Written by Annie Brown

Lessons in Surrender and Intuition

What I learned on the WAVELENGTH artistic residency – reflections by artist, Taeside. 

5th May 

Most of us resist instinct, I think. We have, in part, learnt that certain pursuits are socially inappropriate – whatever that means – and we punish ourselves. The first day of WAVELENGTH was about unpicking and unlearning that. 

Cardboard, pebbles, dried teasels became crunch and clink and hush as we sat with our eyes closed. This is called a sound bath – and each pair of noises became more intense, shifted balance, moved up and down around our heads as we sat still. Then the bell rang and we swapped places with the noisemakers, and we had to lean into our intuition. 

Which transitioned into an aural exploration of the Magic Acorns space. We tapped, pushed, scraped to experiment with the world around us. On one side of the room a pyramid of chairs began to grow out of the serrated sound of their legs and for my part I folded myself into a corner with my shaking fingers rattling against the steel door: a rainlike sound. With Sophie joining me, I pulled back the door and discovered a range of plastic and cardboard tubes, through which we listened to each other. Sang and whooped into the tunnels. Eventually, and I’m not quite sure how it happened, we all formed a circle around the pyramid and began to sing in harmonies through the tubes like a ramshackle didgeridoo band.   

What I have come to understand as Toddler Futurism (Charlotte’s term) is exactly this: an interaction that is pre-verbal and totally instinctive and reactive, far beyond the depth of communication we are afforded as adults. 

As we walked the beach with our plastic tubes and our buckets, I decided I would delve into Toddler Futurism through my accompanying sketches and lyrics – to let go of the adult perfectionist, and move my pen instinctively.  

 

 

6th May

Lift

And deflate.

When it is easy, choosing, 

When it is easy, wanting,

Then we

Can begin percussion: 

Operatic

My hands begin to steady. 

The sound of rain on acrylic in Nana’s house and 

Her holding them still and 

Almost in irritation and 

Now we begin to steady ourselves. 

I’ve never done singing professionally, and what I had done may not be in time or tune, but makes me happy. I felt that same happiness in learning and rehearsing Charly’s songs. It became harder as we began to sing outside; the wind stole the sound and shuffled it with the nightingale’s own song, but it got easier every time, and the group –Mendivan, Lauren, Sophie, Charlotte, Charly and I– was beginning to harmonise more organically and grow closer together. We hummed the melodies absent-mindedly on the way back from the beach, carrying our trolleys and our thoughts about us. Through play we stuck tubes into the sand, creating an oversized zen garden that mirrored the wind turbines on the horizon, and through play we became closer to how the children would discover this space, and we knew we would be better guides for children when they came to experience it.  

 

 

8th May 

Intimacy burns, in its way.

A naked flame won’t live long on Scroby Sands. 

But Charly’s songs hold hands,

Hold hands and catch,

And catch and catch. 

Like this 

The tune carries. 

 

After our buffer day, we spent a cold and sunny Thursday practicing choreography and physical interaction. We slowed movements down, we stepped synchronised and trusted our weight to each other and echoed what we saw. We experienced the act of witnessing as a participation. This would become crucial to our performances, when the children inherited the space from us and needed their own instinctive gatherings and enactments witnessed. It meant that we could be lead by them, which creates something organic and beautiful.

 

 

9th May 

Now, friends, we begin to take shape. 

The hammers rise and fall, each in their own rhythm, 

On our periphery horizon 

And the skylarks overhead

Warn us of our surface area. 

Notice: you are trying to dig in.

Slow down. 

 

I started to feel the itch of imposter syndrome. As our choreography became steadily more structured and we started scrying a relationship between the ground and the sky, I began to feel that I was divining the space around us wrong, even placing my palms to the earth and sifting the grains of sand wrong. How adult! 

My team seemed intuitive already, already at one with the space around them and I wondered in my struggle with that why I was there amongst them – blessed as I was to have been welcomed in. I still wrestle to let that go wherever I am. But when the others picked up the white fabric and wore it like wings, I fell into it. I learnt so much from taking away my words (which as a performance poet is definitely counterintuitive) that I began to make something completely new with what was left.

We had one more day of rehearsal before we performed to the children, and what we were doing together was growing more and more exciting. 

 

 

12th May 

Shucked rehearsals.

We will begin by flocking. 

Percussive sun and tribal future. 

We have re-practised childhood; 

Tomorrow won’t be practice. 

 

 

13th May 

There are, we know, types of tired.

There is that contented, job-well-done

That biases this project. 

I’ll cling to that. 

I have been working hard. 

 

 

15th May 

Now our path

Is much more clearly marked,

And by the enthusiasm 

For logic

Of a child.

We’re cold and 

Overcast again. 

But we are ready. 

 

 

Charlotte kept saying to us, “We won’t know what we’re making until the children interact with it.” So what did we make? 

On paper, it was a performance: we scryed, danced and sang our way around a forest of white plastic tubes and a shingle path leading up to a central spinney of buckets and half-submerged bells. By performing, we demonstrated the extent and the scope of the space, and invited the children to participate in that. They didn’t always want to, and the acceptance of that is part of the witnessing too. Instead, once we dissipated into the dunes, the toddlers were invited to inherit the space and they began to make new rules, new explorations. The collection of shingle became very important, and silently the toddlers collaborated to make it happen. Or the bells needed to be delivered, one by one, to a single adult. Or the tubes needed to be collected by the armful in the right order. Or the path had to be walked on just so, its winding shape obeyed. 

What we made, in the end, was a demonstration and then offering of space. We created it, curated it, lost ourselves in it, and then left it in the toddler’s hands to navigate their own relationship between land, sea and sky in their own language.

There are elements of surrender and intuition in all creative projects, of course, but in WAVELENGTH our instinct and our surrendering became the dimensions I was proudest of. What an enormous privilege.

 

 

Taeside is known to her friends as Annie. A former secondary teacher and current performance poet, Taeside has hosted the Last Poet Standing event for the past two and a half years, when she was not indulging her unhealthy relationship with Pringles. Her written collection, Conversations with God, is available now from Lulu Press. You are not allowed to say nice things about her.

 

 

 

 

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