Athens – movement notes 3/2/20
I leave (you) in the hotel room and descend through two floors of alternating light, to the street level. I begin to walk, connecting to ‘the flaneuse’ who I think must move slowly through the city, aimless, and travelling at a certain speed.
Testing movement I find I walk too quickly, so what does this make me? It is like I am continually on the run…
My speed seems more like the slight of hand in a magic trick. I slip through spaces. I rarely stop. I don’t want to be stopped. A contrast to the ritualistic slow movement of the performance work. A different conversation.
More like a bee gathering nectar, I hover and dart. Nourishment comes later. There is an acuteness to my movement. my body taking signals from the surrounding momentum….listening to the city, its music, cracks, its sounds as scent. It’s alchemic nature.
Boundaries blur, gates and fences open and close. Hidden buildings, monumental stages and museum pathways beckon me …
And in one of these, an object stops me in my tracks. A first century glass perfume stirrer, suspended within a glass case in the museum of Cycladic art.
That it is glass takes me back. Its beauty and intimacy as a single object is arresting, but its function beguiles me too. The delicate act it may call upon requires movements of dipping, testing, stirring. Responsive and exploratory. Something of this echoes in my processes too, questioning in recent days the sometime forensic aspects of performative processes…a perfume stirred.
I return outside. My walk is slower now. On a wide avenue, on an island between lanes of the traffic of Athens, I stop and stand still for five minutes. I listen, I taste the air, pollutants and all. I close my eyes.
This time I feel everything else move around me. Maybe I am a perfume stirrer…
