Darkness. Silence. Uncertain Space.
Waiting.
From the darkness. Out of the darkness
a white haze, in the far left of my field of vision.
The whiteness trembles, disappears.
Darkness again.
Then white light? a round, roundish ball, movements, slight, irregular.
Skeins of light separate from the whiteness
like one of those unnamed, unnameable insects wrapped in their cocoon, stirring into being.
I begin to see more movement inside the cocoon, I can distinguish more: the curve of a body, a limb (arm or leg? I do not know), they merge and reappear.
There is hair? strands of light, threads, skeins? a web of threads trembling in the light.
It is the beginning of Life?
Fragile, Precious.
But inside that fragile beauty, that uncertain attempt at movement, those first moments,
there is great concentration of will.
From the ball to the centre stage
Change of mood.
A creature, long hair, ragged white clothes? a little frill here and there,
like a child, but worn by a hag.
Her eyes roll, her mouth grimaces
She is displaying her anger
and a kind of malice.
The movements are strange:
slow, controlled artifice, with sudden jolts and changes of direction,
changes of rhythm, as they speed up and slow down and with them the strange mask of a face that seems ancient, and suddenly becomes grotesque and pathetic as the scarf around the throat is pulled up onto her head and she is a little girl from another century with the floppy white bow in her hair
and she simpers and performs for the audience.
And then she moves on? to the right, to the stair and the wall.
And the rugged wall is kin to the face and the hands and the feet that we see, gnarled and knotted and lined like an ancient olive tree.
The light catches the layers of fabric and makes them transparent and plays between the legs and around them and different parts of this creature emerge and recede between light and shadow.
She moves up the stair, towards the wall – moves onto and into the wall, as if wanting to be absorbed by it, sucked in.
But instead, she is pulled by some other force beyond, out and to the back, behind me…
What is there in all this?
Life, the beginning of life.
A light in the dark.
Skeins, threads of light and energy, before it is differentiated, individualised.
Matter? a ball of light, soft, luminous, weightless.
Then, a creature who stares at us, confronts us, challenges us: angry and mocking, supercilious and knowing.
Angry that we are there.
Fighting.
But also playing, dancing.
Old, older than anything,
but with traces of her youth,
as memories that move inside the body.
Followed by the impulse, the pull towards the stair and the wall.
Another chapter? the end? the finality
the big question mark as she moves down the corridor.
Rea Stavropoulos,
Athens, 24 February 2010
Florence, 2 March 2010
