Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

At the end of which I took over the slide projector; and Jennifer donned a white mask, which
stared softly glaring atop her black clothing, and moved to the texts, which are striking thick
vertical rather than horizontal black streaks and written text fragments struck in among the
streaks, which I have seen but do not have a name for—and to Bob’s sound realisation of the texts
and her movement which he performed with a various and disparate series of whistles, close up to
the projection cloth, her hands fluttering through the black and white (the lights were right down
so nothing much could be seen away from the images) to birdlike—if you’re not a bird—sounds;
and she disappeared behind the screen and came back draped in and covered by a white cloth so
that she became a part of the fluttering projection screen as Bob’s sounding became less and less
apparently representational, more and more as fragmentary and staccato as his texts... and moving
the cloth away from herself and back she, or the space she created in the whitenesses by doing so,
reappeared. She’s a great mover. I wish I could do it. See me on my zimmer frame in my late
seventies.
So that’s it. I may not have gained any converts with such a description, perhaps confirmed a few
doubts; but for the enthusiasts I think a bit of new ground was broken.
For those who might be persuaded to come to the workshop—next one Saturday 3.30 p m Victoria
pub at Mornington Crescent—most of the basics were worked out at the last workshop,
particularly the idea of having the score/text projected... not a new idea for any of us but
something we hadn’t done for a while. We had quite a long discussion about the effect of how one
“held” the text—in your hand as Bob likes, on the floor as I like or on a music stand—upon the
manner of interpretation. The idea of moving in the image developed, some of you will remember,
at our brief interventions in cris cheek’s contribution to the Third Sub Voicive Colloquium last
January. Enough already. Time to top up the compost heap.