Nefeli Gioti (she/her)was born in Athens. She is a dance researcher, choreographer and dancer who works between Greece and Sweden. She has completed her MA in choreography at the University of Arts in Stockholm as well as her BA studies in Environmental Science in Greece. She has worked as a performer and artistic collaborator in numerous choreographic works and projects in Greece, Germany, France, and Sweden. Her choreographic work is emerging and revolving within and through the intersection of dance, choreography, artistic research, performance and speculative fabulation. She explores the action of confusing, the difference in practice between meaning and sense, the conditions which make them emerge and/or disappear and the relation between facts and fiction. Her work delves into the narrative operation in the fields of dance and choreography by exploring discursive practices. giotinefeli.wixsite.com/research-choreograph

Since the evening of Friday 26th of April, I have been thinking of and with the choreographic work “I have put out feelers” by Vilma Mankonen. Part of this process has been sensing how a choreographic work “is working” on me while I stay with it for a while. Thinking with and about the work has been like letting things settle in place, every day in a slightly different place -if that day there is a place- and how this is a resonance of a dance.
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Today I found a small snail in my fridge. Instead of writing, I find myself observing it, making a small kit for it and letting it walk on the skin of my hands, watching it grow its feelers to sense by its senses (which will remain a mystery to me) whatever surrounds it or whatever the snail is immersed in or the place it is traversing.
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Since the evening of the performance, I have been thinking about how can we be forgetful of the normative promises of our lives and allow ourselves to abandon those promises to make other kinds of promises. And that abandonment feels like a passive stance. But is it? In front of this dead-end question, I allow myself to forget it and pose a new one. What kind of forgetfulness might that be?
This kind of forgetfulness is not at all a loss of memory. It is more a forgetfulness that allows us to let go exactly because we remember. It is a forgetfulness that springs from remembering.
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This is something this work helped me to remember.
In this capitalistic world of violence, wars, poverty, normativity, and racism we are tired! Some more than others… and this is not what I am trying to write about and maybe it is all about that at the same time.
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In studio 1, they step into the space in front of us and at the same time they step somewhere else.
They step with certainty as if there is nothing that might fail.
Everything is part of it no matter what.
The only thing is acknowledging this condition, in common.
They are stepping further into this place. They are taking us with them.
This time it happens through feelers growing from their pelvis.
Feelers grow as this persisting movement of the pelvis opens up space.
I feel pain, pleasure, power and weakness. All at once.
And I smile.
I imagine how it could be if we could make space for this sensation of “It is alright”.
I recognise the struggle, to create and maintain spaces where things can still be alright.
It requires effort.
This is a struggle that we need to go through because some are more tired than others. There we meet.

We are together.
We are different and we are together. And this reminds me of some words from Audre Lorde.

“The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them and lessens the threat of their difference.”

How to let go of anything else (competition, success, ego, individualism, abuse, mistreatment) that disrupts this sensation?
I do not know and probably they do not know either but we are struggling to find out.
We insist.
We grow feelers.
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Imagine if we would be forgetful of the insisting force to forget that we have a pelvis.
Imagine that we allow ourselves to move and be moved by the pelvis.
The space of the pelvis
This enclosed and permeable space
The space in-between
This holding space
The space where things come in and out
This forgotten space
The space where the anus and uterus inhabit
This leaking, spilling, hermetic, and absorptive space
This stigmatised and abjected space
The space where we send our breathing and feel for a moment like breathing whales
This carrier bag of organs, intestines, bones, cartilage
The pelvis, the place where grief inhabits
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In greek folklore dances the space of the pelvis is mostly ignored.
We move our feet, hands but this space of our bodies is neglected
Is dangerous and filthy and is better to remain immobile.
It is sensual and thus forgotten.
I grew up in a culture in which as a female body moving my pelvis meant I was provoking, I was easy, cheap and accessible.
I remember that moving my pelvis was always to attract someone else, not a necessary movement to connect with a sensation of joy and fulfilment.
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The anus
The most disgraced part of our body is also beautifully finding shelter in the space of the pelvis.
Recently, I read the article “Annal Bodies/Annal Politics” by Slavcho Dimitrov, published in Maksa magazine. There Slavcho Dimitrov writes:











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Imagine if we had feelers growing from our pelvis, our anus or navels?
What if by those feelers we would be able to communicate without words, in ways that we do not know, exchange in ways that we have not imagined up till now? How would that be/sense/feel like?
What if we closed our eyes and allowed ourselves to navigate our world through those feelers?
How this world would feel and smell?
Would there be war, poverty, racism, normativity and capitalism?
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We grow feelers and sometimes we offer them to spaces where they are mistreated.
I lie in my bed, close my eyes and imagine this place where I could call home. Several feelers are reaching out to my sorrows, disappointments and failures. Several feelers reach out to my body, to my damaged feelers and regeneration takes place. Then we laugh and cry shamelessly. Forgetful. Remembering to fiercely attempt again.
Until this will no longer be the case.
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I am in love with the world and sometimes the world is you and sometimes it is a million other things and sometimes it's even more than all of these.
But I have no spacetime for this, I have multiple deadlines approaching.
I am failing to produce myself as a successful entrepreneur. I am failing to produce myself as a successful product.
And this feels like a liberation and a sucking failure.
I ask another question. Does the economy of performing arts require us to perform our variation of feelers only to appropriate and cut or render them useless and abused?
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1. Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984)
2. Slavcho Dimitrov, Annal Bodies/Annal Politics, Volume 38, issue 217-218, Editor-in-chief: Pia Brezavšček, Maska , 2023

"Continuing the project of anal politics initiated by Hocquenghem, in this last section of my essay I would like to extend his imagination and politics, especially his insistence on plunging into the depths of the cultural anxieties centred around the disgraced and objected anus, to imagine an alternative resistance and transformative politics. Such that would not simply reproduce the negative and fixed semantic registers gathered around the anus, or the abject, nor would surrender to assimilation in accordance to the phallocratic logic of masculinity, (self)mastery, sovereignty, identity, individualism, and hetero-patriarchal capitalistic normativity. This proposal points towards descending in the lower regions of the anus, the bottom, bottomhood, debasement, and abjection, and the attached anxieties about passivity, vulnerability, penetrability, receptiveness and powerlessness, to devise multiple meanings, affects, pleasures, positioning and strategies. Therefrom, I propose to embrace the stubborn attachments of the anus with abjection, shame, passivity, vulnerability, openness, corporeality, loss of identity/subjectivity, and non-reproductivity, while simultaneously opening these terms and envisioning solidarities and alliance beyond the identitarian confines.”

VILMA MANKONEN / I HAVE PUT OUT FEELERS

BY NEFELI GIOTI

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