contact, one which suggests radios have been abandoned or disabled and that they want privacy when they speak to each other in space. I find it interesting that helmet-to-helmet contact becomes a metaphor for deep isolation and loneliness and the need to make contact, to hear and be heard.
We experimented with different forms before creating the final piece of work to be made for, and performed, in the cathedral. I collaborated with astronaut and poet Al Worden, the first divorced Apollo astronaut to travel to the moon, to write a piece about space travel and separation. At a reading at Gainsborough’s house in Sudbury I wrote radio transmissions from the Apollo missions onto a huge paper moon and steadily erased them as the recording of my voice modified into that of an Apollo astronaut was played. Bettina and I explored the idea that in moonlight you could not perceive colour. We flooded St. Peter’s Chapel, Cambridge, with artificial moonlight. (I had met an astronomer who told me she could fill the space with real moonlight using a reversed telescope, but we decided the chance of a clear sky was too unlikely.) In response to a call-out from the Mars Foundation inviting long-term couples to travel on a one-way mission to Mars, we interviewed friends and family about whether they could travel into space together. We then staged these conversations as part of the Menagerie Hot Bed Festival.
The project which eventually took shape brought together this intimate image of a domestic conversation with the vision of blasting everyone’s voices into the heavens. We interviewed a range of couples from across Peterborough about how they pictured a journey into space together. They were people who, like us, were never likely to make the journey except in their imaginations. Their answers were beautiful and whimsical, both highly specific and enormously abstract. What did they want to take with them? Almost always sound: recordings of the people they loved talking, a musical instrument, the ordinary sounds of birds, passers-by, traffic heard from an open window, music.
These tender thoughts, the sounds of feeling, became the material basis of a libretto that echoed the format of Evensong, that gorgeous welcome to the night and all its fearful possibilities. The framework of that evening service was to explore concepts about a journey into space with all of its associated losses and possibilities. Set to music by the composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Even You Song was then performed by the cathedral choir and local schoolchildren alongside the reconstructed organ. The concert, which took place in Peterborough Cathedral in February 2017, was a performance that blasted those words and sounds in mechanical waves towards the heavens.
The Peterborough performance took place when my daughter was in the same school year that I was when I first tried to learn about physics. Unlike me she showed no signs of loathing her lessons. For her, its formulae are a welcome way of ordering and quantifying knowledge and understanding. She is endlessly curious about the way things work, and retains that knowledge and understanding. It was she who told me about the astronauts touching helmets in order to speak to each other and explained the Slinky experiment to me. For her, the image of that metal spiral, vibrating across the desk, is one of clarity, illuminated with light coming through the windows in her science block. She understands things and she feels things. She can do both. Poetry and physics are both capable of exploring how the world works. She could see clearly how these principles might launch you outside the metaphor of sound as Slinky, out of the tall windows and into the spaces beyond.
Lucy Sheerman’s first collection, Pine Island, is forthcoming from Shearsman in 2023. Even You Song was performed most recently on Midsummer Common, Cambridge on 31 July 2022 at Our Place In Space, led by Nerve Centre as part of Unboxed Festival.
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