BY LARESSA DICKEY

Written with and alongside Dørken

“A painting is not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick
presence all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history.”

John Cage


I.

You don’t know me. Our tenuous contact point is the aperture. In the dark, the sound is
immediate, whether it be the flapping of insect wings or their drone tone, we get the flick
before we can see, feel, swat. The sound is in, if we can hear it. You can have ears and still
not hear.

Two humans with pale skin wearing dark clothes moving in a darkness whose name is
darkness. In the familiar theatre reversing its facing. The mouthpiece of a cave. The promise
of being amplified.

Two humans bobbing in a corner under the city. Sounds from where? The sources don’t
matter or signify. The universe is here and we are inside: bobbing, whispering, swaying,
shaking, stepping, shimmying. Human bodies switching, hiding, a suit, a swanky dress, slit
and cut.

Dust settles. Particles in water, settle. Your breath stirs the atmosphere. The tuning circle
and the willing bodies. No goal, no direction, this slow time builds a silence around us.
Rasps. Hawks. Shhhs. Haaaaas on exhale. It takes all of us to hold the loose tightness of the
fabric of sound.

II.

At some point, your tasks diverge. One speaks while standing in a cloud of smoke, looking
like a nervous prophet trying to let a message come through. Another crouches in a darker
space, making subtle spinal movements, work with hands, touching, pushing, stirring up.

The first words emerge, a SIGN, meant to SAY. What I remember most are the fillers of that
first speaking (as if God wasn’t quite sure how to explain the need for life): um, like, um, um,
um.

Tiny evidence of attempts to touch something. But the actual words are astonishing: astone:
stun: stupefy: how did we get here?

And just as quickly, those actual words are left behind, as you dive back into elements:
breath, whisper, silence.

III.

Later you pull and hold the edges of the curtain with your feet—both now in platform shoes,
black and matching, that keep you off the floor. Special shoes reserved for this. Some
detailed actions are pronounced rituals.

The shoes say, we do this at this height until the atmosphere changes.
The shoes say, we above we reach we shove.

The walls of the cave shift. You play the game, trying to tone together at the same time
without planning. Someone next to me laughs.

The shh shh shhhah sequence is deeply satisfying, swaying hair, and a metronomic kind of
sway from guts from pubis.

Someone next to me cracks their knuckles. Is anyone breathing?

A deep play, a revolution of light into darkness. Something grows out of your voices and
joins together with what is WAY OUT HERE.

This is like overhearing a spell. The beginning of creation. Or the alchemy of how the third
thing is made from the first two. Whispered messages. Wishes. The subtle shift of habitat on
a microscopic level. The tone makes the universe. We stand here. The tone combines. We
bend down. The tone raises to the ceiling. We pause.

IV.

Yes, sometimes guttural sound, from the guts, but also the lighter ones, just off the teeth or
lips, from the shake of the brain within the skull and the shift of hair over your faces.

What’s always in darkness no matter how much we try to reveal it or see it?
Is there a secret being kept or is there a larger secret that even you don’t know is being
kept? Or is the secret keeping the secret from the secret itself?

The untrackable timing of sound. Is this dialogue? Is this speculation? Are we passing notes
across the cave? Or as J said once, whistling in the dark?

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.