Lara and Joyce

A day begun with Brian Lara at the UWS Cricket Community Day ends with James Joyce at Sydney Theatre Company's Riverrun performance.

Seeing Lara bat once again after years brought back great memories of boyhood and all the sleepless nights of watching the master play those flashing drives and cuts and pulls deep into the west indian shadow that would throng the fences in the stadiums without floodlights. Snaps to follow soon...

Olwen Fouéré's solo invocation of the river's voice in JJ's Finnegans Wake was rigorous and corporeal. She danced, she sang, she stripped, she breathed and whistled into the microphone and she menaced us with her silent standing presence on the playing area from the moment we entered the auditorium. She made us feel the malleable materiality of the great text as it broke the waves in her body. Her exhilarating corporeal voice melted into the 'foriver' of time as she etched a writing in the sand with her swift steps. If the river running through the novel is the bloodstream of our body, among other things, Olwen's reiterative use of breath to externalize that stream as a pausing motion on the water made me think that breath is a translation of blood. It transfers the river from the inside to the outside, from water to air and remains in this, the fundamental ontological unit, inside out in relation to the voice.