Author's note: Excerpt from Heart’s Tongue performed at Castlemaine State Festival 2015 Dja Dja Wurrung Country–Castlemaine. With gratitude to, and respect for, the Dja Dja Wurrung, Waywurru and Barkindji peoples
We made this piece of work because we wanted to perform a possible process of seeking ways of being that show the beauty of encountering an-other with the many complexities that involves. For us, it is a poetics of being, not as disembodied philosophy but rooted in the earth, water, bodies, particular histories, the sensual and language. We wanted to perform possibilities of relationship that work to find places that complicate and shift fixed and binary thinking. Our writing together and subsequent performance was an attempt to move toward a language that grows from shared experiences and deeply held understandings of, and desires for, the world—including the sovereignty of an-other. We wanted to perform both the experiences of coming to ends that trail off into unshareable places; knowledges and experiences that are irrecoverably different as well as experiences of deep meeting. And importantly we wanted to reinvest the word and concept of “boat” with a shared commitment to love. As a starting point we worked from Sohrab Sepehri’s poem, “The Address.”
