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Certain show photos taken by Jassy Earl.

Ooooooooh

Ooooooooh is a site-specific performance. It was written and created by Florence Logan. It was performed by Florence Logan and contemporary performance artists Romi Sarfaty, Jess Paris and Hope Kennedy in Jupiter Artland (May, 2023).

 

What I have here is plenty. This performance was created in response to Nathan Coley’s sculpture « In Memory » in Jupiter Artland. 

It explores practices of gratitude, rest and contemplation through free writing, stillness and breath.

Full text from the performance:

How long and how grateful can I make this be?

 

It’s about walking home

in the rain 

and looking through windows 

and seeing people eat together. 

 

It’s about sitting down on the ground even if you get a wet bottom. 

It’s about buttercups under chins. 

It’s about putting glue on your fingers on purpose, just to peel it off and it’s about remembering people’s birthdays. 15th of September. 

It’s about cake. It’s about a full belly feeling. 

It’s about wrapping someone up tight. 

It’s about holding the weight of their head for them, just to remember how heavy it all is.

 

It’s about being carried. 

It’s about carrying. 

It’s about reading your mother a story.

 

It’s about saying I love you 

any chance I get. 

 

It’s about walking home 

and reaching out to touch the leaves just to feel them, just to remember. 

It’s about giving someone’s hand a quick tight squeeze. 

It’s about watching the rain drops race.

It’s about playing rock paper scissors for the smallest things. 

It’s about blending your voice with the buzz of the bee. 

It’s about giving shells and pine cones as presents.

Here’s my chance:

I love you. 

 

It’s about to-do lists that start with “wake up”. 

It’s about googling pictures of the sea at your desk under the fluorescent lights just to see it, just to remember. 

It’s about trying to save the ladybugs overwinter and slowly watching them die  anyway under the hot but not hot enough desk lamp. 

It’s about going to concerts of bands you don’t know just to be able to hear people scream and to scream back. 

It’s about how pretty rotten wood wrinkles, like the pages of a wet book.

It’s about dirt covered knees, specks of soil like freckles and perfumes in plant pots made out of rain water, leaves and beheaded peony buds. 

It’s about eating a lemon just to remember. 

Relax your belly.

 

It’s about welcoming the words to wash over. 

It’s about softening your eyes and letting everything go blurry for a bit. 

It’s about the blurriness that turns the body into a small part. It’s about putting everything at the same size. 

It’s about looking up, especially when it starts to rain and hoping to see the hole in the cloud that opened up to you. 

It’s about looking up to see the bird that’s singing and never spotting it. The tree must have swallowed it whole. It bounced around inside until the song became thick and poured out of the branches. Sap is sticky liquid bird song.

It’s about quoting the artist and saying that “we spent a great deal of time and a great deal of care maintaining the dead tree”. It’s about building a wall to let an old tree rest. 

 

It’s about leaving notes around someone’s home when you leave. It’s about leaving notes in your home to forget about and come back to. 

It’s about writing words with your finger on someone’s back. 

It’s about being half way, being in between, and hanging there, happy. 

It’s about playing limbo. 

It’s about learning how to blow bubbles with gum for the first time and admiring how cool you are.

It’s about tears from onions and homemade haircuts. 

It’s about things that are better a bit wonky.

It’s about the way water tastes when you wake up.

It’s about cinema popcorn that costs more than the ticket. 

It’s about a free biscuit or a complimentary sweetie with the bill. 

It’s about stretching and rolling your neck in the morning and doing it now if you didn’t then.

I’ll give you time. I’ll wait. 

 

It’s about the cold air after stepping out of the shower. 

It’s about rough towels because your mother said it was good for you.

It’s about never stopping practising how to kiss on your hand.  

It’s about not wanting to walk on the grass even if the gravestones are empty. 

It’s about thanking people for their time. 

It’s about having favourites: a pillow, a fork, a spot on the sofa, a pyjama bottom, a notebook that the shops don’t sell anymore. 

It’s about meal deals and student discounts and waitresses that call you “darling”.

It’s about people that know the names of trees. 

It’s about seeing an old couple holding each other’s hands with one and holding a fork with the other while eating dinner at 5pm on a Tuesday.

It’s about giving the tear time to run down your cheek and letting it rest in your collar without wiping it.

It’s about making the journey longer by crossing the street o be on the same side as the sun.

It’s about the smell of sun dried sheets. 

It’s about keeping people close to you, keeping people as lists. 

 

(yours is: itchy necks from haircuts / playing with eyelashes / freckled elbows / sticky out toes / soup /

(black coffee in water bottles and curled up legs) 

(breaths so big so loud they make me worried that they’re your first of the day, not that you were holding them in, just that you forgot you were here, breathing) 

(yours is: sweet and salty popcorn / a wonky left side / sandy ocean water / dancing for each other )

(egg sandwiches / sticky skin and a broken fan / walking home) 

(Don’t worry about it, you can just buy me a pint or something later.) 

(yours is: sweaty hands / silver and gold / 

touching foreheads / blond hairy legs / quick wit / chalk / 

(smiling with teeth / playing with card  s / lying in / yellow /

 are you thinking of an animal?)

 

It’s about Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.

It’s about placing your hands on their hips and pressing down to remind them of the ground. 

It’s about placing your hand on their chest and a hand on their belly just to remind them. 

Breathe. 

I’ll stop here to let you breathe. I’ll give you time. 

 

Voices sing: Oooooohhhhhhh

 

It’s about please texting me when you’re home. 

It’s about showing off your toothy smile in photos. 

It’s about buying books from charity shops with sentences underlined. 

It’s about the little piggy that went to market and the other that stayed at home.

It’s about the subway driver waiting for you while you run. 

It’s about being called down for dinner.

It’s about cycling and crushing snails by accident and stopping to pray for the first time. 

It’s about a small glove that’s been placed on top of a fence for the owner to find. 

It’s about tripping on the street or doing that thing with your ankle and sharing the laugh with a stranger. 

It’s about the way the wind blows in bed at night.

It’s about the wind pushing you sideways and making you giggle because everyone looks so small and silly fighting it. 

It’s about cool air on sweaty necks and flushed cheeks after coming in from the cold. 

It’s about chatterboxes.

It’s about crying to films just to make the most of it.

It’s about crying on the bus because you need someone, someone who doesn’t know, someone who can’t do anything about it, to ask you if you’re ok. 

It’s about enjoying the walk home and accidentally walking past home. 

It’s about my father’s one rough hand, the one he uses instead of sandpaper. 

It’s about feeling uncomfortable in someone’s hug but staying because you want it to get better. 

It’s about borrowing sentences and dance moves from people you love. 

It’s about when she whispers:

“I beg you don’t fear, there’s no such thing as laying for too long”.  

It’s about your spine that feels like hiccups. 

It’s about holding your hand and feeling the little hairs on your knuckles. 

It’s about everything I want to feel: 

 

A whale’s back. 

Moss on a tree trunk. 

The soft skin on the underside of your arm. 

Hotel towels. 

The way I hug.

The moon floor. 

The heat of my face in front of a fire.

The colour pink.

Worn down leather.

My own skin as if it wasn’t mine.

Tall grass tickling my legs.

I want to feel what it’s like to walk for the 1st time. And what it’s like to feel being asleep. 

The sea. What’s the inside of a cloud 

I want to feel forgotten just for a second, just to see if I’ll notice.

I want to feel sweat drip between my shoulder blades in the summer. I want to dip into a cool pool. 

I want to feel a pregnant belly when the baby kicks.

And I want to feel the baby’s wrinkly toes and a freshly shaved head. 

The air on top of a very tall mountain.

Hot sand in Hawaii. 

The soil of a freshly ploughed field.

I want to feel what it’s like to fly and to run really really really fast and what it's like to be the sun.

I want to feel the sun on my face in the morning.

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