WORDS
Over the last ten years James has focused on writing and performance. Below are script extracts from his most recent productions.
HOMER PREPARES
I sang last year in Corinth. There they mixed wine in a bowl greater than any I have seen, painted with endless patterns, whorls and interlocking mazes, rounding back on one another, then springing forward once again, retracting and unleashing until they disappeared around the circumference of the vase.
And I thought, this is my song, the shape that I will sing, whorls circling back upon themselves, unleashing new bursts of energy, creating new mazes in which my characters will be caught up.
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE GODS
And what if we, like the people of the Ukraine, are heading towards the end of our species, as final as that of any extinct race before us? There may be no villages left to till the beautiful earth we have been given. And there may not be another god by whom you can be replaced. Will you die with us (or before us, leaving us to die) our monuments of belief still standing, like the great statues of Easter Island, staring out to the sea, from which no help comes, their backs turned on a ruined earth?
VLAD AND ME
I was sitting in a laneway in the throbbing heart of Melbourne, drinking my third coffee when I knew I should have stopped at two, combing the pages of The Guardian and The New York Times for the ultimate proof that Donald Trump was about to get his. Suddenly I felt a little strange. At first I thought it was the coffee but it was only later I realised it was something else; perhaps it was my soul. Perhaps she was starting to feel cooped up, a little restless and asking herself whether there was not a better way for her to use this, her brief time on this earth. Around her was this rich metropolis of sights and festivals, gastronomic triumphs and graffiti that the whole world comes to marvel at, so much better than many other places in which she had been imprisoned on her long and varied journey through eternity. There was clearly more to discover. So … she wandered off, turned a corner and drifted down an alley and then another corner and another alley until, suddenly, dazzled by the sights and sounds, enchanted by the smells, she found herself unable to distinguish one coffee shop from another, a bistrot from its fellows and realised that she had no idea how to find her way back to me.