February 2022

‘A Dizzying Lanquidity’ -

The title ‘A Dizzying Lanquidity’ was inspired by and is a reference to Sun Ra’s piece ‘Lanquidity’ the title track off of his 1978 record. The track, which begins with a gentle, enchanting trickle of keys shortly followed by a slow martial stroll type of rhythm created by the percussion. This piece draws you in with it’s mystical charm till slowly and subtly the eeriness of the wind instruments start to creep in and carry you in an almost hypnotic daze.  I really love the movement in this piece and felt that it echoed the movement I tried to capture through the characters in my piece. The last couple of years I’ve felt that time has seemed more like a loose construct that through the pandemic has lapsed and slipped through the rigidness of it’s original intention. When trying to recall things that had happened during this time I’ve noticed a lot of people including me find it hard to differentiate whether things happened in the first or second year of the pandemic but we’ve all felt the repetitiveness and the dizzying cycle of the constant lock downs, the mutating covid variants and constant introductions of new and compulsory vaccine mandates. It’s hard to believe that just a little over 2 years ago the very idea of a lock down or global vaccination mandates of a newly trialled and created vaccine would be our new reality and though it feels like we’ve been moving in circles for the last two years its almost as if those cycles have fallen off their axis onto an unhinged tilt almost replicating and morphing into the famous visual of the melting clocks in the iconic Dali piece ‘The Persistence of Memory’. But not everyone has reacted in a unified manner some have struggled where others have persevered or even benefited from this situation and where some people have shut down and become a victim to their own isolation even once restrictions had lifted others reacted by embracing this new state of reality to experience things they might never have dreamed of before. I wanted this piece to capture their movements frozen in time and to have it as though each character, though seeming to be in the same room are all detached from each other existing in their own realms or individual capsules in time collectively isolated in their own curation of their attempt to a new normal with the only certain constant being the sun that rises in the morning and sets in the evening. The figures that appear through the curtain are supposed to represent a past that no longer seems feasible in this new world. The luxury of freedom, spontaneity and movement to explore without the everchanging restrictions. It’s as if the curtains have closed down on the 1st act of a play that we had, till now, not thought needed a following act. Unsure of where the story might go the curtains never re opened and we are left with nothing more than the dancing imagery of a memory that once was. Now only remaining to live through the seems of our memories, creating a tapestry of a fading past.