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The following is a response by Paul Stapleton to a performance lecture by Simon Bowes titled Sunday With Me.

The Event took place on the 4th of March 2007, lasting most of that Sunday, starting at Manchester Piccadilly Rail Station and continuing in and around parts of Hayfield, Derbyshire, where Simon grew up and currently resides. Along for the journey were several of Simon’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances. What follows are a few of my remembered and recorded fragments from a day that I found at times relaxing, contemplative, moving, insightful, funny and encompassed by a transient, yet heartfelt and welcoming, sense of community.

I remember parts of the journey from Manchester Piccadilly to New Mills Central. Werther’s Originals, Buber and Levinas, the first of which was a new experience for me. People sitting closer to people they already new in several clusters brought together by the desire to hear Simon speaking. Different combinations of familiarity and unfamiliarity.

Simon’s walk upstream, salmon-like, followed by his lecture on bridges, mostly spoken loudly over the elements, witnessed by us from a bridge. Man and nature, fighting currents and gravity, a spectacle… I was surprised by this. I did not think Simon would do something that so clearly set up the performer/audience distinction. With this said, it was one of my favourite moments of the day. I was engaged by this performance, and enjoyed the role of spectator.

At some point before this, the whole experience began to feel very familiar. The weather on this day, and the group’s general wetness, reminded me distinctly of a previous Sunday With Me (2nd of April 2006) that I had spent with Simon, and for part of the way with Simon’s Dad, walking from Hayfield to Edale.

Simon took us to a heavily graffitied pedestrian underpass and talked to us about public art. Part of this scripted talk included his reflections on one note, a participatory sound installation directed by Simon in various contexts. This took me back to a paper titled Dialogic Perspectives on Recent Soundings that we co-authored and delivered at the Sonic Art Network Expo 2006, which included a performed instance of one note’s basic proposition: Simon sung a note, I tried to sing the same note, then we sung “it?” together. I still think this part of the piece is interesting, often resulting in an experience where proximity and difference coexist. I also remember being glad of the shelter from the rain and wind. Simon showed us a bit of graffiti that he was involved in as a youth, and described to us graffiti now gone.

I think one of my favourite memories of the day was Simon’s lecture on the Kinder Trespass, co-delivered by nearly all who were present. By chance (we were given numbered envelops with texts to be read out in a predefined order) I got to sing the Manchester Rambler by Ewan MacColl, which I first heard sung by Alison McMorland and Geordie McIntyre in their house in Dunblane. I love this song. It was particularly interesting to see how the presence of a video camera impacted on the delivery of these texts, appearing to influence different individual’s tone of voice, reading style, posture, and focus. The camera operator herself was very much involved in this performance, at times asserting both her and the camera’s role in the delivery of the lecture. For me this brought up questions about the agenda of the day. Although what we were taking part in appeared to be for our own benefit, occurring at that specific place and time, it was also made clear that we were responsible for producing documentation for a future purpose. In this situation the option to be either a participant or audience member became somewhat fictitious, as we were all observing and being observed as well as recording and being recorded for future audiences that we may never meet, and for a specific “expert” audience involved in the assessment of Simon’s PhD research.

I enjoy walking up hills in the countryside, and for this reason and more I enjoyed the the walk up to a certain contestable number of trees. We met Simon’s Dad up on the hill and sang a song… the (overtly-masculine?) meeting of an older and wiser man up a mountain (not quite a mountain in this case) imparting oral/aural knowledge. Simon said to me the other day that Levinas once wrote that no one is more Other than your Father. This has stuck with me and impacted my memory of this point in the day. One of my last memories of my father is us walking up a hill to go fishing at a lake in the Sierra Nevadas in California. My memory of that walk is a good one.

Walking does often make one hungry. Meals have seemed to find their way into several previous instances of Simon’s Sunday With Me. The documentation of Simon’s first Sunday With Me is heavily based around a Sunday meal, or meals, if we include Lena Simic’s DVD document of her family eating together in Dubrovnik. This documentary was created as response to a meal that Simon ate with Lena and her family as a guest in their home in Liverpool. The meal on this Sunday, prepared by Simon’s mother, was festive and delicious. Even Phil, an avid cheese skeptic, enjoyed the lasagna (as evidenced by the above image). I am very interested in the links between the acquisition of food, as well as the acts of cooking and eating, with the notion of community. It was at this point in the day that our group felt most like a community, happily engaged in eating, conversation, general silliness, and reflections on the recent time spent together.

Last Updated the 22nd of March 2007

Tags for this entry: blogging, documentation, food, hayfield, home, land, manchester, meeting, memory, PaR, paul stapleton, performance lecture, photographs, remembering, research, simon bowes, sunday with me, walking

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This entry was posted by Paul Stapleton on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 1:47 am and is filed under Event . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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