Script for presentation on May 11th:

Falling.

Arriving.

Arriving.

In resting.

Let’s practice. Not doing anything.

This is Alice and I’m Tuva. We started working together four days ago.

If gravity didn’t exist I would fall of this earth as it is spinning. Something pulling me up, of it, from my head, creating space in my joints. Gravity pulling me down, making sure that I stay here. I am always falling in every direction.

In 2009 I met Skinner Releasing Technique as I was training dance in UK.

In 2013 I met Eva Karczag after graduating acting school in New York.

Today Eva and I have some sort of master-apprentice relationship. She is my teacher, colleague and friend.

I also have my own practice.

Non-doing.

Non-endgaining.

Undoing.

Perhaps, this is a practice, in not satisfying desire.

Waiting.

For something to happen.

Wait.

Giving in to your weight.

I’d like to experience my body in it’s intrinsic value. My body having a value in itself. Experiencing my body in-itself. Not as a means to an end. Not as a tool for something else to happen. Movement for movements sake. Feeling for feelings sake. Perhaps, pleasure.

Autonomous body.

Collective body.

Anarchist body.

Tissues yielding under my fingertips. Discovering the bony landmarks.

Fingers whispering ”it’s ok”. Thought sinking into body.

Holding space for the tissues to fall into.

She often say’s ”Each one, teach one”, and that ”we stand on the shoulders of those who were there before us”. The work does not have a name. She calls it ”the work”. It is not me she says, the work works.

Lets play with the thought, that at this moment I breathe in, what you breathe out. You breathe in, what I breathe out.

First mouth in my navel. Second mouth in my mouth. Third mouth in my ass.

Heart and lungs on top of diaphragm. Moving up and down with the breath.

All of the cells. Breathing.

I can connect to the idea of my body, the image, form, concept, definition, projection, category, fiction, artifact. Or I can connect to the material that makes up my body, the substance, inside, undefined, experience, matter, physical,

by noticing, sensing, experiencing.

Perception creating movement.

Air penetrating my skin.

Supporting me from the inside.

Supporting me from the outside.

Touching and being touched.

If I am dispossessed just by the act of using language. Where will intimacy take place?

I’m cradling her skull, like the earth in my hands.

Each suture is like a river or the cracks in a mountain.

Each tactonic plate still moving.

Being held by the floor.
Being held by my touch.

Her breath deepens.

As a child, as a mother, as a friend, as an animal, she lies in my hands.

So then, what if I don’t do anything? Doing is often related to an expectation for a specific result, form or feeling. Perhaps, to undo, is to move without the intetion to satisfy a specific desire, without the expectation of being a fantasy.

Fingers moving through flesh and fascia, touching my iliac crest, pubic ramus, tail..

Pelvic wings opening.

Sacrum sliding

Movement in the pubic symphosis

Touching each part of my pelvis

With our thought

With our body

To listen to the inner volitions, the desires of the physical self, might make one say “no, I have to stop, I can’t keep going”. When feeling pain, or discomfort. As a dancer, as a person. Perhaps, lets play with the thought that dance training and performance conditions the dancer to submit to a higher power, with their body. Choreographer telling someone to raise their leg and they raise it, without thinking twice about whether they feel like having that sensation in their body today. A “no” often leads to punishment. To me, this sounds very similar to other kinds of power relations.

Movement becomes a metaphor for other kinds of behaviors in relation to power.

Eye balls falling into it’s deep coned sockets. Softening. Seeing from the back of my skull. The outer falling into my vision, without naming, instead of trying to grasp for what I want with my vision; for that which is already familiar.

A pebble dropping deep down into the pond of the eye socket.

Stepping away from the pre-conceived definition of the body, desexualizes the relationship to the body, and creates, autonomy.

Shoulder sockets.

Hip sockets.

Falling into.

Softening.

A death of a fantasy and so a loss of that which we never had.

Poetic imagery about nature and objects is a metaphor for the hidden potentialities within my body. Hidden through conforming to the normative.

The image is moving me, or I am moving the image. I am not moving my body, but it moves.

Bone. Marrow. Alive. Porous.

Each thought evokes change on a cellular level.

Thought is movement.

Touch each vertebrae with my thought. With my body.

The bone at the base of my skull, slips around inside of those tissues at the back of my neck.

Space opening like a mouth yawning just inside of those tissues at the base of my skull.

From this space, my spine falls, drops, vertebrae by vertebrae. Soft and supple space opens, between one vertebrae and another, from the top of my spine to my tail.

What if, I propose, that in a social welfare like the one we live in, the act of satisfying authorities is masked in the idea that that is how we care for one another. Intimacy is being lost in the act of participating in a system of care?

Tissues yielding. Her shoulder wings drops into my hands.

Tips of my fingers and toes connected to the wings of my shoulders and hips.

I write to attempt to recognize myself. What am I beyond, beneath or before the writing of my body?

Skin

Flesh

Blood

I am material that moves

I am material relating to other material

My movement has no gaze. No phallic gaze. No capitalist gaze. Nor my own gaze.

I notice movement in her body.

Forward movement.

So my hand on her manubrium tells her breastbone to soften.

Her whole body softens and falls back again. Backwards, into herself.

I notice her stillness.

She says “I felt myself going into habits so now I am back tracking.
Now I am in a place of not knowing”.

Is it possible to re-wire or repattern my neuromuscular behavioral patterns through values which are non-patriarchal?

Repatterning is not pleasurable, as breaking our of a habit can feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

Becoming.

Always becoming,
never arriving.

Perceiving without naming.

Naming myself, limits my ability to become.

So perhaps, if I am always anticipating moving in a certain direction I limit my possibilities of moving through the world. So perhaps, when I undo, or don’t do anything, I let go of unnecessary tension, the strive towards a goal, and space opens. As space opens, there is space to receive.

Removing myself from what I know that I see.

I capture myself through the desire to be seen.
When I am seen I become a fantasy.

Perhaps, to exist in a state beyond language, in nothingness, in the in-between, one has to trust the structure of the physical self as order is falling out of control, becoming chaos.

In the transition between nothingness and meaning-making, we might have transformation. We might have intimacy.

Perception allowing movement. Perception allowing transformation. Transformation being intimacy.

A practice of non-linearity. Let’s then propose that improvisation can be some soft form of anarchism. A practice in listening to my inner volition without obeying the will of that which is in power. Autonomous, but as a response to listening to ones iphysical reality, inside and outside.

Having a beginning and an end, a completion through normative narrative, creates a familiar form. A form which you will recognize and understand.

Before I reach the end, redirect into new impulse.

Dissattach and redirect.

Through self-narration and language I become commodity, an object, a product. In that language, there is no room for otherness, or what you may call queerness. What happens if I am inconsumable? If what I display is intangible, in constant fluctuation?

 

I am not a woman. The mere recognition of this body means something different than what I am. The sensation of the body is different than the image it produces.

 

Perhaps, attempting, to erase what we know.

Listening to what is there, in itself, not what I thought or wish, was there.

Only moving when I want to move.