Sandra Cross

Limbo on Resonance 104.4 FM 28 July 2017

Listen to me talking about my journal ‘Limbo’ and recordings with William English on his programme ‘Wavelength’. The programme was broadcast on 28 July 2017 and can be heard via williamenglish.com choose Wavelength then Yearly Archives 2017 28 July Limbo.

Limbo is a journal written over a period of ten years, consisting of diary-like entries written after a weekly or bi-weekly visit from London-Leicester to visit my Mother. The 10 year journal amounts to 2,000 pages or 4 days worth of readings.

The repeated journeys, repetition of each visit, together with the movement from city to city, gave the work an ‘engine’ a dynamism. I wanted to retain this as a one-take experience. The text was written up from notes written on each visit, but there was no embellishment, changing, working on the text or what I can ‘baroquifying’. The text needed to be plain and true. The text which I subsequently recorded is read warts and all, all faults. Writing up the journal in a rush as close to the experience as possible is what I wanted. So there are grammatical errors, tense, etcetera, but these are part of that rushed lived exeperience. When I first started the journal, I wrote up the notes as quickly as I could, as I needed to remember as much as I could, what had happened, what was happening. It’s raw and hopefully true. Now, several years later, I wanted to reenergise the text which has led to me reading in environments associated with the visits ie on the train, on both St Pancras and Leicester stations and at the Curve theatre in Leicester. Taking the work back home to its roots as it were. In this way, the journal is brought back home making Limbo as much about place as time. The public environment with its ambient sounds reduces the content of the journal from being too personal and, instead of recording in a quiet, dead space, reading in a more public renvironment gives the work more life. There is something sad and strange about revisiting, by reading, events which took place some years earlier too. There’s a strange psychology to this. The repetition. The insistence on revisiting. Of reading something that happened before. Reading made me realise several things including just how skilled actors are. The voice is something which needs proper training and exercising. I discovered how exhausting it is to read and read…