the place is repeating

The place is repeating. The place is distant. The place is called repeating distance.

It is a performance.

It has two people, a man and a woman.

It is about walking in cities we love and how it changes us. Our eyes

fingerprint specifics, real and imagined, and this excites and saddens us,

depending on the specifics of the room we are performing in. These

specifics swirl into a word or a dance or a word/dance. Our thoughts

become physical and remind us we are together in the same place, listening

and watching. We become intimate.

The woman moves from a wall to a river. She tells him every time how

noisy the wall is, how it never stops celebrating. She can never sleep beside

the wall, so she gets up and moves to the door of the apartment to find the

river. She knows it is somewhere close. Her body tells her that. She is

very attracted to water. So she sets off down the road with cobblestones,

past the antique store Le Retour, past the open round place, where there are

cafés, and it is there that she passes the two angels on top of the art

gallery…they are driving chariots, drawn by horses, … she swears she sees

them moving every time she looks up, but when she looks again, all is quiet

and they are very still.

He walks to edit her. He takes the moving and the speaking and turns it into

colour. He follows red. There is a shell inside his head collecting

sounds…he is naked from the waist up, drowning in centuries of rain. He

stands by the river and is tall…like the cranes that are all over this city. He

says he dances because he has to, and opens his arms wide, stands on one

leg and tips into the invisible river.

But it is the floor of the studio we are all in together … water and floor get

mixed into river… and the telling of these places becomes full with

accident, like meeting someone for the first time. We are meeting you

every time for the first time…because we are repeating the distance of our

cities to you. It is the place of my body walking towards yours.

I/eye see you here/hear you, now…now listening.

Lin Snelling