�rough �ood-ing: A silent choral

reading

�e only line I remember Certainty reading.

[Inhale] Aware of the action of my heart.[Exhale] I cannot love without trembling.

It’s possible I

heard that line in particular because I was

aware of my own rapid beating. I was also aware of my digestive system

but that is not a diagnostic indicator of anxiety.

Certainty, or the �gure approximating her, said she was also aware of the action of her heart. Luckily nei-ther of us were visibly trembling.

Notes on �rough �ooding made in the week following the performance. A reorganisation and reimagining of the 16 page script in octavo.

I think I climbed the stairs about twenty times on Sunday. Stairs were important in writing the script, so perhaps the repetition is �tting. Or interesting to think about it now? Approximately half the time I descended in the li�.

I took the li� when I wasn’t in a hurry. It’s hard to rush a li�, a mechanical lack of control.

�e video documentation didn’t work, captured next to nothing, not even silence. My memory is the next best thing.

THERE WERE A NUMBER OF EMPTY SEATS

�e whole back row on the right hand side was empty. Plus some gaps be-tween people. At the time I regretted the emp-tiness but empty chairs have some nice associa-tions.

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To be read in no particular order.But, I cannot resist moving down.

Ian said it reminded

him of a Quaker funeral. I asked if he

meant in general or one speci�cally. He

said he meant one speci�cally. �ere

was a lot of silence there too.

He told me that the

silence broke, a�er half an hour, when a

woman said ‘I woke up this morning

and thought it’s such a beautiful day

and Michael would have loved it.’ It was

silent again for some time a�er

that.

�is booklet is to be printed and folded along the dotted lines.

Red like a pen used to make urgent corrections. A�er the fact.

A�er the perfor-mance

we folded

andmoved

all 48 chairs

from the third �oor

apart-ment to

the base-ment

and they were

packed into a

car.

I loved that story. I still really love it.

At one point during the

performance I thought about how I was reading Dante’s Inferno when I wrote some sections of the script. More

speci�cally I remembered how I enjoyed imag-ining a staggered and descending

architecture of hell.Ian’s story is like the story I was told following the last performance work I did. One of the performers told me her job, as an older woman voice actor, was ‘to take the curse out of the material.’ One beautiful story for every performance work.

Dante & Emily Dickinson should probably have been credited in footnotes alongside Simone Weil. But the attribution is more abstract. ED could have a small 2 hovering somewhere about the recurrence of ‘more’.

�ey won’t take it personally, untroubled �esh.

I ended up removing the

words ‘untroubled �esh’ from the script. �ey were originally

intended to describe Body while she reclined. Certainty pointed out the sentiment was misleading.

& Virginia Woolf for the use of the ampersand as a listing device.

Speaking characters: Cer-

tainty, Love I, Love II.

Silent characters: First Person Narrator, Bodyguard, Body.

�e last lines I added to the script, the night before printing.

[Inhale (aloud)] (Silent) An itch on the roof of my mouth,

[Exhale (aloud)] (Silent) neither tongue nor saliva can cure.

Sitting in a separate room Love I and Love II couldn’t see �e Audience. Following a rehearsal Love II suggested we

make a back up plan, in case they didn’t know when to speak. I had to enact this plan.

I coughed, unscripted.

I took a beta block-er about four hours before the perfor-mance to slow my pre-emp-tively fast heart.

�ere was a certain emptiness.

�e stories are not really similar at all. Except they followed performances. And I like them.

A�er the performance Olivia reported seeing a drinking fountain that had wet itself on the carpet.

Fast readers made slow readers feel slow.

I noticed that a row opposite me started read-ing the script at page 3. Eventually they real-

ised and �ipped it over. But by that point they were well out of time.

Lauren’s email repeated Ian’s story. She had imagined Quakers might literally quake. Later she found out they spend most of their time in

still silence.

I’m quite sure that no one in �e Audi-ence was trembling or shuddering. A relief of sorts.

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