by Jamie Lee

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 two departed individuals it examines the locus of 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. Where do we find beauty, safety and recovery? 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. airsign was first performed at blurt, an evening of sonic experiments in text produced by TACO! with the following cast: bella aleksandrova, bhāvinī j, dan rhys wakefield, sidney jones, sydney radclyffe; co-directed with svetlana rakočević. Publication design by hal hockney. Print by dan rhys wakefield.