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Dear Vilma,
When I was younger, I used to get angry when I forgot things. Angry that I had failed at
something I was supposed to do, to hold on to something, to grab and grasp it. I remember
that feeling in grade school, when learning the multiplication tables, or learning a phrase in
dance class, or something on which I would eventually be tested, evaluated, judged.
The objects, your objects, are important; they have agency through the mechanics of their set
up. I see the second law of thermodynamics, I see the associative history of puppetry and the
history of the use and abuse of the word “marionette” as a phrase to describe someone who is
being controlled from an outside source, usually unknown, out of view, behind a curtain. But
here you give us the curtain overtly, and it’s transparent. You give us the strings so we see
how they are attached to the curtain rod and how they wrap around and over the curve and
then how the strings are made tight by the precise weight of the running shoes (pink trim? I
can’t remember now), and then you give us the extra animation of the performer whose feet
are inside the shoes and who, through their seemingly incidental movements, activates a
whole system of the scene. One thing moves, another thing responds. For every action, an
equal and opposite reaction. It’s intensely pleasurable to see the relationship between the
performer, their feet, the shoe, the string, the pole, the curtain, the larger space around all this
and in the periphery, the line of audience all around the edges.
I looked for evidence of how this touch with the world was lost or forgotten. Was it through
exhaustion, losing one’s way, being distracted by others, the pressure of being watched?
Your title i have put out feelers seems to work like a meta costume—in retrospect, I can insert
the idea of a big insect and its feelers and then try to remember the performance through this
lens, and even though none of you represented insects directly, I do remember your hands
Vilma, and the way your fingers curled back toward the palm, even when you had extended
your whole arm to the farthest parts of the room.
The feelers might be the strings. Measuring weight, waiting in time.
Through forgetting, exuberance, reticence, failed duets, trios, campy kicklines, tiredness,
through your incessant rolling back and forth with more and more force, gradually producing
a body that must forget what it is engaged in, must rest, must lie.
Not a rhythm exactly but an affect comes. Sometimes this is where laughter comes. I don’t
remember how it ends.
I thought about being left out of the joke. Who is in on what in this world? Who is forgetting
and happy to have forgotten? Who still grasps at knowing? Why do they grasp, for belonging,
for curiosity’s sake?
With appreciation,
Laressa

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The performer behind the keyboard—at first, the musician, the “player” and later, a dancer
among three. Is the performer a musician? Is the performer a puppet master? A worker?

i/I like to see what comes from other people’s fantasies
i/I like to see what
i/I like to see what
i/I didn’t know why people were laughing
i/I didn’t see who was laughing
i/I didn’t realize I was sitting next to the smoke machine
i/I saw M across the room, not laughing
i/I saw A across the room, who never laughs
i/I saw U across the room, who had credits rolling across her face, which made people laugh
i/I heard the laughter of a few and then saw the face of the performer behind the keyboard
i/I heard the laughter of a few people then I scanned the room
i/I heard the laughter and saw the floating shoe, moved by the shift of weight between the
hanging rod and curtain, through the string tied to its strings

(feeler, ----- usually plural: ------------ long parts -- the head of an insect and
--------- creatures ---------- it touches things in order to discover what is ------
--)

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She has published books of poetry, as well as collaborative texts, including a series of feminist essays commissioned for Bergen Assembly 2019. She is devoted to her notebook and a dancing practice based on the radical notion of an imagining, sensing body. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation. She researches the dancer's use of language and the writer's use to/for dance.

Forgetful, you desert ---- -------------------------------------- -     ------------- you
know ---- forgetting -------- a way of constructing --------------------- of losing
touch with --- world. –Vilma Mankonen

VILMA MANKONEN / I HAVE PUT OUT FEELERS

BY LARESSA DICKEY