Monsters
Product of imagination, ungrasp-able, unknown. Alive? Existence cannot be confirmed by usual scientific methods.
Fossils
Mixed mineral, mixed animal substance, calcified. Existence can be confirmed.
Product of memory.
If the fossil and the monster at first do not seem related, it is not true. They are connected in the lemniscate as opposites poles, opposite extremes, one always inevitably becoming the other. Mbembe talks of haunting. This is why figures like ghosts and phantoms need to invoked, because they have not found their way into any system of classification. Hauntology speaks to all activisms and all radical ideologies that try to work in the margins, in the angles we do not see.
The workings of the dance is like an evolution of thought. We start stacked on top of one another
in the mind-space of one organism. The score of the dance consists of trying to get all eight limbs in
coordination and collaboration with each other.
The score is a question: how does this eight limbed, two-headed creature stand up? Once standing is achieved, we try to separate. Sometimes we succeed and other times the dance ends without having reached this objective. At the end the two figures separate and become two subjectivities.
The score is a question: how does this eight limbed, two-headed creature stand up? Once standing is achieved, we try to separate. Sometimes we succeed and other times the dance ends without having reached this objective. At the end the two figures separate and become two subjectivities.
SCORE
1. One stacked on top of the other, balancing like rocks, foetal position. Integrity of bones keeps you stacked, one balancing, one weighed down. Two skeletons, two masses stacked and merging. Pouring into each other. Gravity does the rest.
2. Skin begins to slide, glacier-ly slow. Movement is slow and continuous, nothing sudden. Falling down, but not apart, only into and onto. Pressing towards surfaces of skin, of ground, of body and bodies. One body, falling slowly into the other.
3. A many-limbed creature. The other’s legs are your legs, your arms. Practice being both bodies. Press into and onto your many parts. One many-limbed creature pushing into itself, pressing anything against anything. There is no proper way to place a hand on the ground or body, let it land in any way it lands let any part be anywhere. Stay close, no stretching out.
4. The idea of a direction upward. Try to stand up. Try to organise your many limbs and bits to press and push and function as a holding structure. Eyes are only half open, often closed, you are not an identity, not socialised, only feeling and sensing and discovering how to organise mass. Try to stand up.
5. Try to separate. It cannot be quick. Subjectivities are so densely bound and pressed into each other. How to come apart from the massive mass of intertwinement. Come to stand. Come to stand separately.
stacked like stones gradually waiting for the weight to drop, to shift, to slide into another formation
Like a glacier, your weight presses me into the ground and stretches my skin so slow and so heavy
a pile of limbs on the floor functions not yet known strength is just a squeezing contracting press
it sometimes shakes or quivers with exhaustion or distorts into a de-socialised contortion drooling and drooping
Like a glacier, your weight presses me into the ground and stretches my skin so slow and so heavy
a pile of limbs on the floor functions not yet known strength is just a squeezing contracting press
it sometimes shakes or quivers with exhaustion or distorts into a de-socialised contortion drooling and drooping
fingers and feet land on the ground first thing first they don't choose the part that should they don't know how only know gravity pressing, squeezing, ceasing
try to get up is this my leg? is that your pelvis? a mush of a person muddled together a monstrous form I don't know where I start or you begin
try to get up is this my leg? is that your pelvis? a mush of a person muddled together a monstrous form I don't know where I start or you begin
try to stand this is not my body I cannot control it it will not listen standing on borrowed structures, borrowed time it can fall, it will fall, it does fall and lands where it lands to start again
up or down you can never go back time only goes forward with the consequence of efforts crash clank moan new structures forming, new dimension to perceive from
upright, reborn lighter biped two separate entities attempt to find their feet and
s e p a r a t e
up or down you can never go back time only goes forward with the consequence of efforts crash clank moan new structures forming, new dimension to perceive from
upright, reborn lighter biped two separate entities attempt to find their feet and
s e p a r a t e
In binding our bodies together and tuning into only the felt sense of touch and weight shifts, the mind enters a darkness, a space of unknown. The eyes are closed, downcast or applied to blur vision. The darkness produces the sense that you do not know whether you are making contact with an arm or a leg. You lose sense of where your partner’s body is in space, where their verticality is, how they are oriented. You could be touching a knee and mistake it for a shoulder. This trick disturbs our pattern recognition of the body.
Wherever you are, and however you are placed, close your eyes. You still know where your head is, where your feet are, how far your elbows are jutting out and how your spine is shaped. If you were asked, you would be able to draw an outline of yourself. That is your kinesthetic sense.
We worked on de-socialising/de-culturalising our bodies. This entails: there are no inappropriate places to touch as we do not know of these social rules. We have no knowledge assumptions about the workings of specific body parts. We cannot assume that our feet know how to stand and hands know how to bear weight against the floor. The hand simply falls to the ground without using its fully formed knowledge, which has been further heightened through dance training and aesthetic conditioning.
The dance Monsters and Fossils disturbs the kinesthetic sense, it tricks it. I can only take my attention to the contact point between me and my partner. I can, to an extent, still sense my own outline, but I am not able to calculate the whole of our joint pattern. If I had to draw the outline of our two-headed, eight-limbed figure, I would not be able to. I can’t predict where the next movement is and what the next shape will be.
It means moving in the darkness, moving in the unknown.