time to respond

time to respond
TWO DESTINATION LANGUAGE
with
DANCE BASE SCOTLAND

Hello friends,
How are you?
Thank you for reading this, perhaps even holding this little pink explosion in
your hands.
It felt really important to us to make a thing, an actual thing you could touch
with your fingertips. A thing for you to feel, a thing for you to have, a thing to
pick up or a thing to receive.
We don’t know about you but for us, we are really craving tactility and touch.
This has been a time where so much of our lives have been spent online, in
front of a screen.
In many ways, this pink thing is also about a time we planned to spend next to
each other (albeit with a mandatory distance), which instead we spent online.
But it feels really important to find a way to share a bit of a response to time to
respond because although we connected with each other’s projects mainly
online, within each project there was action and interaction and connection to
celebrate and to share.
This pink thing is our response to the residency we curated for Dance Base. A
week in the cold February of 2021. A week of exploration and experimentation.
A week of questioning and connecting. A week of wading through the debris of
this time. A week where seven artists and their collaborators went off and did
their thing with all the pent-up energy, jubilation, density and overwhelm of
this time.
Here you will find some hints of what that cold week in February 2021 was like,
what we chatted about, what tickled us and what provoked us, a keyhole for
you to peek through.
Katherina and Alister
Two Destination Language

CONNECTIONS
We speak about connection. Again and again and again and again and again.
About the gaps between us, the potential of crossing the voids. Staring into our
computer screens, the internet offers our images to one another. We speak
about the difference between rhizomatic and mycelial networks, about
whether the network itself communicates. About quantum physics. About
maps as unreliable guides, holding in stasis a dynamic thing. We sink into the
digitised sounds and pixels of one another’s thinking.
About our weight falling constantly into the floor, our minds tending to the
shifting sensations rising up through our soles, feeling the sand between
another’s toes, our fingers twitching as they reach to grasp a phone.
About emptying ourselves, offering a space for occupation by the rocks and
seaweed and crabs. The not-body of our body constantly becoming.
About sharing a body, offered for occupation, and sent out into the world to
give presence to the housebound.
About making marks and traces.
About leaving nothing behind.

BODIES
A lifted body’s skin shines white against a dark-clothed figure. Bare to the glass
and concrete, a soft surface which wraps itself around them.
The body’s boundary edge is a raw sensory mass, constantly ready to report
back each encounter. What does each body feel, where it touches another
person? What does a hand feel, where it holds the weight of the body it is part
of, above a gritty pavement? What does the eye feel, exposed to February’s
dawn air? I see two bodies, crab-like on a pavement, and imagine the shards of
dirt pressing back into their fingertips, the resistance to clean soft lines.
We talk about the bodies touching. How strange it seems, to those alone, to
watch those sharing a household and able to touch. How our awareness of
proximity has changed in the past year. How we ache for community and
togetherness.
Elsewhere, bodies merge with the built environment, not asserting their
separation but seeking the cracks to assimilate one into the other, to mix and
make something out of the mixity. The act of feeling a way of joining.
It’s strange, seeing and hearing these things from afar, unable to share a space.

SPACE and PLACE
We speak about space.
The pandemic has brought a new
attention to the spaces we share, and
those which are private. It’s not just
the awareness of proximity, but a
recalibration of the politics of space.
How far a personal space extends.
The radical nature of shared spaces.
The architecture and ownership of
shared spaces:
Who permits access, who controls
the space,
How people are routed around or
through it.
The role of money.
The meaning of public.
The forbidden spaces that sit
invitingly close:
Locked gardens in the centre of
squares
Waterfront paths behind fences
And now,
Locked shopping centres,
Locked arts centres,
Locked livelihoods.
Cathedrals without worshippers.
Inside our homes
Without visitors
We crave touch.
And we are more alive than ever to
our senses
Temperature
Balance
Proprioception
As we sit at rest, gazing at each other
through computer screens, we
cannot feel the spinning planet
(460 metres per second)
We cannot feel our orbit of the sun.
(30 kilometres per second)
We cannot feel our universe
expanding.
(72 kilometres per second per
Megaparsec)
(a Megaparsec is about 3.3 million
light years)
We note the lag in our video
connections.
And find fibre optics work around
two-thirds the speed of light.
200,000 kilometres per second.
We’re moving fast.

THE GROUND WE WALK ON
Almost everywhere, when you look,
The ground is unnatural.
Shaped by human labour:
Trees cleared, stones shifted, earth tilled, planted, harvested.
Foundations dug, cement poured, stones laid.
Sand blasted into glass, rocks into steel.
Unnatural, unless you count human as natural.
Eventually, we’ll be in the ground ourselves.
Gravity will win, and draw us through the crust.
We float and coast and roll and fly, attentive to balancing and falling.
Reaching high defies the fear of breaking on it.
Until then, it supports us.
Lets us belong upon it.
Connects us all.
The ground we move upon is owned.
It is our work to be here.
Knowing the labour it has taken to be here.

ESSENTIAL WORK
Why do we do what we do?
Is it enough to want to do something?
What will it mean?
For us? For those who see us?
Jian tells us over lunch that aloneness is related to ego. Perhaps we can give
ourselves up to inhabiting space. To opening inner space. To a boundlessness.
It’s easy to focus on the walls and what divides us.
Harder to cultivate connection.
We slurp soup as conversation turns to trance states. The calming, stilling,
interiorising practices of body weather, transcendental meditation and
journaling. Hot soup on a cold wintry day, the ice outside protected by the shadows
of chimneys. The dominance of working in studios, of making products for those
and of selling tickets to sit in those, has been broken by the pandemic. The
creation of inner space, the merging of background and object to haze the
boundary skin may seem: these can achieve a spaciousness an audience can
access, a transitional space which is psychic and physical. A resistance to
constant commodification. Our spoons clatter in empty bowls, bread soaking up
the dregs. We want audiences. We want to share sensations, feelings, moments.
To overcome the binaries of us and them. Where do we want it to happen?
A year without studios and theatres and gatherings has recalibrated us in
different ways. As we talk, I wonder about the difference between missing and
wanting. I miss sitting in neat rows watching a stage. I miss the lights, and their
effect on bodies. I miss the surprise of costume. I miss the shared moment of
recognition when a piece of music starts. I miss feeling the effort of a
performer.
But how much do I want them now? How much have our ideas about
performance shifted, seeking shared experiences unlike those of the studios
we had before, seeking intimacies unlike those of the theatre we had before.
Where do we want it to happen?

ENTROPY
This time has been permission to
move into intimacies otherwise
unachievable.
Picking up lost conversations.
Seeking influencers who write
thoughtful books and don’t post
selfies.
Making space for new habits.
Is this merely dialogue for an ending
world?
Twenty years into a 21st century
lurching from crisis to crisis.
What remains?
What sustains?
What’s important?
The technology allows us to meet.
At eye level.
We can cast it off for now, but…
How long until we’re all cyborg?
Whose body would you inhabit?
How would that body change you?
We speak of the accents of cows
from different places, and their
inaccessible cultures.

GAZED UPON
Most of the time, the only eyes upon us are virtual, mediated by cameras and
miles of cabling. Out in the streets, we feel the direct gaze we remember from
the before-times, an eyeline leveled at us.
We speak of the watched body. A body surveilled not by technologies and
governments, but by a person invited to watch, a group of people invited to
watch.
One of us remembers being chronically shy, and finding that performing dance
was a way of being with people, communicating with people, without
embarrassment and shame.
More than one of us thinks of flow, of energies directed, of emptying and filling,
of controlling the audience and their gaze.
One of us seeks to lose self-consciousness, exposing the body to escape the
sense of audience attention and avoid a pressure to make something beautiful.
More than one of us thinks of composition, of creating moving images. We talk
about the effect of changing the body performing in that image, of different
people moving the same score.
One of us says that in dance, nothing is wrong, there are no mistakes.
More than one of us reaches towards a natural language, a communication
which cannot rely on words, reaching back into intuition for something.
One of us says a literally precise descriptive language is unhelpful to
understanding, and embraces the more accurate ambiguities of the poetic.
More than one of us agrees.

OVERWHELM
We are exhausted.
Video makes us fussy,
Seeking a more perfect version liveness disallows.
It’s hard, allowing uncertainty, in this time, in this medium.
Too much pressure on ourselves.
Constantly changing contexts.
Flailing around in doubt to find direction.
After all the pushing, pulling, lifting, melting, reaching, turning, stretching,
stroking, hanging, bouncing, shifting, retreating, embracing, flowing, resisting,
ordering, composing, framing, cutting, rushing, pausing, waiting, trying:
We’ve fallen.
We’ve finally given up control.
Felt vulnerable, helpless, sore.
It’s OK to stop.
Despite determination. (Because of it.)
Despite the constant companion of imagination. (Because of it.)
Despite our evolving practices. (Because of them.)
It’s OK to stop.
To be still.
Still inside ourselves.
We cry together.

words by Alister Lownie
drawings by Katherina Radeva
time to respond contained projects led by Jian Yi, Laura Paterson, Lindsay
Oliver & Fiona Oliver-Larkin, Lucy Suggate, Mark Bleakley, Suzi Cunningham
and Tamsyn Russell
— find out more at www.dancebase.co.uk/professional/time-to-respond/
the artists were supported by Beth Chalmers and Louise Gregory
curated by Two Destination Language’s Alister Lownie and Katherina Radeva
commissioned by Dance Base Scotland thanks to support from Creative
Scotland with funding from Scottish Government via the Performing Arts
Venue Relief Fund
© Two Destination Language 2021