LU: When and how did you first meet Alaric; and can you tell me about it?

SH: I first met Alaric in September 1999. He and Jo Hyde wrote a piece for video, tape, speaker and singer called Nekyia, and as I'd worked with Jo before, they asked me to do the singing. The first time we met was the week before the first performance at a place called Shawford Mill near Bath, which is a water mill - the piece was written with that venue in mind, as you can hear the water rushing underneath the floor all the time, so that got built into the piece. Alaric was the speaker. We recorded the piece at Dartington the following month, and then performed it in Rotterdam and at UEA in December, which was the last time I saw him. I didn't know him well or for long, but I felt there was an openness about him - what you saw was what you got. He seemed simultaneously a very complex man but at the same time very straightforward. Very easy to like. We had a lot of fun doing the piece - there's something very special about being alone on a stage with someone for 33 minutes, particularly when the piece was so very much his. I've performed it with 3 other people since then (you're one of them!), and every time, I have really missed Alaric. Anyone who speaks the words of the text will bring their own voice to it, literally and metaphorically. I miss the cadences of his voice, the emphases and meanings he brought to the piece which cannot be imitated or replaced by anyone else, no matter how sincerely or capably they perform it, simply because they are not him.

In answer to the original question, then, I met him in that piece. I probably spent something in the region of 10 hours simply doing the piece with him, rehearsing it, running it, performing it, between September and December 1999, listening to his voice, interacting with him. The text he wrote for himself is, to quote myself above, complex and yet straightforward, and that is how I think of him. There was a warmth and a generosity, but also a certain darkness, a questing, a reaching for something without quite knowing what it was. In many respects, it's hard for me to separate him from who he was when he performed Nekyia.

LU: Thank you for that. I found it useful, when I performed Nekyia to try to hear Alaric’s voice reading the text; and that was real enough to me; but, as you say, one cannot actually replace the person. It is always going to be different.

You’ve spoken of the experience of performing with him and I recognise that mix of warmth, generosity and something else, something restless - that’s my word; yours was darkness and I don’t disagree with that. … Is it possible you can say more about it?

SH: Again, I come back to knowing him mainly through the piece (although there was a fair amount of time spent in pubs as well....) The way he performed it struck a careful balance between the poetic and the conversational - in fact, the most painful of the subsequent performances was with an actor, rather than a poet, who simply tried far too hard to imbue the text with meaning: it's all there already, and trying to heighten the text made it incomprehensible. Alaric used a very simple delivery - in many ways, this is extraordinary language, spoken as if it were almost commonplace. Nekyia is a dream text, and an interplay (as it says at one point) between three dreamers, the desired, the desiring, and the bearer of light. In a sense, in terms of the performance dynamic, Alaric was the dreamer and I was the dreamed, but it's not a very nice dream. And this perhaps explains the nature of the language, the way something quite bizarre sometimes seems entirely normal within a dream and it's only afterwards you realise how odd it was. And this is what I mean by "darkness:" Nekyia is a very bad dream at times: there's a lot of implicit violence in the text, in the language. The relationship of the two characters, "he" and "she," is very specific. He is rough, intense, dynamic - it's his dream; she is smooth, serene, static. (We had fun with the "costumes," Alaric dressed casually, with his leather jacket and hair all which way; me in a very formal but plain long black dress, barefoot.) But he describes her as monstrous, something ravenous lurking in the depths, and this is in absolute contrast to how she appears to the audience, and to the very calm, lyrical vocal lines she sings. And she sings the same words he speaks: she can hear him, but he seems absolutely oblivious to her, to what she actually is.

The violence lurking in the text is also present in the Letters for dear Augustine, which I heard Rory [McDermott] reading at Shawford Mill when we did Nekyia there. You have to remember, I worked with Alaric, but I never knew him well, never knew him for more than a few days over a few months, so this is all very much my impressions, not anything I 'know' about him. The Letters [for dear Augustine] seemed to me to be an expression of different aspects of love, not all of them conventionally "nice," some of them deeply uncomfortable, fierce, bordering on violence, but love nonetheless. And we had a conversation about them, at Dartington when we making the recording of Nekyia, in the pub over lunch. I can't remember how it came up - we might actually have been talking about the Letters - but I told him that I have what I can only describe as an imaginary friend, Christian: an alter-ego, an actor in all my internal dramas, and he's been around since I was a child. And Alaric was intrigued by this, because of the parallels he saw between me and Christian, and him and Augustine - both of them alter-ego figures, both with slightly gender-ambivalent, overtly religious names. He said that Augustine was like an imaginary friend: and that was something we had in common, knowing that the thing about imaginary friends is that they are friends, they are people you know, they just happen not to be real in any independently physical or psychological sense. He wanted them - Augustine and Christian - to start writing to each other, which would have been fascinating, although a little frightening. I wish it could have happened, but this was only about four months before he died, and we just never got round to it.

One other thing that occurred to me: when we performed Nekyia in London (you , me and Jo Hyde) after Alaric died, there were a couple of rather strange moments, ways in which the piece changed and developed because of his death. Firstly, quite a lot of the text uses image of death and descent into the underworld, and in context, just a couple of months after he died, it suddenly felt as it we were speaking directly about and to him. And then, as part of that performance, Jo reworked the piece so that a couple of sections were still being done by Alaric, now on the video, from material filmed that day at Dartington when we recorded it. And suddenly, it was as if that "triangulation" that the text spoke of had suddenly been manifested: the speaker (you, on that occasion) was still the dreamer and the singer (me) the dreamed - but now Alaric himself was recast in the piece as the bearer of light. And it was simultaneously wonderful, and moving, and rather upsetting.