TONGUES OF STONE: February 2009

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

snow figure

So we have just had a major snow event here in London with 30cm settling on the ground yesterday. Today the sun has been out and I am looking out on a fluorescent whitescape and enjoying the subdued muffled sounds of traffic (very little and going slow). When I went out on the common last night and this morning the fields of snow are dotted with snowmen and women. Russell took this image of a rather imposing towering snow woman (that's Rafe and neighbour Anna standing below). This is one but there are many as there has been a frenzy of party-like building of ephemeral figurines of snow going on since yesterday morning. I'm fascinated by this hunger to build melting figures of fun. They also reminded me of the Pinnacles I posted earlier, only these ones are built with human hands rather than with wind, sand and water.

Bodies and City

Here are some further images of the dancers responses to place in Nov 07.

Bodies and City

This is an image from my workshop in Perth in 06. The Strut dancers improvised on the grass patterns of rolling, resting and containing. Its a large stretch of grass fringed by a busy road and the cityscape backdrop, on the other side is the sea and the Bell Tower. Looking at them from this distance without the motional quality of the live they appear fallen.

Living Stones

At Lake Clifton in Western Australia these stromatolites are found. Known as 'living stones' they are millions of years old and some of the oldest organisms on our planet. They are primitive cellular organisms which 'grow' 1mm a year in these spiralling circles. At the lake you can see them, some submerged some beached like this one, a sequence of circular forms which form a visual rhythm around the lake like a piece of serial music.

Geology

During my visit to Western Australia in 2005, I was intrigued by these standing sentinel sculptures of limestone - the Pinnacles - found near Cervantes about 200km north of Perth. Apparently limestone deposits run all the way along the coast of Western Australia. The pinnacles, as they are known, take on various anthropomorphic forms, this one - a tall woman - appeared at sunset standing sentinel on a plain of wind blown sand.

Ishtar

I need to research this further but am drawn to the story of Ishtar as a trigger for Tongues.

Ishtar is a multifacted goddess. She is the goddess of love and sexuality, and thus, fertility; she is responsible for all life, but she is never a Mother goddess. As the goddess of war, she is often shown winged and bearing arms. Her third aspect is celestial; she is the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. In Babylonian mythology she is the 'divine personification of the planet Venus'. It is claimed, her cult involved sacred prostitution, or at least the requirement that women once in their lifetimes made love to a stranger in the temple of Ishtar. One of the most famous myths about Ishtar describes her descent to the underworld. In this myth, Ishtar approaches the gates of the underworld and demands that the gatekeeper open them. The gatekeeper lets Ishtar into the underworld, opening one gate at a time. At each gate, Ishtar has to shed one article of clothing. When she finally passes the seventh gate, she is naked. In rage she throws herself at Ereshkigal (queen of the underworld). Ereshkigal orders her servant Namtar to imprison Ishtar and unleash sixty diseases against her. After Ishtar descends to the underworld, all sexual activity ceases on earth. The god Papsukal reports the situation to Ea, the king of the gods. Ea creates an intersex creature called Asu-shu-namir and sends him-her to Ereshkigal, telling him-her to invoke 'the name of the great gods' against her and to ask for the bag containing the waters of life. Ereshkigal is enraged when she hears Asu-shu-namir's demand, but she has to give him-her the water of life. Asu-shu-namir sprinkles Ishtar with this water, reviving her. Then Ishtar passes back through the seven gates, getting one article of clothing back at each gate, and is fully clothes as she exits the last gate. (Source: Wikipedia)

Because of her multiple aspects and powers, Ishtar remains a complex and confusing goddess figure in modern study. Scholars suggest she incorporates contradictory forces to the point of embodying paradox: sex and violence, fecundity and death, beauty and terror, centrality and marginality, order and chaos. Rivka Harris views her as a "liminal" figure (Harris, "inanna-Ishtar as Paradox," 265). In 'Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopatamia', Zainab Bahrani calls her the embodiment of "alterity" (Bahrani, 'Women of Babylon, 158) (Source: www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/ishtar/php)

Gates of Ishtar

The Gate was one of eight gates into the city of Babylon and a main entrance dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. It was decorated with glazed brick reliefs, in tiers of animals - a mythical dragon, and young bulls and lions. It was built during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) and has been reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Batavia Gate

The Dutch East India company sent many boats around the coast of West Australia towards Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) one of their major colonies (1619-1942). After the slow passage through the doledrums, the waters off the coast of West Australia were fierce so, many were shipwrecked, including the Batavia which wrecked off the coral island of Abrolhos. Having just been to an exhibition about Babylon - Myth and Reality at the British Museum - I have been thinking about possible connections between Batavia - Babylon - Perth. The shipwreck of the Batavia contained the 32 tonne sandstone arch (in pre-fabricated pieces) for the Batavia Castle (Jakarta), a fragment of a perhaps babylonian dream to build an architecture which symbolised human ambition, an aspiration and a folly.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

AARERO STONE: TWO SOLOS IN A PERFORMANCE LANDSCAPE

Commissioned by the New Zealand International Festival of Arts, 2006
Choreographers/Dancers: Carol Brown and Charles Koroneho
Performance Designer: Dorita Hannah

Aarero Stone was an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer-dancers and performance designer, commissioned and premiered by the 2006 New Zealand International Arts Festival. Aareo means Tongue and the tongue of stone was a speaking landscape upon which journeys of transformation were woven from the strands of Mâori ancestral stories and European mythologies. Sited on the stage of Te Papa’s Soundings Theatre, this architectural installation was comprised of a cartographer’s grid of reflective crosses, a shadowy tomb embedded in a slab wall, a vessel of white stones, an obsidian promontory jutting into the auditorium and a black mirror hovering over a dark pool of water. Open, abstract and elemental it formed an atmospheric space that shifted subtly through movement, light and reflection to evoke a multitude of places.

Aarero Stone in 2006 New Zealand Arts Festival