MARATHON OF INTIMACIES

(AN ONGOING SERIES OF CHOREOGRAPHIES IN CONVERSATION.)

Performed at CHAPTER ARTS CENTRE 2020, RISE FESTIVAL 2021

Film Sharing for: SURF THE WAVE, CHINESE ARTS NOW

SUPPORTED BY: ARTS COUNCIL OF WALES grant for SYMBIOTIC SOVEREIGNTIES

& MGCfutures

MARATHON OF INTIMACIES…

An ongoing series of choreographies in conversation.

Jo invited me on a walk during lockdown.

I told her how I had been imagining a series of blind-sight duets channelling ‘Otherness’. 

I had a hit list of people… who somehow challenged my compass for navigating difference, those who contradicted & dismantled my own readings/pre-readings, pre-judgements of others. 

Blind-sighted touch and conversation could hold and channel a desire for sensing the universal sentience of otherness/ outsiderness within everybody, whether dormant, repressed, abundant or laid bare. Otherness as a presence which exists within us all. 

Dancing- often alone in a studio or elsewhere sometimes seems a refuge, an escape from life. 

Yet it is also a way to become wholly cellular, including the real, as well as the imaginary.

Perceptual actions germinate in a bed of thoughts and feelings foraged from life.

When I imagine dancing, talking with someone else, 

I wonder how “otherness” can become one another, each other… 

A touch which includes resonance and dissonance. 

This is how I imagined a series of dances entitled Marathon of Intimacies: a habitat of “otherness” and one another-ness: of the recognition which comes with being ‘stranger’ .

Marathon is a word associated with endurance and winning.

Intimacy is overused in describing performance.

These two words marathon and intimacy don’t fit together

All the intimacies that have been part of our lives, could they be with us while we're dancing?

JO:

“For me, this film with Anushiye emerged from our walking in parks and talking about race, White rooms, family, shame, power, being heard, justice, presence… in these last months I’ve been searching, looking everywhere around every corner for how my nearly 50 year old body can be a part of the conversation. In 2020, I’ve been practicing saying the truth and with Anushiye I felt I was able to learn to speak the truth. 

The strategy at the moment is small, safe, hyper-local and with purpose. 

And the question I’m holding closely is, “What is unburdened arts practice for women of colour?”

ANUSHIYE: 

 “Getting what you need... it’s not necessarily what you think you need.

There is a kind of recognition, arriving at the beginning again, which involves not knowing. 

I’m interested in being in the margins- the margins within myself and in life.

This is something that I’m sharing and treasuring with Jo

Our margins meet as a gentle micro riptide. Going out coming in. 

Shedding shame. 

Perhaps we are both getting what we want from it.

Resonance and difference. 

The complexity, sensuality, movements and fault lines of consent.

Non destinational care without compromise - a kind of survival.”

The film was a way of being seen my the sky and carried and tended to by the earth. Most of my solitary dancing surrenders to the horizontal plane.

As such it is a kind of prayer… without the usual words.

GARETH:

“Looking back isn’t something I try to do often, digging up the past can always get you muddy. I’m more inclined to look forward, the past only exists as fragments to me ,that more often than not raises more questions than answers. However how are we ever going to stop repeating the same patterns over and over again? And this is where mythology steps in to be a firm and guiding hand. 

In this day and age of cemented cultural identity we don’t think much of mythology, metaphor is dead apparently, but to me, myths can be a catalyst for transformation and rebirth. Being a mercurial trickster in my work and to some extent my personal life I know the importance of breaking a few rules to challenge the status quo and disrupting established orders.. I often think of the trickster as an embodiment of duality and complexity, an archetype who is neither ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Look at The Fool of the tarot cards.

 Life on this planet is rarely black or white, it’s incredibly nuanced. This idea of duality was a big presence  Anushiye and I would often approach when were together for MOI ,some days it came easy to me,  on others it felt too big too handle. How did we physically manifest all these rhythms, feelings and perceptions for the voyeuristic eyes of an audience? We became mediators between the sacred and profane. Trickster clowns who live at the crossroads.”

ANUSHIYE:

"Gareth Chambers seems to dress mostly in black. He described his style as goth-chav or posh boy wanna be. I don’t like to nail my style down. Tom boy- 1920’s, colonial stowaway, silk road twist, a weakness for knitwear, avoiding black with velveteen exceptions. I cringe at being categorised as a hippie. 

Gareth says he lives in the past. My tendency is to romanticise the past… time and shadows seem to have lifetimes to meander there. We walked through Adamstown together once and things were overturned...he showed me Mezuzah doorbells and talked about his mother.

I am lured and open hearted when things no longer make sense about someone. We have been dancing and talking together for the last 2 weeks. People were surprised we were working together.

Our conversations of words and movement are encounters through fissures, ruptures and fault lines of resonance and dissonance… We touch upon civilisation, desire, regret, medieval humours, villains superstitions, true and fictional horror, dreams, the realms of private and public, twins, gossip, the Mabinogion, our fathers, our mothers, bedtime stories, death, flashers, shame, sensuality v sexuality, curses, familiars, wealth, radars of the male gaze, numbness, sensitivity and growing up.

We dance to Apex Twin, Opera and the soundtrack for Suspira. He says, “It is none of your business what people think of you”

His words are often both liberating, perturbing and make me smile." 

CHARLIE:

“Marathon of Intimacies has been an ongoing exploration through time in which moving and talking have been folding into each other - each feeding the other. It has felt to me like something worthwhile - a fully engaged way to be in a mire of complexity without grabbing at solutions, or defining a position, but allowing opposites to exist alongside each other.

It feels timely - is of and responds to its time.

It’s not always been comfortable, which I would define as a good thing.

I think Anushiye is a rare artist who opens a space which is gently but profoundly unsettling.

Big questions and topics are considered side by side with more seemingly trivial things. Subjects are treated with simultaneous lightness and weight grow out of and tilled back into the movement world which is being crafted as it emerges. Somewhere in this work is a non-model of how to be in thoughtful conversation; how to speak about the unspeakable; to deflate the overinflated, and invite smaller often finer voices to be heard. I see this work as being a site for re-orientation - an invitation to think and feel again. The work feels accessible - strange but inviting.”

ANUSHIYE:

"Charlie lived on the sunny and rugged side of the valley with his beloved Rob… (christened by my little daughter as Whispering Rob)... They are good neighbours, baking, fixing things, flower arranging, settling age old disputes in the woodwork. Stirring things up diplomatically speaking. In heated moments privately biting something aids a return to dulcet tones.

Myself and my daughter lived on the cobbled, twisting and misty side of the valley, a stone's throw from the church bells, and the blackberries growing from Sylvia Plath’s headstone. There lived the last of the line of ancient village folk who counted people in and counted people out. Our neighbours were odd and kind. So somehow we fitted in. Times were certainly tricky. We planted pink and blue wild geraniums and climbed trees.

Somehow I became brave enough to try this thing with Charlie… moving in touch with closed eyes. Each time is different. Something oppositional was thrown in at the beginning, but it slid somewhere else untimely, delicate, nebulous and specific.

After the communal morning dance… we gossip. It is a serious and essential ingredient of stone soup. Herr Chambers turned the page and revealed the origin in Olde English... Godsibb... god relative or godparent. Blessings on the newborn. Six blessings to one curse. Fairy Godmothers.  

Our ratios oscillate. Scales of problems personal and global interlock little fingers and dance.

We purge, we rant, we cackle, we mourn, we wish. No stone is too small to leave unturned, cupboards, skeletons, histories of violence, avoidance, glitter, dust. 

Tears have been shed, mostly mine, but I swear his eyes water over from time to time.

Once Charlie said to me oversensitivity is a gift (which helped)."