Wednesday, 6 July 2011

Dollsing 1

Outside in West Square, children from Charlotte Sharman sing in unison:

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream..
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream..

 Harmony suggests this crazy sense that we're more alike than we think. At the same time, the lyric (la vida es sueno) pushes against the facticity of our physical existence. This charming innocence seems particularly fitting for the young, and a sense of the idyllic beyond the real. The song takes me back to the ebb and flux of the Isle of Wight.

The Millers' house on the Isle of Wight has many dolls. They are old dolls, possibly older than us (this year's Isle of Wight group). This year, their freakish dollness, both childlike and plastic, was exploited to great effect. Dolls were planted with aplomb all over the house to shock and scare in unusual places - not just hidden eerily in beds, but towel clothed in sinks, with razor blades, or lodged above doors so as to fall on a victim. The name Dollsing was born.

Dolls had an added significance for Emily, as she was meant to be working on her dissertation on dolls and Dickens when she met me three weeks ago. She was interested in dolls as human reproductions, and as a means for Dickens characters to achieve control over their heavily industrialised, patriarchal environment.

In the Shearwater house, dolls were fun, prankish objects. They suggested a previous era, and thus offered a slight sense of release from our own. Far removed from cria cuervos. Not so far from 'row, row, row your boat...'

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