Walking through a hubbub of American postcard Londons, dirty and suductive looks, pushing past and against savvy local winter coats making b-lines, slow obstacles of provincial family visitors in puffer jackets (near blackcab roadkill), past a glorious old pub flanked by KFC, dicarded fags, underground tickets, posturing glares, bewildered and awestruck faces lights of the theatre shows Priscilla, Phantom, Chicago.

Thoroughly alive and expectant but tempered by a reassurning English mundane: dirty walls and obiquitous crisp-selling corner stores.

Tube signs explode with pregnant possibility of their own theatre: characters playing out warmth or avoidance or attraction or … anything really, like a mainline injection contracting focus here to there via ancient resonant nodes of Piccadilly, Waterloo, Charring Cross.

Spat out with the post-performance crowd dispersed and still buzzing toward point B.  Highlights include “Insurance” ad, “New Kindle” ad, sexy tights, an exuberant cosmopolitanism.  

London orchestrates the unending breath of one man’s sigh into another’s drawing in…

~

[The dance performance “Babel” has a bit of an introduction in which it is suggested that “Language (both spoken and physical) and space emerge as the driving forces behind all human interaction”.  An interesting idea!  So I wanted to do a “Phenomenological Lab Experiment” to see if it worked:  I wrote this little creative piece about London.  I tried to restrict everything to (body)language and spatialisation, but I couldn’t.  The discarded objects for me are important to the sense of space and people.  A pile of discarded cigarettes by a traffic-light shares a story of other people.  Not a direct face-to-face interaction, but powerful nonetheless.  Maybe you would call these things a symbol.  Or poetry.  Language seems too often linked to a particular meaning, whereas these items form a pretty subtle poetic image beyond “what does a cigarette mean?”.]