We are not sure we can exactly explain the poem, The Blue Jar by Scottish poet Norman MacCaig. There is a feeling of MacCaig dwelling on the nature of reality and of fiction, almost as if one allows for fiction then reality can be born through that fiction by invention. It is a beautifully provocative poem. There is a blurring of the lines between what is considered reality and what is not. We looked at MacCaig’s poems for months but kept returning to The Blue Jar. We knew we would develop a performance during the Nexus Symposium in Lybster, Scotland but we did not know what we would do. We had to begin somewhere so we decided to start with a Scottish poet, search for a poem and develop the idea from there. We wanted to acknowledge the unique location of far north-east Scotland where rugged landscape meets the North Sea and the weather is ever changing. We wanted our performative work to speak to the spirit of the people who live in this harsh, yet remarkable, even magical area of the world.
(The Blue Jar Performance, Inguna Audere, Ian Giles, Jeff Zimmer, Silvia Aditi Levenson, Michael Bullen, Michael Rogers)
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