Pieces for Sonia
Confession
I fall in love with my collaborators. I’m in awe of the source of their art. Sonia is easy to love. She’s inimitable, an unpredictable force in improvisation. Her use of language is textural; you can file your nails on it. I don’t really know what Sonia thinks of me. It doesn’t really matter. We share practice. I love her art.
Scene: The Last Beer in the World
The once resplendent ballroom above Flinders Street station, after the apocalypse. There is a shattered chandelier on the floor. There are weeds growing through the windows. There are no sounds of life from outside. In one corner, salvaged: a bed, a TV, a clothes rack, an esky. Sonia sits on a chair at a linoleum table drinking a beer. ‘This is the last one there is,’ she says to the audience.
Listening
Open up. Let go of professional, strategic ideas of right and wrong, beauty and fear. Listen with an ear attuned to what is speaking. Listen as though the world is listening. Listen like a Zen master, like a diary, like a friend, like an artist. Listen for associations, word play, listen for the joke. Always listen for the joke. Listen without effort, listen with love. Listen as only you can, with your own special accumulation of sensitivities. Listen with the pleasure your own ear finds as the words tumble, jumble, and digress.
Sonia: One
‘Sonia’ is a Russian name meaning ‘wisdom.’ Sonia can talk to anyone. Her work as an artist is an assault to bourgeois sentiment in art.
Scene: The Meet Up
A laneway behind a popular restaurant strip. Sonia stands smoking next to the bins. A man trails aimlessly up the street. She offers him a smoke. They smoke together.
Watching
My gaze radiates from the time and space of my body, locating what it doesn’t know, what is strange or novel. I watch as Sonia conjures competing representations of ability and fragility. I like to look at this. She offers mementos from her time and space: I notice her posture, movement, expression, her gaze returning or ignoring mine. I become part of her experience when I look at her. Her time and space, becomes part of my time and space.
Sonia: Two
Sonia doesn’t wait for approval. She takes pride in living-on-the-edge, but perhaps it causes some suffering also. From the margins, she observes. Sonia doesn’t observe wilfully, she does it intuitively. Her gaze observes brutality, mischievousness, the unacceptable in people and places – unflinchingly. What she observes, impresses upon her, and she revives this in the studio.
Scene: The Break Up
Faded aqua weatherboard Californian bungalow. Outer suburbs Melbourne. Afternoon. Furniture is being chopped up offstage and fed to a crackling fire. Smoke from this fire blows onstage. We can hear Sonia cursing.
Transcribing
Sonia carves words in time. I listen. She has a regional Australian vernacular. I’m on the side (trans – the other side); I’m the mechanist, the etcher, the stonemason. I write them down for her. She is writing her own myths of Australianness. Of honesty and loyalty. Of bootleg.
Scene: Dying wish
A suburban garage. The radio is playing Gold 104.3 FM. There is a bag of marshmallows on an old car bonnet: the ants are making a feast of them. The owner of the house and the car, a man, has tormented some children. Sonia is about to behead him with a blunt handsaw. He is pleading for his life. He begs. She asks him for his last request. He would like a marshmallow. She stuffs all the marshmallows, with the incumbent ants, and the packet, in his mouth. He chokes.
Coffee with Sonia
Make a time. Hope for the best. Meet her with radical openness, meet her with a sense of encounter, a sense of drama, a sense of the unknown. Be aware that you may not survive the encounter.