FIN.AGAIN

	French pages Présentation Solo Musics Projects Music - Danse Painting-Music Contact	FIN.AGAIN In a theater in Lyon ....................................... At the Exquisses Festival (Drôme) A performance inspired by the agitated corpse of Jame Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the deviant eye of his daughter Lucia James Joyce, giant of modern literature, continually on the verge of becoming blind, named his only daughter Lucia. She was his mirrorminded, cross-eyed saint of vision. Through his thick “fathom glasses” he watched her dance, setting fires left and right, fueling the creation of Finnegans Wake, burning her own tethers to reality. “And weary I go back to you my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the nearsight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush…” The legend behind *FIN.AGAIN* In 1929, her performance was singled out by a Paris critic as “subtle and barbaric”; James Joyce’s daughter Lucia was beginning her career as a modern dancer, at the very birth of this new art form. However, the vicissitudes of her father’s itinerant creative life and his physical ailments forced the family to move away from Paris at a crucial moment for Lucia. Here perhaps began a frustration which drove her towards profound emotional instability. Her crisis worsened after a string of failed love-affairs with her father’s assistant, Samuel Beckett, and her drawing teacher, Alexander Calder, among others. Put into disgrace by family friends concerned to protect the career of James Joyce, she was placed in an asylum in Ivry, just outside of Paris. At twenty-eight years of age, she was given the little understood diagnosis of schizophrenia and would be institutionalized for the following forty-seven years, until her death in 1982. Lucia remained very dear to her father and her unique personality manifests itself in many of the pages of Joyce’s masterpieces of modern literature. Some scholars have argued that her language games and creatively expressive behavior were the living poetry which inspires much of Finnegans Wake. *FIN.AGAIN* on stage FIN.AGAIN physicalizes through the body, sound, and voice the themes prevalent in Joyce's text Finnegans Wake, and in the lives of James and Lucia Joyce. Finnegans Wake is a text of 600 pages, a collision of more than 40 languages, plunging into a single night in the life of one man already dead or merely sleeping-- an nearly absent hero? or a worm-filled mound of earth? On stage the male and female bodies drown in nocturnal pools of the unconscious. Time elongates, stretched to its limits, arrested. And we dream, tossed from one stream of thought to another, soaked through by a river of unknown languages. We rise, gasping, to the mirrory surface, only to sink even deeper into the waters of sleep. Reflections, play of shadow and light, tenderness and taboo between father poet and daughter muse. Blindness, desire, a contracting black sun, or the rapidly dilating pupil. Sensitive ears of the sleepwalker become “the eyes of obscurity” and the nose a compass seeking the beloved. Through dancer and musician on stage, we discover James and Lucia: Lucia, the dancer who is “passing out”…who touches her end…the end which is only a beginning. FIN.AGAIN! Back

FIN.AGAIN

In a theater in Lyon ....................................... At the Exquisses Festival (Drôme)

A performance inspired by the agitated corpse of Jame Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the deviant eye of his daughter Lucia

James Joyce, giant of modern literature, continually on the verge of becoming blind, named his only daughter Lucia. She was his mirrorminded, cross-eyed saint of vision. Through his thick “fathom glasses” he watched her dance, setting fires left and right, fueling the creation of Finnegans Wake, burning her own tethers to reality.

“And weary I go back to you my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the nearsight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush…”

The legend behind FIN.AGAIN

In 1929, her performance was singled out by a Paris critic as “subtle and barbaric”; James Joyce’s daughter Lucia was beginning her career as a modern dancer, at the very birth of this new art form. However, the vicissitudes of her father’s itinerant creative life and his physical ailments forced the family to move away from Paris at a crucial moment for Lucia. Here perhaps began a frustration which drove her towards profound emotional instability. Her crisis worsened after a string of failed love-affairs with her father’s assistant, Samuel Beckett, and her drawing teacher, Alexander Calder, among others. Put into disgrace by family friends concerned to protect the career of James Joyce, she was placed in an asylum in Ivry, just outside of Paris. At twenty-eight years of age, she was given the little understood diagnosis of schizophrenia and would be institutionalized for the following forty-seven years, until her death in 1982. Lucia remained very dear to her father and her unique personality manifests itself in many of the pages of Joyce’s masterpieces of modern literature. Some scholars have argued that her language games and creatively expressive behavior were the living poetry which inspires much of Finnegans Wake.

FIN.AGAIN on stage

FIN.AGAIN physicalizes through the body, sound, and voice the themes prevalent in Joyce's text Finnegans Wake, and in the lives of James and Lucia Joyce. Finnegans Wake is a text of 600 pages, a collision of more than 40 languages, plunging into a single night in the life of one man already dead or merely sleeping-- an nearly absent hero? or a worm-filled mound of earth? On stage the male and female bodies drown in nocturnal pools of the unconscious. Time elongates, stretched to its limits, arrested. And we dream, tossed from one stream of thought to another, soaked through by a river of unknown languages. We rise, gasping, to the mirrory surface, only to sink even deeper into the waters of sleep. Reflections, play of shadow and light, tenderness and taboo between father poet and daughter muse. Blindness, desire, a contracting black sun, or the rapidly dilating pupil. Sensitive ears of the sleepwalker become “the eyes of obscurity” and the nose a compass seeking the beloved. Through dancer and musician on stage, we discover James and Lucia: Lucia, the dancer who is “passing out”…who touches her end…the end which is only a beginning. FIN.AGAIN!

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