Notes (October 2025)

In October, my body feels like it's broken down, a pile of chairs. This is Pina Bausch's Café Müller, which Blue Pieta directs, a sequence, again and again, in the Churchill College chapel, where we've met to rehearse.  "Do it again."  Two steps forward, eyes closed. "Again."

This is followed by the meat sack. Here is a modified image from our rehearsal.  I wanted to install a freezing sky.

To rehearse: sensorimotor + glitch = [                    ].  Now I'm the director. The first iteration of the meat sack took place in Schindler House, Los Angeles.  This time, in the UK, Blue is inside and I am outside.  Our rehearsal lasts for hours and when we leave, it's dusk.

We're rehearsing for our launch at Café Oto. A fifteen-minute slot.  Our collective includes Kath Gifford.  Writing these words, I have the rare, unexected feeling of being a baby, of what it must have felt like to be a baby.  

To recover, the next morning, I take a walk in the Jewel-Box Wood.  Nourishing, cellular, bright.  

But I'm still shattered.  Salt bath, poses that release the fascia, and now, before the day begins, I'm reading poems: 

In October, I'm writing in bed, I'm writing on the windowsill, I'm writing with my mother at the kitchen table.  I'm writing about a visit to Chicago in 2010, during a blizzard. In the few minutes before it closed for the day, I saw the Luc Tuymans show at MCA.

Luc Tuymans, Leopard (2000)

“Luc is a colonist,” said H., when I commented on the leopard skin splayed on the floor.  But also: “A glow and a resonance through an over-use of white.”  But maybe he’d moved on. To the next work, a smaller piece by Louise Bourgeois.  Lebourgeois, I wrote in my Diary, in the time when I knew nothing, over-correcting at the first hint of lost sensations, everything that became H.

H for Hot.