The Story behind it all
When my daughter was two she was extremely advanced conversationally. I am very lucky to have been around a lot in my childrens’ lives. The nature of what I do didn’t require me getting out the door by seven and mostly Pom and I managed the childminding between us. I know my children well I have always been interested in them and what they have to say.
Faith as a child was extraordinarily bright and articulate, so much so that people used to suggest we should send her to special educational institutions for extra-bright kids. By the age of two I found on our car journeys here and there, I was already having quite adult conversations with her. By three we had engaged on a series of philosophical discussions that were open and deep. But she was three. I used to do a simple magic trick to entertain her, I would make an orange or an apple disappear from behind my back, and she would delightedly and animatedly search for it. As I showed her my empty hands etc... “How did you do that” she would ask? “Magic” I’d reply. I am not able to do magic tricks. My ability to perform these seemingly impossible feats, was based on distracting her momentarily, and placing the orange in a drawer or the pocket of her hanging coat or whatever. In other words, lying to her. She began to suspect this. Maintaining the lie became, in a word, trickier. It demanded actual lying. Meanwhile, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the myriad fairy stories and games and pretences we love to play with children all continued. My wife would – really convincingly – suddenly stop in a woods on a walk and say, “did you hear that?” and so on.
One day as we drove home having our usual philosophical chats she asked “is magic real Dada?”. I looked at her face in the mirror. It was totally focussed and earnest. She really needed to know. I thought the simple answer would be “Yes! Of course it is!” and so on. But found I couldn’t betray her trust. But I also found I couldn’t answer “no”, that it felt too reductive, too negative, and too dismissive and final, it didn’t honour the earnest intelligence of her question.
So I answered like this: I said “The truth is, that the answer to that question is very complicated, it’s not a simple yes or no. Take for example you, who I love more than anyone or anything else in the world, but you are only three! Three years ago I didn’t even know that you were coming along! That the best thing that could ever happen to me, could even happen! That there was a little girl called Faith. And so I went around, living my life, doing all the things people do, not knowing that you were coming along- and all the things I thought about everything then, they were all true then, but now they are not. That to me is magic. And no one knows, not really, how or why that happens. They know the facts of it, but not really how or why. That’s magic, some people don’t think that it’s magic, but to me it is.” She listened and nodded and we discussed it more.
Is magic real Dada?
It started an internal conversation with myself. “Is magic real Dada?”. I’ve been answering that question ever since, and all my work that I've made since then on some level, or in some way, addresses it.
The spiritual discussions that form such a large part of the spoken texts of Silver Stars. The presentation of the show ‘The Last Ten Years’ in St Patrick’s Cathedral, the meditative Drones and primitive drumming in Theatre Clubs ‘History’. The use of repetitive simple sequences and ritualistic settings and processes in so many of my community based pieces, and every Album and every live performance I have done since 2002, all testify to the idea that I believe art is an act of transformation- for the audience and the artists.
An act of magic
Why do we head out on a wet Tuesday night, to a small venue, and sit listening? Why does a community hire a musician to write or help them write a song and sing it, why does theatre exist? Because, for whatever reason, something about the way of things, with us, with them, with life, with how we talk about it, or feel about it, or something; something about this, is not enough, needs to change.
There is no ‘documenting’ of ‘reality’. There is no recording of it. There is no expression of it. There is an act, an action. All actions are transformative, potent actions are potently transformative. Powerful actions powerfully, moving actions movingly, interesting actions interestingly, beautiful actions beautifully, loving actions lovingly transform.
“Everything I ever did artistically changed me, and changed everyone who became aware of it. Everything I did artistically, from 2002 on, was an attempt to do that consciously.”
All is Leaf
In ‘nature’, in the universe the same processes continue constantly: generation and decay. I believe in a conscious universe. I believe that consciousness is that constant at the heart of everything, every galaxy, every sun, every planet, every forest, is conscious, every tree, every leaf. The patterned processes of repetition – of pursuit and escape, rhythm and intelligence, of embrace and neglect, of awareness and ignorance, of change! – are visible like fractals of each other in all forms of reality, from microbes, to leaves, to spiral galaxies. Truly, as Goethe said – “All is leaf”.
Art, as I understand it, is transformative in that it attempts, on some level, to address that consciousness directly. To consciously change it. Magic is real. The concept of magic, for me, relies in the twin concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ and it relies on the understanding that the border between these two concepts is not a hard border, but in fact a porous membrane – a membrane that can be crossed. Acts that bring something, across that membrane, from the imagination to reality are acts of magic. We make it real. If it’s not real, then it’s not magic, it’s a lie, a game!