March Chronicle by Sanna Hirvonen and Dimitris Chimonas

Fire Practices (short play)

THE WRITER
Let me start with something simple. A walk across the sun—not yet burning, not yet in flames. We arrive through the city and Stavros tells us about fire. Fire is a practice. A danger. A lifeline. Fire is political. I listen, smelling an imagination of smoke. My northern body—it swells in the warmth.

I write from two places: the classroom, the bed. I take notes - a witness account. I write on two timelines: one waking, one lying down.

(THE WRITER pulls out a small notebook.)

Ground truth is something that takes the form of poetry but roots its meaning in technicality. Fire reveals truths, but also burns them. To see only destruction is to see like a coloniser. Not even in black and white—monochrome.

STAVROS (shouts from afar)
You must look from afar to see close!

THE WRITER
To sense remotely is to become more-than-human. But remote sensing is never merely recovery. It is always haunted—by what evades the sensor. By the absence within the presence, by the limit of its own spectral logics. And yet, we return to the ground - to the local. Always a local body?

Maybe the British feared fire. Feared warmth. But more than that—they used class struggle like kindling.

(Cats pass through.)

There is nothing new under the burning sun—(Ilja’s tune floats somewhere)—and still the reality shifts. We are neither here nor there. We are, at best, transmission lines. Maybe traces. We eat on the rooftop. Then, we drive.

ENSEMBLE
We drive.

THE WRITER
A road trip through Cyprus. Many stops. A monastery where the icons have no eyes—only the idea of vision remains, like someone took their gaze away for safekeeping. In the botanical garden, we walk with our eyes closed, fingertips doing the seeing. A leaf presses its history into my palm.

ENSEMBLE
This is the sound of the island remembering itself.

THE WRITER
And from the highest mountain—which rose from the sea millions of years ago, bringing the earth’s buried past to its own summit—we take photos of the stars. We record light that travelled for centuries only to end up in our lenses, our mouths, our dreams.

ENSEMBLE
The past doesn’t stay below. It ascends.

THE WRITER
Then: SPEL’s roof. Outside, a half-dark building holds life. A dog barks. We see a poster—not a program but a warning. A guideline for losing one’s path. Inside, the scent of pine and smoke. The forest begins to speak—crackling, whispering, almost human.

ENSEMBLE
Welcome. Listen.

THE WRITER
Some of us build a forest. We collide. We spiral. And in the far corner of the third floor, someone whispers:

ENSEMBLE (whispering)
Begin. Be a forest on the move. A ritual that mimics itself.

THE WRITER
And when we speak again, we speak about what we’ve discovered and what we’ve lost. We whisper to statues. We feed the cats. We restart our phones. We plan for tomorrow’s trip.

(A pause. A soft wind. The smell of pine. A phone vibrates.)

THE WRITER
I think I’m not lying when I say—we are tired. But not finished. We have been marked. We will return.

(The echo of footsteps. A final rustle.)