"Indeed, it is a curious way of coping; to close the play, leaving the issue open…"
- Bertolt Brecht
‘Jellied Fire’ was crafted and performed as part of a two-week workshop deemed as ‘Musical Motivation’ with David McAlmont and Andy Dean at the Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio (AAIS).
The cohort for the fortnight delved into our association to sounds, hearing behaviour, and auditory inputs. I articulated the plethora of voices that I have as a poet.
A Voice to Think in.
A Voice to Exist with.
A Voice to Read | Re-read | Embellish in.
A Voice to Lie.
A Voice for the Truth.
A Voice to Orate | Tell | Re-tell.
Look at me!
I am Jellied Fire.
A treacherous stupidity.
Demented in every way.
You can’t avoid
My stench.
A stench of twisted humour.
Thousands of ugly hands
Driven by an even uglier instinct.
Valhalla is a zeitgeist.
There’s nothing poetic about it.
Look at me!
There’s nothing poetic about me!
And yet
Here you are.
Here I am.
Still managing
To screw with you.
See me speak.
Come closer!
Face me!
Watch me enunciate
Your plight to you.
I am that I am.
I am jellied fire.
I was directing a troupe of artists. It was clear that I wished to explore and exploit sounds.
I knew that text per se, is not theatre, that it becomes theatre only through the actors' use of it - that is to say, through intonations, through delivery, the association of sounds, and the musicality of the language. When I write and embellish the pieces that I craft, I imagine myself sitting on a bar stool in front of a drunk crowd reciting my verses. It is a romantic image, a self-indulgence. The Architectural Association interprofessional Studio (AAIS) gave me an opportunity to realise this visual rendition and aspiration of mine for the first time.
The question however remained; a sound of what or for what. I had a visual and physical modality for the performance, a motif that could carry the presentation, in my repertoire. It was similar to having the screenplay for a film without a narrative or intention to justify and anchor the scenography. The idea was to use a piece of fabric and let it respond to a soundscape. We certainly could not automate the fabric technically. All we had at our disposal was a set of performative beings who could use the fabric as a cocoon and manifest the responses through the movements of their appendages.
‘Jellied Fire’ is a euphemism. It posits the homogenous mass of humanity suffering under war.
Unlike a plethora of Marxist thinkers and playwrights I am not a staunch believer that the audience or reader must find solutions for and of human intervention as alternatives to the present misery that is being performed.
All I presented was an analogy. A generic war, if I am being honest.
It is…
Well let’s call it a Myth, and as a myth it is both a primeval situation, and a complex model with an independent existence in the psychology of social groups.
“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lying is the only privilege
I have
Over you poets.
No one truth
Has been reached so far
Without ever lying first.
You can’t possess
A taste for fucking;
Without ever having a methodology
For holding your own damn thing.
That being said though,
Poise…
Doesn’t promise effectivity.
Through the text I introduced fright. Perhaps awe. Through that we extracted a sense of the sacred. Now for a person well equipped with worldliness it becomes sacrilegious to not brandish a catharsis.
The spectator is; in such a predicament compelled to prostrate a renewed awareness of their personal truth in the truth of the myth.
And that was ‘Jellied Fire’s’ success.
A cunning to propagate a generic myth.
I had begun scribbling ‘Jellied Fire’ during the first week of the workshop. At the time my scribbles were about a muse, as they more often than not are. The scribbles had an association with women and their limbs. ‘Jellied Fire’ was an analogy for my muse and her legs.
When I was asked to spontaneously develop a piece for the recital, I reappropriated the scribbles for the performance presentation. I just increased the specificity of the phrases and the lines of the verse to allude to war and suffering. ‘Jellied Fire’ hence, from the moniker for the legs of a woman transformed into an analogy for our contraption that we made using a piece of fabric and two tables.
I am guilty of presenting a cacophony of fraudulent empathy and earnest dishonesty.
OOPS.
The way that the performance is cinematically blocked, it treats itself as an experiment being viewed upon by observers. It works on a simple visual trope of a frame in a frame. It is precise, clean and to the point.
This particular model urged the spectators to organically form their own perimeter around the piece. From their radically slanted perspective, given their proximity to us, they looked down on the actors as if watching animals in a ring, or like medical students watching an operation. This particular detached, downward viewing gave our action, and their candid viewership a sense of moral transgression.
Hearty aficionados circling around a self-professed embodiment of suffering!
It is comical. The comic refers in this instance to a structural principle under lying acts and communication that exposes the conflict between what is and what should be.
I did not script a deus ex machina.
Neither do the myriad of Scholars or Pandits, nor do the powers that be…
The initial intent of the performance was to record myself reciting the verse and overlapping it with the score that was being composed and arranged at the time. However, during a practise run, we did not have the verse pre-recorded, hence I was compelled to stand in the backdrop of our set and recite it myself, live. That is when I was heeded by the troupe to have the recitation live itself. I hence went ahead with memorising my piece to be able to perform it.
I am not an actor. I am simply a poet reciting his verse.