Entanglings: April
monthly missive from an artist's lyfe
My enthusiasm for trains continue. I see many comedy festival shows with R. We started going out during comedy festival so it is always anniversary time. It is fun to be out on the trains and at the shows together. I do get sick one weekend so have to take a few days off going to see shows. At the shows the seats are always jammed close. We must sit close to people we hate. Not personally, just their bodies and noises. The people give us germs, and they squirm or talk or check their phones or eat chips. They are heckled by the comedians. We are glad we are not heckled. A woman who is heckled starts to really get into it: where DID we meet? she asks her friend as the comedian asks her then stares in disbelief at the length of her answer. We want to be punished and told what to do. Mildly though, this is BDSM for the fainthearted. Some of the comedians want us to love them. Some of them want to remind us we are loathsome. We wait in corridors to go into shows. We are lucky this year to have participant passes because we both made shows, so we can get in to shows for free but only once all the proper paying audience has gone in. I am bewildered by people who are not running or looking anxious as they arrive at shows right on start time or even minutes late. Why are they not running or looking anxious?! At one show there are only a few seats left. Our friend with a pass doesn’t get in although once inside there are empty seats with reserved signs on them. Minutes after the show starts the festival director comes and sits on one, she sits right next to me. I guess it is more important that the festival director gets in than our friend. Between seeing comedy festival shows and going to work and trying to understand precisely what Age Up is providing my mother, I am writing carefully chosen words for playwriting opportunities to demonstrate how worthy I am for these opportunities. I am writing carefully chosen words for speeches for poetry books I am launching. I am writing carefully chosen words to endorse a poetry book and may use just 60 words. If you are reading this you can appreciate I find ‘just 60 words’ very hard. The hardest of all the carefully chosen words. I go to a non comedy festival show about the weird glory of bodies and talk to an artist about the possibility of 3D printing from our own cells as a food source and watch an episode of The Bear which is basically scallop porn. A playwright online asks where the risk in theatre is these days as companies say they want risk but their appetite seems so tame and I say a lot of it is in strange comedy shows and independent theatre about the weird glory of bodies made with no money. The festival finishes. I go to see other shows. At interval at a main stage theatre I want a choc top only to be told they have sold out of choc tops. I find this strange as it is the first preview, so the theatre has been dark for a few weeks. You’d think restocking on choc tops would be a priority for a first preview. As I walk away dejected and choc-top-less I see the artistic director of the company also go and ask for a choc top. She walks away looking slightly sad. The play is a classic and my feeling afterwards is like I have looked closely at a beautiful poem or artwork for two hours and I love this feeling. Another theatre work I see is more like an anthology of and I sit right on the side so almost see it from behind which is discombobulating. A third piece is more like a novel or a memory puzzle and in each one my body is present and I have feelings. A book I am reading, which is a novel called Transcription by Ben Lerner, suggests that screens separate us from each other, from the world, from ourselves and that this can be isolating and cold but also something of a salve in a world we are often overwhelmed with feelings. The feelings I have in a theatre are mediated somewhat but they are my own and they are given space and time to be. April has proven a long artist lyfe entry and I apologise. I will try to be more economical in May.
Hello and thank you for reading Entanglings 2026! In 2024 I wrote Unfurl, a weekly poetic response to a performance work. In 2025 I took a hiatus. This year I am writing a monthly missive with the aim of capturing a poetic/prose snapshot of the ordinary/mundane life of an artist. It will not capture everything, of course. It will be idiosyncratic and inconsistent in what it notices and reports on. It is inspired by thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed and Kathleen Stewart who are interested in how the everyday affective quality and experience of our lives are worthy of attention and may enlighten something about how we live and how we might want to live.
Love love love ❤️
Everything. Everything. But choctops should remain a priority.