Collaboration with Sharon Black (poet), Isis Olivier (painter), Louise Desbrusses (dancer) and AAD

We are co-creating in a shared space ...

Recordings

Isis wears a spattered apron,
hair a cacophony
around her cheeks,
table a riot of brushes and jars
as her bamboo nib draws ink
across the sheet.

She's choreographing
silence.

*

In a soundscape of electronic
blips and loops, the painter
dips her brush,
the dancer is
a black tulip, opening –

*

pages of diluted ink lines
swarm the floor
each one a caught gesture,
in which she moves
like rain

*

bare feet framed
in a rectangle of sun
describe
a flawless stroke

*

muscled calves and blackened soles
propel her body into flight, relax
as she pauses on a bed of light,
arms and fingers unpeeling, twitching
like a first pale shoot

*

Lying on my side, I feel your bass vibrations
(a window to my right, a bass amp to my left)
a pulse of resampled machinery on a loop
as if you're spooning me in bed.



How We Speak

Alex through a hum of bass,
a treble sweep, a snatch of Spanish,
his fingers twisting dials, adjusting knobs
until the PA's hiss becomes
a syncopated loop,
a heartbeat during sleep, a sun-filled cannula
into which a hush of tambourine
is fed.

Isis with India ink, a flat brush
and a bamboo nib
to draw it down, articulate
a neck, a breath of shoulder,
arms like slender branches – sheet after sheet,
translating movement into thrum
and limb, casting them
like windfall on the floor.

Louise through flexed toe, fluted spine,
one leg a taper, now a wave, her body folding
into Cupid's bow, a lip
pronouncing all the names for love,
her fingers tinkling
an imaginary keyboard, black flotilla,
her bare feet like a river
in its wake.

The biro's scratching is blotted out:
the world reclines
in a windowed corner
as sunlight lays its cheek against its mother,
each shaft singular and pure,
a collaboration
of red, indigo, yellow, violet
and other spectrum colours.