'some thing'

Some writing to accompany an excerpt from my song some thing.

With all that’s happening in the world, it can be easy to constrict or close-down, to allow personal struggles to go unexamined and unshared, or joys and achievements to remain underground. I’ve been experiencing this lately; an impulse to become very, very quiet. Shut down?

Perhaps it’s shame. Perhaps it’s a belief that my own experience is insignificant given the whole. Or, maybe it’s a kind of exhaustion borne from the barrage of images and news we nowadays live amongst; a difficulty situating myself amongst that.

I’ve moved around a lot these last few years. This is a social issue, tied in with other social and political issues.

Perhaps I’d feel more relevant if I wrote explicitly about social issues. The truth is, experiencing the thing requires different muscles to communicating the thing. All that simple complex. I don’t have the strength.

I’ve been making performance works since my youth and I’ve seen these quiet, close times before. I remember how they can set in, complicating the clear impulse to share, when it comes, with the challenge of a lack of practice.

And sharing is a practice. It requires different muscles to making.

Scouring through my creations, I’ve wondered what to offer next. Perhaps I could share something about summer, about the holidays and the changing light, but that doesn’t feel right. While the environment changes, expression moving outwards, I feel I’m going in. Maybe that’s the point.

Having just moved to a place I will settle for a while is a privilege. I collect and integrate and I offer some thing.

I wrote some thing in November 2020. This is a snippet of that first version.

Despite the thickness of sound, reminding me of the density of colour and experience in summer, it’s also about quietness inside activity. It’s about inside and outside, also movement and stasis:

“Great movement always followed by quiet, the seasons changing she’s much like that…”

I’ve written some poetry too. It goes alongside the song. When I wrote it, I was reeling from the tumble, flip and spin of recent moves. Words were a weight I was struggling to hold.

This Now

Over many, many years

through many, many spaces

this body

                        moves

Air and ground

flight and fall

twist       and /tumble

 But no                     more     juggle

    No more   hand

    No more          Smile

/just Land

/Land

Experience dust

             Slow-tumbling

             ‘I am here’                      

some thing was available for public listening for one month after the publication of this post. If you would like to request a listen, please contact Leone directly.

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