Topologies-of-Between [Gillian Whiteley, Geoff Bright, Lyn Hodnett and Walt Shaw] work with sound, image and mark-making to conjure and provoke transformations and unsettlements within improvised performance.
6pm Thursday 19th May 2022 at Loughborough University campus Spell-ing the Green Knowledge: an improvised performance ritual by Topologies-of-Between to celebrate ten years of Fruit Routes and to mark the passing on of the project by artist Anne-Marie Culhane to the care of the University.
Spell-ing the Green Knowledge was performed at a site in the yurt at the Barefoot Orchard on Loughborough University campus, opposite Pilkington Library. Ritualistic drawing and an incantatory cacophony of wind instruments, percussion, strings, objects and voice enacted the spell.
Text of Incantation: Calling in Maya: Spell-ing the green Knowledge.
Listen!
She makes herself a leaf-green bed inside my ear
Twines from her hands a quick and thickly
Shaded bower
Inside my ear
Listen!
What might free bodies do?
What can leafy green free tree bodies do?
Fleeing, might she now be running river?
Now be burgeoning bough?
She weaves herself a leaf-green bed inside my ear
Glimpses of the Goddess make us less forlorn! To hear the tree speak: Oh, I am leafy speafing; we are leafy speafing; lovely, laughing leafy speafing – These trees: my alchemic crook. These bees, this buzzing skep: my alembic nook
Rain, I could be rain…but rain a wall! (it’s terrible to be a wall!) It’s always He wears down her vibrant heart, shapes her mouth into his mouthpiece, shouting: One book! Just one book! Only one book!
No, no. Let this choir sing out our poly-vocal, joyous hymnal…
Someone laughs. A woman sobs. From a male, a great shout: WE ARE LOST! A woman’s voice whispers, softly: no, we are saved!
Lost! (saved) lost! (saved)
Listen!
My verdant, changeling angel adept
Lays her lissom beddy-bye leaf-made
Fine accouchement bed
Inside my ear
Births her leaf-green knowledge seed
Inside my ear
Spells her abundant season’s fruit-loud
Name resounding
In the fecund, sonic
Alphabetic
Chamber of my ear.
(Text written by Geoff Bright. This vocal performance piece is a kind of supplemented cut-up of parts of Norman O. Brown’s kind of supplemented cut-up of Ovid’s Daphne in Metamorphosis,1. 450-565. See Brown, N.O. ‘Daphne, or Metamorphosis’ in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. 1991. 9-22.)
