POEM: Forever & Ever

November 14, 2018

Recently, our Playwave Creative Quang Mai went to see Forever & Ever by Sydney Dance Company. He wrote a poem structured on the stories that he personally got from this double bill featureing Rafael Bonachela’s award-winning Frame of Mind and a brand new work by internationally acclaimed choreographer Antony Hamilton called Forever & Ever.

Off Light 
By Quang Mai

twack! (sudden noise) light’s on
a crescendo of bodies,
light-bare
people, light-bare
people,
 
here, the music begins,
our dances begin
do – re –
mi – fa –
son –
& you pick the tune
from the enamel    again
si – la –
son – fa –
mi –  
twack! (anticipated noise) light’s off

look,
here is a moonlit box someday
bright enough to enter someday just how our
hands our two famines scraping off the light into
a coin  i tried  you tried to bargain our
bodies for a blood-warm hand
the light this threadbare moon has spat
onto wallpapers this room a sea blued       
with the heavy parts of us our shadows
cried into two wingless ghosts
exhibiting like a day’s thigh

look,
the moon an engine ignition
here is the war you’ve brought
yourself into  where body is nothing
but a price-tag hanging to be bought
legs circused into the floor
& we thought it’s our skin already 

look, 
how we dance ourselves into fireflies when
we search out to the window pane there are
only faces looking back i mourn
the way meat is part of our bodies you mourn
how i begin to spill promises into waters.
ones i’ve borrowed from my gum –

people’s steps,
start pebbling the room’s floor
(entering)  
  
listen,         
look how our thighs wobble as if they’re trying
to catch heaven’s air light is as sweet as nectar
so you can forgive that we’ve thrown each other
ten worlds away tumbling on a min(d)field
& escaped with our legs open like parachutes 
here is daylight for you people’s hands
their hands  fanged with a loaded gun to empty us
like how they empty each other our lips paged
only told when this room is damp with
two bulging hearts so tell them 

listen,   
read them our
version of grim’s & Andersen's tell them all I want
is a piece of you whittled down to confetti
nothing else nothing else in these tissues
we exist like two nude hanging mouths
 
twack! (awaking noise) light’s on
 
seaful bodies arrive, they clap! they clap!
tap the floor the walls like copper chests,
echoed ten scales of answers.

FOREVER & EVER
Sydney Dance Company
16 - 27 October