Still writing 7th street

We Rembered the Plenotic today MAY 2020

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The Melville Plenoptic 

Note for the producer 

What follows is a "choreo-poem" - meaning a poem written for performance and theatrical movement dis/play. The poem is made of words, obviously, but more seminally, there's notation of the beat of the thoughts behind them intended to be closely woven to an idea of dance expression and body movement. 

The choreo-poem is a form I learnt about from work written for theatre by Ntozakhe Shange, specifically For Colored Girls and Spell # %. I was later to develop my own ideas around this form as I observed and spent time with a performance poet, Lamakhosi Kunene, in Durban, Los Angeles and New York. 

I imagine a moment when this poem will spark and glow, and on that day there are visions that are going to come alive. Even though this is a confusing world, it carries the latent power of word, sound, image, body action, senses and new imagination all together in one. 

The Melville Plenoptic is in summary a chronicle of a failed revolu tionary plan and a diary of drunken nerves. 

Setting 

In this poem/play, our setting or geographical location of story alters at a whim, between an internet café in Berlin, Germany and a Parisian type of café in the Johannesburg suburb of Melville - in particular, its Seventh Street. 

It is the year 2002. The café is a restaurant, bar, and lounge-type of place. It also has a place where patrons can connect and surf the Net. A line of bar stools with five computer monitors each with an image. 

In the piece THE MAIN REMEMBERER is writing an e-mail, from Berlin. THE REVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS are his/her interlocu tors, and he addresses them, presuming they still exist in Seventh Street in Melville, a street they once experienced as a blurry mission of changing. Into what exactly, it shall remain unknown. 

Our characters also change function, save for one constant habit: that each time THE REVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS enter or exit 

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the stage, they carry their café table and whatever attendant props along with them. 

every February, every valentine's day, but I do not even mind 

Cast 

• THE MAIN REMEMBERER: Interchangeable as a dancer, lead actor, and narrator. He wears blue Levi's 501 jeans and a pair of cowboy boots. 

in a clocking, flowing river of water crossing berlin, i looked upon a symbol of a capital's blue windows offer light to an organ in a church that has a hole to remember a day a bomb broke everything 

• THE REVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS: A band of six black youth. 

They are gifted dancers. They also each wear a pair of black Levi's 501 jeans, Converse All Star sneakers and always appear bare-chested. They wear different colour's All Star sneakers - white, red, yellow, brown, blue and orange. 

to this entrancing city, light turns to night my eyes cannot close on the straight line of streetlights on the traumatized story on the side of the airway strip where the airplane skid, as it landed me on the blocks and blocks of a town heating itself against the snow... 

THE WAITER 

• A BEVY OF GIRLS: They are so pretty, very sultry, free-spirited and multi-racial. 

(MAIN REMEMBERER exits. We hear his voice now, along with the words scrolling on the back screen at this point. The words are interspaced with contemporary images of Berlin - the airport he is talking about, the church with a hole from WW2, east Berlin, Rastafarians, Skinheads etc...) 

* 

**** 

i arrived here, and the next day my eyes got stuck, to a city and saw a witch 

(As the audience enters the theatre, an image of the director's choice is projected onto the back screen. The song is Zim Ngqawana's "It's About Love". 

moved. The rest of the stage is dark. We hear the rattle of stage props being 

Lights. 

i landed and felt unrest brew till my inner chambers were fullfull of red balloonsfull of fluff skating a nefarious number till i could not count this long number, it spun in the air and many teddy bears were falling in, on the snow, red teddy bears nopopis, are these the falling wings of a berlin sky? 

THE MAIN REMEMBERER enters, as lights continue to come up, to reveal a booth with computer desktops. It is an internet café in Berlin. He types, in his clumsy way. He is writing an e-mail...) 

i did not, i could not resist or close these eyes it's valentine's day as tempting as miracle as inscription in the shape of a heart shape like clouds thrown high, it's valentine's day today my fluffy chocolate heart 

everywhere people had hurried feet, adorned in red coats. was this the bonfire in the middle of berlin? 

was this one city where your head can grow in many directions? 

my friends, far away it is the same shape of a heart that drives figures for some merchant, somewhere 

the sun has just sunk and my eyesight has begun to drone i must stop here, till the next time we speak again... 

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this was not always the case 

(MAIN REMEMBERER moves to the edges of the stage. THE REVO LUTIONARY APPARATUS enter in their customary fashion. They dance. The action has moved to Melville. 

and as the city was breaking out into shingles, and as the boom gates swung low and swung with fear's flow 

THE REVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS (White All Stars) comes to the front, addressing the audience.) 

our story takes place entirely in the seventh street 

when the clock bangs across the centre of this city, strikes to say it has seen so many people who are still dragging heavy chains that were being dragged by the laden, as the world entered its nine teenth century, 

(The remaining REVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS enter carrying a ta ble and chairs. They sit and engage in loud, animated conversation. WAITER keeps coming and going. This goes on until the lights fade 

(On-screen images show that Johannesburg, like all cities, was created on the back of people's pain.)