A Letter Last: When I'm calling you-ou-ou-ooooooooooo

Abstract

This performance-writing essay borrows the Indian love song titled “When I’m Calling You” to emphasise the great distances that sound can travel when performed. The essay revisits the 2021 performance HARK, delivered in Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa when, over seven summer nights, a letter written to my great-grandmother Stança was read aloud at one of seven houses I have lived in since immigrating to this country. The attending public were part of a unique collision of weather, place, urban ambiance, my posture, gestures, and vocal elocution in relation to intimate correspondence. As sonic migrations across time and space, HARK made public a personal, political, and oral imaginary, a desperate plea to belong to place, here and there, and to people living, and not. This last letter serves to punctuate the event three years later with critical reflection on its autotheoretical personal-as-political dimensions, to extend the performative intimacy of a letter, and to speculate on its potential as a geo-sonic spatial volume.