A Huff and a Puff and All the Day Done

Of all, what I miss most is going for a walk. My gate is half a kilometer from my back door. At about that point, painkillers become obligatory.

I used to walk for kilometers every day. It was my answer for everything. Dickens was the same: got a problem - wear out shoes.

Walking is how I learned my shows. There will be memories still of a nightly figure in Belmont, trudging the footpaths and muttering in a half demented way out of rhythm with his steps. One show I learned pacing manically from one end to another of a friend’s hall as I sat her house. If ever she reads this, she will now know why the knap is so ragged down the centre of her rug.

Walking is how I invented things. Last year, I marched in wild circles all around my lawn, listening to Bolcom’s mad and magnificent setting of Songs of Innocence and Experience, solving problems to do with projects for which I had not yet found a home. When I was in Albany, I used to wander through the CBD and the Port, composing narratives and scenes, until I became so familiar a sight to the Police that they used me as a kind of unofficial neighbourhood watch. I crawled through every cranny of the grounds of Parliament House, from freeway to tennis courts, looking for locations for Fat Nancy, and all the staging for Medea was worked out thumping my way from mooring to mooring along a jetty.

Most importantly, walking was the way I kept a show alive. My work of the last few years has had no set blocking, has not, in fact, ever had a consistent venue, so it was words alone that I needed to keep intact, not moves. There is a line in Lawson to do with the tramping of feet; whether hopeless, as in his case, or sprightly, the tramping of feet is a ready rhythmic marker against which to counterpose what you are saying. I maintain that the iamb is not natural to English, and certainly not to Australian English, so the inevitable iambic thump of walking becomes a ground against which the lines stand out, and against which flaws and opportunities can be heard with great clarity.

Tramping is a time, too, to develop core muscles so as to strengthen breath control. Usually I double or triple pace while I run lines, but occasionally - especially now that I am writing a much more tightly measured line - I want to arrange the breath and the words together. To do this, in voice, while walking is a guarantee that it will be finely controlled on stage.

Performance is nothing but breath given an unusual purpose. Allen Ginsberg somewhere has an anecdote of grasping this while watching Bob Dylan from the wings; but having been given some cantorial training as a boy, he already knew it. Dylan himself writes about  himself as a breath-manager rather than a singer, and offers the suggestion that Jimi Hendrix was the only one ever to match him in this. I do not keep such exalted company, but I know what he means.

Since listening to the recordings I made in the shearing shed last week, I have become especially aware of how erratic breath really is in a spoken performance. This is unnoticeable when there is an audience present; in fact, the audience is often the reason for suspended or skipped breaths, for delays and hurries. More random disturbances, such as those caused by an insect flying into one’s face, or a lump of spittle heading down the throat, or the gust of a dry wind brushing past the playing space are still unnoticed because they are human and recognisable for what they are; they do not attract comment.

In a recording, however, the rhythm must be very different. Smoothness is all. Normal, human interruptions become magnified and alarming. An extra quarter second to catch breath redounds upon the ear more horribly than a shout. The recording very quickly sets up an expectation of the rhythm of breath - even if the rhythm itself is irregular, the length of inspiration is not -  and the ear depends upon it as a kind of narrative logic. Without it, the noises, including the voice, become not random or unexpected but chaotic and ugly.  
 
All that I know I have learned upon my own two feet, but now I must learn it on my bum. I stand to record, and can even walk and carry my gear short distances, but I cannot stride. There is an old joke about four legs, two legs, three legs. Now I have become it.  

Noël Christian
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