10 minute read
Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go at Dance In Vancouver 2024
In search of collective effervescence*
By Lee Su-Feh
Over the last 10 years or so, I have become less interested in dancing FOR people and more interested in dancing WITH people. This has led to a preoccupation in creating choreographic instructions that can be a shared score for both performer and audience. These instructions can exist in various formssometimes as a set of explicitly written or spoken instructions; more often as strategies embedded in sculpture, poetry, song, dance and storytelling. I think of these instructions as choreographic gestures: gestures that posit dance as social practice; as a practice that can be accessible to everyone and can be a shared experience in the encounter between performer and audience. My latest choreographic gesture is Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go (TMHMLMG), a somatic algorithm that functions as both a performance methodology and an embodiment process. It centres touch as the primary modality for finding a greater sense of the boundaries, sensations, and movements of our bodies.
* Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Les Formes Élémentatires de la vie religieuses)
It came out of a previous choreographic gesture involving a mask carved by Klahoose/ Wuikinuxw artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett. To read more about that process, go here Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go is also the title of the lecture-performance that I performed recently at Dance In Vancouver 2024. In this work, I discuss, teach and perform the algorithm, inviting audiences to DO as well as WATCH. We eventually end up singing and dancing together. It is my humble attempt at creating an experience of collective effervescence, that feeling of unity and transcendence that can happen when people come together in a group and share a collective experience.
Why algorithm, you might ask, I could simply say it’s a choreographic score. I use the word algorithm because I want to put myself in conversations with the more opaque algorithms that are embedded in our digital lives; algorithms that increasingly mediate our relationships to one another. I offer TMHMLMG as a “counter-algorithm” to these algorithms. I offer TMHMLMG as an invitation to connect to oneself and to each other in gentler, more sustainable ways.
The algorithm simply asks:What part of my body needs attention right now? What if I ask to be touched or held there? What comes next as a result?
By inviting a practice of noticing the needs of the body, and learning to ask for support around those needs, TMHMLMG serves as a somatic tool to help people have an experience of embodied support. From my experiments over the last several years, I have found that the process of playing with the algorithm can enable greater autonomy and agency, both in dancing and in other modes of communication. As a performance methodology, it can generate emergent choreographies based on the needs and desires of the human bodies practising it.
In 2020, in the isolation brought about by the pandemic, I turned my teaching notes into a set of poems. In the performance, I speak these poems and as I do so, they get written anew, the words get rearranged and reorganised by the needs of my living, dancing body. It is my way of being in a dynamic relationship with the written word. Words that live on the page do not live the same way when spoken by a body that is reorganizing around other bodies, by a dancing body, by a body that has a heartbeat, by a body that breathes and that is breathed. I repeat TMHMLMG as an invocation to dancing with others, a way to ground myself as I guide myself into the chaos, often terrifying, of being in relation with others.
As people enter the Faris Family Studio, I move in and among them, greeting people I both know and don’t know. I practice the first part of the algorithm: openings and obstacles, the yesses and the no’s. I practice moving into my yesses - ah, someone I haven’t seen for a long time, ah, a friend, ah, an open face. I practice honoring my no’s - my social anxieties, my fears by softening around them, yielding around them.
To yield is neither to push into nor to pull away,But to soften around the obstacleThe way your palm might soften around a cactusIn order not to be hurt by the spines.Yield so that the obstacle is not ignored,But is acknowledged, held with care.Observe the consequences of each action.
- From Openings and Obstacles, Scores for Dancing Across Distances. More here
This notion of yielding comes from the Taijiquan concept of “lǚ”(捋). In Taiji martial arts philosophy, "lǚ" represents a fundamental principle of softness and receptivity. It's not just about passively giving way, but about a dynamic, intelligent response to an incoming force. The concept of "lǚ" involves:
1. Listening and sensing the opponent's energy and intention
2. Neutralizing force by redirecting rather than blocking
3. Maintaining a relaxed, fluid state that allows for quick adaptation
4. Transforming defense into a potential offensive opportunity
Another way of saying this is “sui ji ying bian” (随机应变 ). "Sui ji ying bian" is a classical Chinese idiom that can be translated as “follow, gauge, respond, transform” or “following the occasion and responding to changes".
In this iteration of TMHMLMG, I have invited Sasha J Langford to play live with me, on top of the foundation of a soundtrack made by my daughter, Junhong McIntosh-Lee. During the prolonged anxiety of the pandemic, I had asked Junhong to make me these ambient soundtracks so I could sing or hum along as a way to regulate my nervous system and feel connected to her.
Singing slows down your breath and has been shown to help your nervous system drop into a parasympathetic state of “rest and digest”, of safety. I invite you to play these tracks and sing/hum along.
Listen to Junhong McIntosh-Lee on Bandcamp:
Track 1-4, Track 2-4, Track 3-4
I have invited Sasha to play live with me so that together, we can better “sui ji ying bian”. Follow, gauge, respond, transform. Sasha brings an acute awareness of the present to her musical interventions. She too is practicing TMHMLMG, listening to the needs of her body even as she listens to the needs of the room. In this iteration, I have also invited lighting designer Andie Lloyd to do the same. And so, all three of us are in a practice of attunement, to ourselves, to each other and to the audience, as we make choices around sound, movement and lighting.
I look out at the audience and I am surprised and delighted at how willing people are to let their bodies drift and spill into more pleasurable shapes (floating, swimming, spawning). I see an ocean of bodies in different states of pleasure & comfort, moving in small ways (tiny microshifts) and in big ways (someone has vacated their seat to go have a bigger dance in the back of the room). I move into this ocean of bodies, stepping into the spaces between the bodies. I am in new territory. I have never danced this dance in the midst of so many bodies, with so little space between bodies. Soft murmurs of “Touch my arm”, “Hold my head” and other body parts emanate from this mass of gentle moving bodies, meeting my own voice and body. This part always feels to me like a collective prayer for more gentleness to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet.
The territory between usis the distancebetween your hand and the back of my neck
This distance that is an ocean and a continentThis distance that is your flesh pressed into my bones
Touch my neck
Hold my head
Hold my head
Hold these wordsthese dreamsthese hopes, these fearsWrap me in your tentacle armsand take me down to the soft bottom of your ocean.
Let me touch the tenderness inside you so that I may touch the tenderness of the world
I dream of your hands fluttering over my skin
like birds fluttering over the water
This water
lapping at my feet
lapping at my knees
lapping at my cock
my clit
my tits my lips
The planet is drowning
The planet is burning
Hold my eyes hold my eyes as I hold my arms above the water
This water rising from my tears falling from the smoke
The planet is burning
The planet is drowning
Birds cannot land on my burning arms
The burning trees
The territory between us is the distance between my knee and the inside of your thigh
This distance that is my bone pressed into your flesh
This distance that is
An ocean, churning, Orcas, singing, Aspens, trembling.
Birds fly over my burning skin
Later we sing together in amateurish abandon, collectively making a song from something I call the Machine Poem.
my spine is the snake and running the ocean is coming up my spine little dolphin jumping out of my open now I'm swimming in the ocean I'm sitting in the show swimming in the ocean I can feel the sand on my feet that comes in I can feel sad I'm touching your feet hold my hand what's the time now how can I touch you.
The Machine Poem is a poem made by Zoom during the early days of the pandemic, out of a moment when the artists I was working with at Dancemakers - David Norsworthy, Francesca Chudnoff, Omar Rivero, Naishi Wang, Supriya Nayak and Nyda Kwasowski - and I were trying to dance with each other across distances even as we were stuck in our respective living rooms. The project with them had begun in 2019 in person. In 2020, with the project forced online, I grieved that we could no longer touch and hold each other, even as touching and holding each other became more necessary than ever. Online, we found it easier to dance to the sound of each other than to small images on our computers. We gathered on Zoom without our cameras on, listening to each other talk about our bodies - what we felt inside us, what we felt around us. We fumbled together towards a series of dances together that, despite being distanced, still managed to have moments of bliss. This whole experiment underlined for me the importance of hearing each other’s breath and voice as a way to feel each other’s bodies.
As I share this poem in the performance, the audience is invited into what I hope is a similar experience of tuning into their own breath and voice as a way to feel each other in space.
And so, we fumble along in a sort of karaoke sing-along towards an emergent song that is different with each iteration of the work.
We sing together.We dance together.
Swimming turns into flyingSwimming turns into flying
Lee Su-Feh Lee splits her time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where she was born and raised; and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (TsleilWaututh) Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where she makes her home. Over the past 35 years, she has created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits.
