A note on: Lexicon, performing at Marsden Woo - March 16th 2016

Such a beautiful experience, to curate a night of new poetry and performance responding to Alida Sayer's magnificent exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery. We did it all on quite a tight timeframe, really through my friendship with Marsden Woo curator Siobhan Feeney and an immediate passion I felt for Alida's work. She is interrogating, in sculpture, what I am interested in digging into in poetry - language, its instability, its material qualities, its graphic glypic abstraction. So I asked Giovanna Coppola, Fabian Peake, Iris Colomb and Christian Patracchini to come and see the work and we all presented this on a really enthusiastic evening, on March 16th (2016), in the gallery. You can see all the performances www.theenemiesproject.com/lexicon

For my own performance, I have become increasingly interested in improvisation, in speech rhythms and crowd responses, and in breaking the 4th wall with readings and performances. In this case I spent quite a bit of time working out certain parameters, concepts, that I would adhere to, but deliberately, strictly, ignoring the 'content' I might produce. In this case, I pretended that I was performing only for to-be-edited youtube vignettes, like some televisual curator, highlighting Alida's exhibition. I hoped for it to be humorous but not flippant, and people seemed engaged anyway, so I was pleased I took the risk.

I would highly recommend visiting www.marsdenwoo.com and checking out www.alidasayer.com