A Song, A Dance and A New Stannary Parliament

RECITATION TO ACCOMPANY THE SONG

This short "recitation" was written to convey some of the concerns of the work to the song-writing group. It was published, with the song lyrics, in the Proboscis booklet and spoken after the song's performance at St. John's college, Oxford (Simon Pope, 2014).

Where will you meet, together again?

Free from winter's tyranny,

to cry alone, but now a chorus;

Gathered up, brothers in harmony.¹

Tynners wythyn the countey of devon,²

you will we see us first assemble.

Gathered up on Crockernyrn Tor;³

a parliament we will resemble.

Streaming from the shores, you came;

When molten, we erupt.

But at rest we had been 'til now—

Shifted through hands, cupped.

Our lives transformed once you were free:

once isolated, elemental.⁴

From near-neighbours'—cold, fused tight,

You were forced to disassemble.

On my cell is inscribed 'Sn'.

Periodically, I'm in this ballad

As a “post-transition metal;

primordial; solid.”⁵

Our own near neighbour,

fleeing tightened reigns of matrimony,

heard you in her horses thunder;

“dolorous bells” with Copper, Lead, Antimony.⁶

NOTES

From an article for the Dartmoor Tinworking Research Group, November 2014:

During a tour of New Zealand in early 2013, I was welcomed onto a Maori meeting place with a traditional song describing the harmonious relationship between my hosts, their ancestors and the local mountains and rivers. Responding in kind, I sang several verses of Widecombe Fair—a song from my native Devon which relays a more troubled relationship between humans and "natural" things. When commissioned by Spacex, I decided to addresses this deficit and to produce a new folk song for Dartmoor—one which would explore how we might develop a less exploitative relationship with 'natural resources'. The re-opening of Hemerdon and the possibility of additional mining in the National Park brought an additional urgency to the project.

My recent research engages with a new materialist philosophy preoccupied with the agency of material things, their capability to transform as well as to be transformed: plutonium's undeniable agency, effecting the state of other things despite human will, for example; or the "vibrancy" of all matter, the "call" of which we might become attuned. This has profound implications for our understanding of environmental issues, with the very concept of environment placed in question. The distinction can no longer be made between environment as background and as “material thing.” We can no longer consider ourselves actors on Nature's stage. Rather, we are in a lively, mutually-transformative relationship with all things—humans and non-human. It is my thesis, in A Song, A Dance… that we can understand this relationship as dialogic and that an art practice which already works with the concepts of participation and dialogue is well-suited to such enquiry.

The concept of participation in art, as in other disciplines, brings with it a strong ethical dimension, with human participants not objectified (as they might otherwise be). My own research seeks to reintroduce objects back into participatory art on these non-objectified terms. This re-engagement could be considered dialogic in recognizing other things—human or otherwise—as Thou, rather than It.

See also: information at Public Art Online