As Riches walks backwards in measured steps, mapping a large mirrored rectangular surface in the centre of the space, there is a sense that she is in fact a tendril transmitting real-time messages through the soil. As the audience takes their seats along two opposing sides of the rectangle, Riches continues to walk backwards, in considered meditation. Before she passes along one of the sides, flanked by seating, people who previously had their legs crossed, and a foot extended near to the performance area, alter their positions to give her space to continue her transmission. The collective gentle encroachment of the audience, one by one, we tuck our feet in, and Riches continues along her path. In a costume designed by Sandra Riches, the texture of an iridescent pearl, she glides past in socked feet, and it occurs to me that perhaps she is not walking backwards at all. If a performing body can become a manifestation of a mycorrhizal network, who is to say that Riches is walking backwards at all?

At the corner of the mirrored surface, Riches enters on the diagonal line, her form mirrored by the surface, just as the audience in the row of seats opposite are also something of a mirror, gleaned through the haze. An ambiguous mirroring that abstracts the familiar with its rippled pattern, Riches reflected twin wrinkles and grows her form. “Never are” is hypnotic in the details that are layered slowly, step by step, in the process of becoming “a compost of itself as components break down, decay, and nourish.”[1] Movements are added to the sequence, from resting on all fours, before swooshing her shins, pressed together at the knees, out to the side. Riches rolls over and rests on her side, her head propped up with her arm making the shape of a triangle. She looks at the audience, and she repeats the sequence. She grows the sequence, adding to the lexicon she is drawing in shapes for the audience to decipher. Movements are “re-used, re-affirmed, and re-imagined.”[2]

To this pattern, words enter the landscape. “You,” says Riches, and it echoes like the “re-used” movements throughout the space. “Are” joins the collage. Or was it the other way around, did “are” proceed “you”? Soon, to the patchwork of spoken words held in slow pauses, “Are you,” “even if,” “you,” and “think” are added. 

A language of symbols is forming, and in a bid to understand, the words grow in importance, to me. They become the key to the sequence. Lying on her side, she takes away her hand from supporting her head, letting her arm extend along the floor, the sound of her arm connecting loudly with the floor is twinned with the word “are.” A three-letter word—“are”—for a three-letter body part—“arm.” The word “think” is connected to Riches as from a coiled forward position, not unlike Rodin’s The Thinker, she hovers her form off the ground, supported by her hands.

Further words are collaged with actions. “Might” is often shown as Riches lying on her back, her upper body propped up by her forearms, as she looks forward. “Be” is joined to her legs raised in the air as she wriggles them about and tries to lift her upper body in the process, as if a caterpillar jiggling. The word “there” is shown by an arm extended to the side, pointing in the direction somewhere ‘over there.’ Of course, as soon as I feel I have the code, things change, and the same words, in a different order, take on other possible readings. Almost as if to say, ‘don’t get too caught up in metaphors.’ Words in the soil, broken down, definitions are tilled and presented open-ended.