by Alice Gale-Feeny
^
Books are shelters, theatres, tents, dens, bobs, wigs, places of worship, and model towns. They are the bed and the body.
Voices are singing from the leaves of the pages, leaking out of the zipper openings, peeking out from behind long fringes, trying on new colourful gay chants for size, exclaiming at the stained glass windows and rallying the public around a central purpose.
Imagine such shelters are illuminated by camping lamps. The kind left behind by all those who forgot them at music festivals. Lighting a landscape with a low centre of gravity.
Oh! to be enveloped by the weight of pages. To be weighed in pages. To internally read, in warm light.
There is a strong indication that this is a future scene where we read ourselves and shelter in whatever we can find. What we find is full of detail. A layered world that refuses to be one thing. The weight of the volume of the voices speaks about the desire to be represented. And to be represented again.
Triangular voids welcome extravagant musicals, crevices to cup an elbow or two, or meeting places for those in conflict who need to get together, and hash out ideas. At night, when the theatres close, and the conflicts soften or explode onto the street, two books scissor one another. A daily ritual.
Antidote to the incoming darkness. Maquettes of promise!
Mutable shelters. Nooks.
Reading with a palm, foot and tongue. Clasping our backs, the invitation is there to get to know how our spine really moves.
In the crevices of the corners of the book theatres, performers wedge themselves alongside audiences, feeling their front back and sides. A 360 degree kind-of-attention. Fourth walls are now within and we are breaking them down. Distancing. Breaking them down. An intimate holding. A full body press. Weight.
^
Material list:
I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom by Danielle Goldman (2010)
Body Space Image: Notes Towards Improvisation and Performance by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay (1990)
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier (2021)
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (2021)
Outrageous!: The Story of Section 28 and Britain’s Battle for LGBT Education by Paul Baker (2022)
DIRt Workroom (from the project DIRt: Dance In Regional disaster zones) by Rosalind Crisp (2025)
An Eros Encyclopedia by Rachel James (2022)
Aleksandra Kasuba: Shelters for the Senses by Anne Barlow (2026)
Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time by Samantha Friedman (2023)
^
Alice Gale-Feeny is an artist who engages with contemporary art, experimental theatre, dance, live art and archival spaces. She has presented work nationally and internationally. Her performances, sculptures and drawings are the result of accumulated research, non-linear experiences and a certain level of fandom. Improvised movement scores and solo monologues are central to the work. She grapples with LGBTQIA+ histories, a desire to be around books, and for humour and sincerity to co-exist. www.alicegale-feeny.com
1 Comment