The 6th season of the A B series launched last night with Geof Huth!!
I’ve followed and enjoyed his writings for years so as soon as I found out about this one it went straight into my don’t miss calendar.
I have read his blogs and books but seeing a person in person is always a bit odd. Before it seems like someone known online as as real as people you know in person when you remember them when they aren’t present and yet it’s not quite the same. There’s more of an existence with that thick information of someone going from spirit to in the body. (I don’t know how it surprises me every time yet it does.)
He’s an animate performer so a picture in focus misconveys in a way. He paced and would have flown into the 3rd dimension on wires if he could. He looked like he was having fun which allows the audience to also have fun.
There were titters of enjoyment at some of the sounds and words he performed.
His shoes stand alone as he roamed the room.
He braided together several bundles of his work and switched among them which kept continuity and added variety, continual pings of freshness, same but different.
His words in a jar, for example. One was nuts, each stamped with the word “no” [or was it not”?] and some metal plates of text in the jar as well. It was like an object lesson in reading space. It doesn’t need to be space on a page for a gap to indicate pause. As the nuts are shaken, some turn their word away. Reading the word and the gaps where there is nut but no word is a reading the world.
He also read the word in forms, photos of things similar to letter forms, a stack of L-shapes of frames makes a repeating L L L of different weights of bold and volume. And a manhole cover which would be voiced as O.
He performed long prose-like pieces that while in sentence form are not linear essays.
Interspersed was a singing reading of shapes and words scratched into copper plates. It was like a textbook of how to perform. He started with one which scaffolded with numbers so audience who had either the plate in hand or the overhead projected plate could read along and orient from his voicing the curlicues, sweeps of lines or repeated hatches. Ah, 6, we are there. A later cycle through had words that acted as grounding for listening/reading. Gradually each had less “real” words and a greater percentage of sound, incantatory shapes in the air.
He read English or the other script-like shapes and read across the pictures. It was a kind of pataphysics of reading.
He also performed with a video displaying a walkabout singing meditation on the overhead screen while he reenacted what the video was while he walked with his ipad playing the same video of grass and his feet walking. Fascinating trip walking.
I have a couple of his books and he was kind enough to trade me Texistence too. He and mIKEKAL aND worked cooperative to make one word poems, portmanteaus, such as “heartrance”, “etchjack” and “boatrope”
Next up is kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jenny Sampirisi on Oct 20th.