#performancepoem

Chocolate Drops:

Caroline Bergvall, “DRIFT,” 2013-2015.  Materials: [from her website] “narratives and mappings of travel, migrancy and disappearance, specifically old nordic maritime navigation, the politics and horrors of contemporary sea migrancy, Anglo Saxon sea poetry, being lost as sea in literal and allegorical ways, through contemporary, historical, archeaological means. Initially commissioned by Theatre du Grutli, Geneva 2012 as a collaborative performance involving voice, percussion, datawork.”  A range of countries, environments, and art spaces across the UK.

I’ve been trying not to write too much of my personal interest in these artists into my descriptions of them for this blog, because I wanted their work to speak for itself.  But that assumes that the only purpose of writing myself into these descriptions is to convince you to look at them, which ignores the growing realization I’m having that as I progress through this project and settle into, the work of these folx becomes a sort of blanket fort I can huddle inside until my next period dump onto that troglodyte’s head.  The fortifying comfort I take from learning the names and work of these folx is becoming the real project.  Remedying the gaps in my knowledge.  So I’m going to be a little more present in my discussion of these artists.  They have all come to mean a lot to me over the last couple of months.  

The work of Caroline Bergvall, specifically DRIFT, is, to me, a work of genius.  One part reinvention of the Nordic sea poem, one part star chart/boat map depicting the knowledgable abandonment of refugees in a dinghy by every major naval force in the world, and one part project notebook/journal detailing a love affair, Bergvall expands what a piece is “allowed” to be.  In collaborating with Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach, Swiss visual artist and programmer Thomas Köppel, Swiss dramaturg Michele Pralong, she creates a drawing textual musical meditative harrowing devastating performance of grief, her body gasping for breath and measuring a rhythm that eventually evokes the sensation of drowning.  See her/this when you can.