air sign, NO

‘air sign’ attempts to ‘speak the world’. It is a feral spell and work of vandalism against the moral imposition of logic, order and virtue held in the worldly crucible of the loving relation and the body as a vessel of the state. Taking place between departed individuals it examines the impossibilities and crime of loving. Exploring the line where physical violence is justified, the piece wilfully reenacts harm against real or imagined oppressors where voices are dually victim and perpetrator. It gives voice to mutual longing, objects of nature, and emotions of the unknown. Asking performers to risk betrayal, it disrupts the license of gendered power roles, the language of access and refusal, the totem of what we are able and unwilling to find permissible. Aiming to distort the victim-perpetrator complex of liberal modes of contemporary art-making, the writing speaks to obsessive, difficult desires of a moral and psychotic energy but also asks where we find hope, beauty, recovery in the mess of living.

In times of extremity and catastrophe, what are we willing to transgress or sacrifice for love, for grief, for injustice?.

NO is an experimental research project, spoken-word choir and theatre group run by artist and writer Jamie Lee. They employ polyphony, gendered speech and exhaustion to explore the personal and political implications of silence and rage, and the relationship between legality, morality and the sacred.