workshop documentation, Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements curated by Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier, Klosterruine Berlin. Photo: Dijana Zadro. Courtesy of the artists.
so living in ruins is living in a
community
a town
a city
a country
where a wall becomes a home
and
if we built our body as the walls of this ruin
with a roof at 1600 stories
we might house every homeless person in this city
if we dared multiply the Burj Khalifa by eight
we might find out how it falls
“experiment with these buildings and structures crumbling”
or perhaps we might use the houses that are already here
rested upon then
marked up and doubled and rented and sublet and re-lent and doubled again until the body is
ruins anyway
the bureaucracy of domination is small and menial and insidious
holding paper or moving it when
this part of the body could be bricks
and it doesn’t seem to matter when your cheek is to the ground listening
how wickedly it can be spun into a bomb anyway
“while you hold your hands here begin to make a SSSSSSSSSSSS sound with each exhale”
Alice Heyward, Oisin Monaghan and Maciej Sado, Tributary, 2022, performance workshop documentation, Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements curated by Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier, Klosterruine Berlin. Photo: Dijana Zadro. Courtesy of the artists.
laughing when you are uncomfortable
when you're in a performance
when you are in a life
is good
is bad
is whatever now
psychedelic drunkenness of a body thrown up and back into the ground
nothing quite disarms like a jump
i have never realised how much i use that word or that it really means to
put
down
your
gun
“what is the quality of forgetting as a movement”?
what is the quality of forgetting to breathe and so
maybe in the long conversation of breath (life)
it does not matter when we start, or
rather
we could start anywhere and
it is just a way to say to ourselves that something continues into
the spiral
“forget where we are”
we let the body rebuild by destroying it
seven years and your body is not your own
“forgetting what weight is, what touch is, what gravity is, what texture is”
then pulled back out of the kaleidoscopic womb of anything
now i am on a train and i am headed home
what cage do i adopt now
oh i’m in it
but which walls as
if to come back down to the papers
and the clock
to be shot
through the metal as the small body of border against strange land or
uniformity and obviousness
yes, i get it
i am always setting
the table
to keep time from blowing away
leaving the station a couple say “ooooohhhhwwwwww”
in that pitch up and back down way to say “did you feel that cold wind?”
“wooooooooooohhhwww”
in our sleep which is our most undefinable potential
perhaps we are our most awake in the loose flowering grips of anti-gravity
great helium brain
and now the train
is that pulse again
to the end of my fingers from
the cranberry tunnel and pumps and
sometimes there are drugs in there and that is how dance works at least
forces in the breath and
rushing to pleasure like tadpoles to a sheet of drooped ripe algae
i could be convinced that dancing
which is listening
which is singing
is the drug of unbound potential
where
freedom is the act of falling
our nose dive life
day day day
where life becomes the ruins of time dealt with
Alice Heyward, Oisin Monaghan and Maciej Sado, Tributary, 2022, performance workshop documentation, Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements curated by Siegmar Zacharias and Christopher Weickenmeier, Klosterruine Berlin. Photo: Dijana Zadro. Courtesy of the artists.
daniel ward is a poet and musician based between Naarm and Berlin. they are the editor of no more poetry, an independent publisher of poetry books and art magazines. they have published two collections of poetry, most recently eternal delight paralysis. all other writing can be found at danielwardpoems.blogspot.com. daniel performs predominantly improvised music under the moniker bodies of divine infinite eternal spirit.