31st May 2017                                                                                                                                                   1 Tudor Avenue,

                                                                                                                                                                           Rhyl,

                                                                                                                                                                           Denbighshire,

                                                                                                                                                                           LL18 4SA.

 

 

 

Dearest Adrian,

 

Your books are in a box.

Your books are in a box in the archive of Glasgow University.

 Un-catalogued.

 I know this because of a photograph in a beautiful book about you by your dear friends, Dee and Dominic. I have that book, I have your books.

I have your books, not because I found the picture and bought them, I have your books because I love them. I love looking at other peoples books. Looking at a book shelf is like looking into a person’s soul. More telling obviously is going into someone home and finding no books at all! But your books tell me a truth, but then I don’t think that truth was a secret. You told your truth every day, sometimes for the whole world to hear, sometimes for only one.

“I can’t bear the fact that so many people literally carry around this weight of shame and guilt about things they’ve done in their lives. I know I don’t want to feel bad about things I’ve done in the past, and I don’t want other people to feel bad. I kind of feel that what I’m doing is almost like a collective catharsis. A global catharsis – that’s what I’m after, that’s what I’m interested in[laughter]”.

That’s what you said in Singapore in 2010, you seem happy and confident, sharing your work and ideologies.

But as you say, talking is my mask; I understand completely, talking is my mask too. The happy smiley face and cheerful ebullient chat: the face for the world to see, that identity for the world to see. Happy, confident, but as we know this couldn’t be further from the truth. Dominic suggests that we are all confessional animals; I know you’d agree with him and the extension of his reference from Foucault that if we have a need to confess then we must live within a state of not speaking freely, a silence: an enforced silence. A force preventing our freedom of speaking out, keeping us in the silence and then, of course, it’s all about who controls the silence. I have lived for years in silence, because it’s easier and safer to live in that silence, to exclude oneself from discourse, not to have an opinion. You told Dee this. “Through my performance experience, I intuited that I needed to confess in order to give permission to and put at ease the audience participant, encouraging her to do the same. So, the exchange was consistently dialogic, predominantly both oracular (spoken) and auricular (heard) experience, performed within a wider cultural context of the mass mediatisation of the personnel and private made public”. “That our culture is saturated with confessional opportunities, mass mediated confessions”.

This journey of exquisite discovery into you and your work began on social media, putting out a call for a selected 50 women to share their opinions, their silence was crushing.  I found you.

I found you, and the answer, and wanted to share your work.

 John 13:5

“[He] got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him […] When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. ’Do you understand what I have done for you?’ he asked them. ’You call me “teacher” and “Lord”, and rightly so, for this is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you”

 

I tried to do what you had done. I even followed the guidelines from the proposal for Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance by the Live Art Development Agency, to devise my own work inspired by you; they have an award for you! People trusted, people shared and I want to let you know what those people said, it humbles me and I thank you.

 

              “I really enjoyed listening to you breathing whilst washing/massaging them, it was as if you were giving them life and taking in all my stress”

 “The warm feeling of your hands on the bottom of my feet at the end made me       feel like we were sharing energy”

              “I’m full of a calm stillness. It feels as though my whole body has been affected. To have my feet treated with such love has made me feel as though I can walk anywhere comfortably now”

“Thank you for such a magical, soothing and giving experience. What a beautiful random act of kindness!!”

 

Of course the answer is that we need to share together as one loving being to another, in person, face to face, or foot to foot. To give the time, to share a special story; but most importantly: to listen. To listen openly, without judgement, without the necessity to control or determine, Dominic says this is apophatic listening, but I would say it’s simply listening from your heart.

At the beginning of this letter I said I didn’t buy any of the books from you box, that’s not exactly true. I bought one, The Law of the Playground by Jonathan Blyth. I wonder if you were given this at Christmas by a special friend in 2004 and whether this was before or after your own personnel disintegration in your performance, Adrienne: The Great Depression. The other books say so much, how can you hide with Kane and Ishiguro?

And so now I confess to you.

Unburden

Saying the Unsaid

I will tell you.

 

 

“The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return”