As the bells begin, the first performer enters quadrant no. In her instructions for the performance, Fielden notes that ‘The sound is loud and fills the space. Simultaneously, Fielden and Thomson move into quadrants on the floor that correspond with the poem’s four parts, unconsciously swaying their bodies with the bells overhead and weaving around each other like unfamiliar clockwork. One performer begins the first stanza as soon as their counterpart begins the second so that, as the stanzas lengthen, their timing seems to stretch and snap back together. This has been transformed in Fielden’s performance by two voices in canon, where the repetitions and rhymes of the poem form tumbling sound passages that seem to pursue each other across space and time. When read by one voice, Poe’s poem traces the stages of an individual life, from tinkling youth to clamorous death. They fold together spoken word, the “tintinnabulation that so musically wells”, and slow movements around a quad marked out on the floor. “For her newest work ‘The Bells’, Fielden and Thomson read the poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe aloud and in chorus with neighbouring church bells.
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