Reviews for Five Rooms

propeller arts collective are pleased to announce the publication of their first book, Five Rooms: a collaborative writing project.

Five Rooms is published by ACTS OF LANGUAGE.

Five Rooms costs £10.00 and is available to purchase at http://www.actsoflanguage.com/?cat=1

Reviews for Five Rooms.

Dr Cathy Turner, Reader in Performing Arts, Convenor Centre for Research into Expanded Dramaturgies, University of Winchester, Wrights and Sites.

A tree falls into writing. Or does writing uproot the tree? The collision of words and things reverberates through this book. Copper - wood - bone - flesh - stone are scattered across the geography of the page, frequently transmuting into one another: stone breathes, the body petrifies, copper sings. The book suggests and enacts not only our dispersal into the life of objects and materials, but also the other in whom we touch coherence through the exchange of voices, writing and naming - the summoned 'Andrew' falls from the tree, born out of leaves, copper, flesh, bone and arriving on the ground like a ripe fruit.

Dr.Wallace Heim, Independent Curator, Academic and Writer on performance and ecology.

I’ve loved reading this, thankyou.

The intimacy of the intertwining of flesh and world moves outward, in propeller’s hands, to mingle gravity, time and metal with the same proportion as the co-evolution of skin and stone. There are redemptions and instructions, but also cleaves and trip wires in these narratives. Can propeller be trusted? Yes, in their fidelity to care, for the falling, for those that land, for liberty and Frank Sinatra.

Dr. Tracey Warr, Lecturer, Art History & Theory, Oxford Brookes University.

Five Rooms addresses the mystery of matter through diverse meditations on metal, wood, stone and flesh. It engages with the making and unmaking of the world by human and other hands. It is an almost story of birth and death where the fragments and threads generated by the five writers perpetually teeter on the edge of connection. Its locations range across Cuba, the US and Dorset. Its unlikely cast of characters include Apollo, the Statue of Liberty, a copper-obsessed doctor, a Cuban spy, a gardener, a poet turned human rights activist and a grandmother obsessed with Concorde. In style it ranges through the registers of narrative, memoir, list, song lyric and instruction manual. Bernini’s marble sculpture of Daphne pursued by Apollo and transmogrifying into a laurel tree, is in its turn transformed into the shape of a constellation of stars, a diagram of finding ammonites on a beach, or a plan of a room in an old people’s home. In a thrilling display of associative glee the text enacts its own themes of transmutation and metamorphosis.


David Williams, Professor of Theatre, Dartington College of Arts.

These collaboratively authored texts constitute a book of motion: of fallings and flyings and journeys of many kinds. Materials here are in perpetual flux. Matter circulates at differing speeds and transforms, as do spaces, times, images, narratives, selves. Identities and their constituent elements migrate in a dynamic unfolding/infolding of translations of things, people, stories. The authors trace the mortality of forms, and the trajectories and contours of time’s metamorphoses and of matter’s becomings: its dynamic ‘fidelities’ and ‘infidelities’.

For everything here is on the move, in transit: information (genetic, viral, sonic, electronic, visual, semiotic, ideological), people young and old, past and present, and events. Here events are protean in their meanings, and promiscuous in their proliferative ripples and dispersed echoes. A meteorite falls, and elsew/here so does a leaf, a seal in snow, light, rain, ‘Andrew’. Moments of shock, tiny or momentous, recur - eruptive occurrences when the doors of perception are cleansed, or at least re-written, by a sudden transformative ‘appearance’, a visitation, as untimely and unforeseen as that of an angel. A catalogue of epiphanies and revelations in the everyday, some of them read as portents, symptoms, coded messages. Others trigger memory or breed confusion in this exquisite cartography of a politics of wonder, belonging, displacement and connectivity. At such moments – carefully distilled invitations to attend, imagine and connect - an infinite web of perceptions and circuits are activated, and the shape of time, memory, history and geography morphs, stretches, tears, and pulses.

This is also a book of passages, mapping a weave of interconnecting territories and the mysterious wormholes that both link and separate them. Here the world is re-membered as ‘something slippery, elusive, open’. Trace elements of lives – extinguished, sputtering or aglow - are continuously unmade, re-routed and refashioned. Within these pages coexist gods and dogs, dream and fear, love and loss, the exhaustion and hope of flesh and stone. And as readers, we are invited to inhabit the spaces between fragility and persistence, chance and fate, regimes of order and the apparent formlessness of a deeper grammar of complexity.