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Fiona - having thought over and re-imagined your performance RECOGNITION (and, charged with its undissipating energy), I feel as if several remarks are incited; I hope you don't object to my quick broadcast...I was thoroughly engaged by the performance, at a level of appeal quite strikingly additional to the impressiveness of its visual and vocal disjunctions (themselves striking). Hearing (and seeing) this text performed was for me a genuinely new auditorship, one in which the immediacy and vigour of the performance's interrogations - of the viabilities of attributed dialogues, of self-positioning in elegy, of time lapses and lags and of sexual care (to name but a few) - were neither diminished nor arrested by their distance as prepared spectacles. Potentially enervating aspects of dramatization were rewritten, into the actions and words, so that the inevitable asymmetry of a monologue before a full theatre became crucial to the text's coherence: Fiona would suddenly address the crowd (whose members also included a randomly selected, on-stage 'jury') directly, explaining with all the hesitancy of an unpracticed announcer, what she was to attempt next, or why she had made a decision and how that decision might affect the progress of the performance. These moments of seeming discovery, or relinquishment of persona (not that any one persona was maintained), constituted rather than transcended the limits of fictitiousness, co-ordinating a resemblance between the grieving performer and the assembled watchers that disintegrated at the next turn, leaving both her and us in the distress of suddenly not sharing an unsharable distress. The point quickly yet subtly became immanent in the performance, recurring in each tender or manic gesture: that a communicated distress is unimaginable (in the old Coleridgean sense) in the minds both of auditor and communicator, or that the communicative affect of distress is an auto-affect, that is to say, distress distresses radically its own communicability. So there was the dying man on a video screen, speaking somebody else's words in testimony to his own expiring ability to speak for himself - the distressed man himself the least directly expressive, as if the inevitable efficacy of his real life situation as a feature of a dramatic performance (the unavoidable sympathy aroused) must be countered, or partially repressed by his non-authorship of the gift that, dying, he gives to us. This partial repression seems commensurate in rejecting the more readily available resources of pathos; the anxiety to -demand- recognition of pain, from herself, from the unnourishable man-turned-prop she has directed and rewound to the appropriate moment, from us as audience, is assuaged and replaced by the intelligence of how that pain distresses its own publicity, and how that intelligence itself can be meaningfully described and so in part repudiated. This is the most misrepresentatively brief of responses, but - I hope - throws a few impressions abroad and may inspire people to have a look at Fiona's work. HI COWBOY, which I'm reading now, is also very interesting. x, Keston. (feel free to dismiss these glances, Fiona) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%