Monday, February 15, 2016

poem || Lawrence Upton

MIME #12
Mimes
Polyvocal – see performance note
[Mime a]
overwhelming strength of aspiration
apocalyptic, cannibalistic,
sequence, rapidly disintegrating, awareness

[Mime b]
spontaneity stuck in the past
explorations of counterpoint without compassion

[Mime c]
a sunlit garden in a natural world;
characterised shrewdly and delivered;
receiving widespread systematised bombardment;
apparent emissions, admissions;
disease detected;
level of alarm crushing;
war against the lost and stolen,
outlining contours in surrounding;
securing mood music and general application

[Mime d]
response to surveillance allowing knowledge
to spread defects moving towards benefit
struck by an immoral state

[Mime e]
sun breaks through after a wintry night:
a dull morning with brisk wind;
underlying stone an impression of brightness

Performance note
The subtitles - “Mime a, b, c, c, e” are reference labels and are not uttered; there should just be a long pause between each piece, the five read as one piece.  
The poem is polyvocal, but freely: there are no written parts. It is suggested that there is a 'primary' performer, a leader who starts each mime with other contributors following on, preferably with the primary performer at higher volume than the others. The primary performer will read all the text [but not the labels!].
There may be a different primary performer for each of the five mimes.
The emboldened text might be left for the primary performer(s) alone or for them to complete before contributors follow, i.e. the contributors would read after a delay the length of which is the time it takes the primary performer to read their text. NB Text has been emboldened just for this purpose and that formatting has no other significance if it is not followed in this way.
Contributors may select some or all of the text to read – different contributors may select different text to the others and spread out physically in whatever space is available.

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