You can't hold places still.
 
For the truth is that you can never simply 'go back', to home or to anywhere else. When you get 'there' the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point. For to open up 'space' to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as the product of interrelations. You can't go back in space-time. To think that you can is to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories. It may be 'going back home', or imagining regions and countries as backward, as needing to catch up, or just taking that holiday in some 'unspoilt, timeless' spot. The point is the same. You can't go back. (DeCerteau's trajectories are not, in fact, reversible. That you can trace backwards on a page/map does not mean you can in space-time. The indigenous Mexicans might re-trace their footsteps, but their place of origin will no longer be the same.) You can't hold places still.

What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to 'now', but where that 'now' (more rigorously, that 'here and now', that hic et nunc) is itself constituted by nothing more than – precisely – that meeting up (again).


Doreen Massey, For Space (2005)



stå
foran speilet
og si: jeg




jan erik vold











 
(stand / in front of the mirror / and say: i) 

As we grew up we struggled to create a 'social-self' that would shield us against the onslaughts of other people. (I'm sure you'll remember glancing at your reflection in shop-windows to ensure that the lie was being maintained.) If we can perfect this, we'll hardly ever get laughed at against our will, but the imagination will be our enemy - because it refuses to present us as "sensitive", or "tough", or "charming", or "mature", or whatever else we're pretending to be.
Keith Johnstone






Here's my own recipe for the Complete Breakfast. Get up with the light. Don't dawdle. Washing and dressing should not take more than ten minutes. Straight downstairs and put the kettle on to make tea. Always tea with breakfast, lots of it, and always at least one cup before anything gets eaten. If it is a lovely day I might wander outside for a bit, mug in hand. I can easily end up on my hands and knees deep in a border, the tea growing cloudy and cold, but the early sun warm on my back and appetite whetted. I might go to my desk for an hour or so, my mind at its clearest and relishing the absolute peace and silence of dawn.

Monty Don




Summer is letting go. Her final sigh is long; it bleaches out colour and fades past glories. There is a longing around now that always catches me unaware. Next time we meet, we will both be different.... I am made for autumn. Summer and I have a fickle relationship, but everything about autumn is perfect to me.... The low slanting light, the crisp mornings, the chill in my fingers, those last warm sunny days before the rain and wind. Her moody hues and subdued palate punctuated every now and again by a brilliant orange, scarlet or copper goodbye. 

She is my true love.

Alys Fowler




 













Typical male energy and typical female energy do not exist.
There exist only an energy specific to a given individual.

The performers task is to discover the individual propensities of his or her energy
and to protect its potentialities, its uniqueness.



Eugenio Barba, Animus-Anima in A Dicktionary of Theatre Anthropology (2006)

















I’m convinced that time spent idle makes for a healthier state of mind.
We want less and are more at peace when we get it. 
We sleep better and work harder.
Simpler things bring us joy.
When we daily observe our immediate surroundings, we are more grounded in our context,
more attuned to the rhythms of whatever season or place we are in. 


 
 Plus, the changing shapes of clouds need our attention.










Edvard Munch, 'Løsrivelse', 1896



Artists and performers rarely succeed in changing the world,
but they can change our feelings about the world,
our understanding of it,
the way we live in it.



Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: a Cultural History of the Great Depression