Ghosts of the Unfinished Monastery

Nelken Line South from Pina Bausch Foundation on Vimeo.

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FantaSEA 
~  a calling card for the ghosts of the Unfinished Monastery ~

​In December last year I moved to South Fremantle, my forever home. This place was thick with ghosts. Not apparitions, as such, but the dense psychic territory of three generations of my husband's family's intertwined lives. I felt thin, wondering how to add my own presence to those I sensed were here.  The aptly named Walter de La Mare captured this feeling in his poem "The Listeners", a childhood favourite:

 But only a host of phantom listeners 
  That dwelt in the lone house then 
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight  15
  To that voice from the world of men: 
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair

Among these ancestors are a Spanish grandmother who held dances on the back verandah; her daughter Dolores who taught music and played piano for parties; a host of vaudevillians hailing from the U.S.; and an unmet brother who left this world too soon. 

And most of all there was the oceanic child who grew to be the man who created a magnum opus in The Unfinished Monastery. I have the extraordinary privilege of living in his three-dimensional work of art.

I am profoundly grateful. And in response I decided that these ghosts were now my ghosts, and I liked the cut of their jib. What better way to introduce myself than a  theatrical dance up the Colonnade?

                                                                                              Hello. I am here. And I'm ready to play . . . 

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