I wanted to post on this (and one other) list some remarks about the event
that took place at CPT in London last weekend, simply because it was quite
remarkable and, I like to think, had a significance way beyond its scale of
attendance.

This was the first Alaric Sumner Festival, organised by Lawrence Upton.

Alaric would be 52 now but he died unexpectedly, due, it turned out, to a
congenital heart defect, when he was just 48. The Festival took the form of
a kind of live selected. Lawrence has already got much of the material up in
a readable form in the Remembering Alaric Sumner special feature in Masthead
8 (http://www.masthead.net.au/current/sumner/) with links and other work
on http://pages.britishlibrary.net/sumner/. What the Festival was able to
do was to address - or at least to gesture towards, in a significant way -
the range of modes that Alaric liked to explore both on his own and in
collaboration. This gave a sense of a coherent and developing achievement -
a body of work already in place - rather than that poignant feeling that can
so easily occur with an early death that things were about to happen. To my
regret I had to miss the last event in order to drive back down to Devon.
This meant missing a revised version of 'Error Studies', a piece involving
dance and text that had first been shown at Dartington as part of the first
Performance Writing Symposium in 1996 (if I remember right); Text out of
Image (Sandra Blow), a collaboration with the sound artist, John Levack
Drever; and a performance of a late piece, Bucking Curtains.

Despite the range of his textual practice I still think of Alaric as a
poet - but one who was keen to work for the conventional page, for a treated
page, for the gallery, for various forms of live and theatrical performance
(none, I would say, conventional theatre), towards layered sound pieces in
collaboration with musicians, and even, in the case of his collaboration on
Nekyia with Jo Hyde, towards an 'opera'.

There were four readings. In each case there was more than one reader - from
two to four. This passing of the text from voice to voice worked very well,
given the way that Alaric liked to set up an ambivalent derision about the
idea of an authentic lyric self orchestrating a textual emotional field. The
whole of the epistolary late work, Letters for dear Augustine, was read with
three (male) voices. The addressee - Augustine - is manifestly a multiple
figure, but then so is the 'Alaric' who signs off each letter and
increasingly, as the one-way correspondence continues, teases out the
instability of the sexuality at work in and through the text at both implied
poles of the exchange. The other readings were: an extended excerpt from
Waves on Porthmeor Beach, probably his best known writing (four voices);
Lurid Technology and the Hedonist Calculator, an extended piece, mixing
lineated sections of dense (and probably collaged) text with chunks of cited
'theory' (two voices); and Rhythm to Intending, a sequence of tiny poems all
setting off with, and playing against, that familiar trope of 'On .... ing
...' (eg 'On sensing, particularly intensely, the position of sculptures in
a garden') (four voices).

Rory McDermott, a close friend and collaborator of Alaric's, who had
developed the script of The Unspeakable Rooms for a changing set of
performances, had made an 11 minute video version for the occasion; Alaric
and Rory gave a rehearsed reading of Conversations in Colour, a text that
manages to combine a relentless repetition and phasing of colour terms
(blue, green, yellow, red) with a narrative of a love relationship strained
by illness, by a recent absence and by a mode of dual internal monologue
that mostly fails to escape its own longing.

A performance of the 'opera' Nekyia had been planned but because of the
illness of the singer/performer, Steve Halfyard, Jo Hyde showed instead a
video version that he had especially made with Alaric.

Early Saturday afternoon, Erin Maguire showed a short film she has completed
on Alaric and a set of interviews (with Lawrence Upton, Jo Hyde, Rory
McDermott, Rosemary Sumner).

Lawrence insisted that this was the 'first' Alaric Sumner Festival. I'm
looking forward to the next in the series, whenever and wherever they
happen.

John