Stills for A Game

Stills for A Game

Stills for A Game is part of Nicole Zaazoura’s ongoing research on everyday choreographies, movements, gestures, performative texts, and encounters. This week we feature two of her texts, ‘Athens-Movement Notes’ and the poem ‘Meet Me Here’, submitted to our open call series on artists’ writing, Carta Bianca. 

Nicole Zaazoura, ‘I ask you this…’, Performance piece made for Towner Gallery, Eastbourne

Athens – movement notes  3/2/20

I leave (you) in the hotel room and descend through two floors of alternating light, to the street level. I begin to walk, connecting to ‘the flaneuse’ who I think must move slowly through the city, aimless, and travelling at a certain speed.

Testing movement I find I walk too quickly, so what does this make me? It is like I am continually on the run…
My speed seems more like the slight of hand in a magic trick. I slip through spaces. I rarely stop. I don’t want to be stopped. A contrast to the ritualistic slow movement of the performance work. A different conversation.

More like a bee gathering nectar, I hover and dart. Nourishment comes later. There is an acuteness to my movement. my body taking signals from the surrounding momentum….listening  to the city, its music, cracks, its sounds as scent.  It’s alchemic nature.

Boundaries blur, gates and fences open and close. Hidden buildings, monumental stages and museum pathways beckon me …And in one of these, an object stops me in my tracks. A first century glass perfume stirrer, suspended within  a glass case in the museum of Cycladic art.

That it is glass takes me back. Its beauty and intimacy as a single object is arresting, but its function beguiles me too.  The delicate act it may call upon requires movements of  dipping, testing, stirring. Responsive and exploratory.  Something of this echoes in my processes too, questioning in recent days the sometime forensic aspects of performative processes…a perfume stirred.

I return outside. My walk is slower now.  On a wide avenue, on an  island between lanes of the  traffic of Athens, I stop and stand still for five minutes. I listen, I taste the air, pollutants and all. I close my eyes.

This time I feel everything else move around me. Maybe I am a perfume stirrer…

Meet Me Here

In this white field
listen…
An outstretched hand.
Isolation.
taught fingers
an elongated arm
our rolling distance
this is how we talk
mutating, twisting
intimate hybrid.
Slowly slowly
did I mention
that I am sitting across
from nothing?
I spell and dispel.
my/our body
my/our question
my/our spring loaded tongue
my/our lost gesture
my/our resistance
my/our yielding
my/our pressed body
I cup my ear with my hand
fingers as chords
to listen again
in a first time space
with and without you
and I may whisper all of this to you
from somewhere

About the Artist

Nicole Zaaroura creates site responsive ‘choreographies’ using movement, performance, texts and encounter to explore the physical, emotional and peripheral spaces that we inhabit and resist. Through an embodied practice, she works within a sensorial approach to body, space and time, investigating, and creating ephemeral, temporal and documented works through performance, video, photography and installation.  She is an artist born in London, and based in the UK, and has a BA Fine Art from Central St Martins, and an MA Fine Art from the University of Northumbria.