Performance Circle

I want to perform. I have wanted to perform for a long time. When I was not brave enough to perform nor brave enough to use my body as a tool to share narrative, I began making sound pieces and sound installations instead. I sang and told stories, I impersonated, I spoke and used my voice in many different ways. I let objects hold my stories, I let others speak my words.

Yesterday, after writing and writing in my journal I stopped because I sensed I was going through a motion. I sensed that I had written these words before. Over and over again. I kept thinking back to a piece of work that I made many years ago, a floor piece. Two large pieces of fabric that I had stitched together to make one, onto which I had created a circle marked in charcoal fragments, my smeared finger prints and hands marking this fabric, making this circle. I was to perform a piece about mourning, I was to perform in the center of the circle with my audience sat around encompassing me, observing my mourning, a re-enactment of the loss of my father. A re-enactment of the mourning that I had witnessed in women in particular, many times as a child in Ghana with wailing and sobbing and calling the deceased persons name over and over again.

Yesterday I went and unearthed that piece of fabric. The piece that I had wanted to stand in the centre of but was too afraid to do and so instead a large oval clay pot that I hand made sat at the centre, housing a sound piece of my wailing and sobbing and repetition of my father's name 'Allotey', now the middle name of my first born son. Yesterday I laid that fabric out in my sitting room and stood in the centre of that circle and breathed. I have come full circle and I am now ready.