Two Women - Breathing Life into Life by Lizzy Le Quesne
Thank you – for your simple self-love, and your freedom.
This joyful moment all allowed, allowing; while sister nestles, weighty on the ground in retching stretching through the push and grunt of giving birth, or mourning one's own dreadful harms.
Summer, evening, in a hot black box just off the Euston Road: two women – girls – alive! Seated on the floor in puffy dresses, rampant presence. Patience…
I half-see two vivacious children, sealed somewhere – upstairs and away – alone together.
Voluminous smock-like dresses cover all. Protective clothing. One in vital scarlet and the other dusty royal blue. Therein rests keen bare life aplenty, underneath those fulsome frocks; you two a multitude.
How now, you red-blue cows? Sat resolutely there, in golden stage-light – waiting, for a flush of certainty before you move. Waiting. And thus slips a breath, or fold, of critical importance – small but definite the signs of life.
So well I know this waiting – quiet, in a softly crumpled heap of cloth and self. So well, I know your gentle pangs, your shyness and your little laughs. So still you sit, and glow – like embers in a smouldering fire.
I do not require you to move, just yet. I am with you and your waiting. Warm hands, faint smile. You are partners in crime – and accomplices of mine – in letting life be game: a play of rare and delicate intensities. All shades of awfulness, of loss, and hope.
I am enchanted by your simpleness and youth; your round faces, thickset thighs and soft forgiving folds. You are more than dancers. You are raw, prolific lives – seated on the floor in pools of cushioned cloth like precious things. Why, yes! I share your glee and naughtiness; I feel your revolutionary guile; your bold insanity and goodness.
And just like that – a fresh green leaf lands silently beside me, as I write. Simple as a smile. It fell fast and mutely from the trees above, and rests there, pointing to my pelvis. It has not moved again.
Each of your soft bell dresses swallows you whole. They cover you, and yet they set you free. Loose and long – an artists’ smock, “reform dress” – they make space for movement and for play. No corsetry! Their bulkiness affords you freedom, and your modesty.
I glimpse ruffles of tulle beneath your calf-length skirts. Multiple layers of buoyant mesh render you triangular – more protective packaging than frilly petticoat. Soft bubble-wrap to your ingenious bones and flesh.
Glad of the wrapping, I feel your privacy and freedom and join in with, just by watching, your cushioned play, of shifting, settling, here and there.
You let little child-like noises escape you, in your waiting and your gentle starting, and they pierce the space – a gasp, a growl, a squeak – as movement takes you, bending, curling, hurling yourself heavily forwards into your own soft blue skirts. You – Blue – grunt and writhe on belly while your scarlet sister circles into space, head back, arms swinging crisscross through the air, orbiting and wrapping wildly her own heart and neck.
She spins and grins and drifts, a leaf in gusting wind, a formless blob of orange-red, a thing dissolved in motion and in space. Rising, uncoupled, she dangles interstellar – aloft, somehow upheld, a shimmering spark within the dense black casket of the stage.
This joyful moment all allowed, allowing; while sister nestles, weighty on the ground in retching stretching through the push and grunt of giving birth, or mourning one's own dreadful harms.
Don’t stop! Don’t stop from feeling – all of the calamity and poise of this sweet life.
Feeling hangs within you, and around you, as you become still – light and heavy both. And then again uncurling – pure gold leaf made flesh.
At any moment I could stop and shout out “help me!”… just as I could roll and stretch and swing myself into the world, along with you. But I can chose to feel and ride this dance with you, in and out of power. I will uncoil through time upon your backs and presage breath.
The sound – of sounding – voices, traditionally anathema to dance. The shadow cast across us – to be seen, not heard – you risk all, making noises in our stead. Not cruelly tearing breath from motion, or eliminating voice from breath – you play along the spectrum that is liveness – from sound to silence, movement to repose. Guttural or giggly, ferocious or afraid, your voices form a music with the swish and flop of body, feet and cloth.
You reveal (proclaim!) the pure disturbance of a human presence as we sit politely at your edges watching gentle wildness vitalise the night.
How now brown cows? You've merged. You’ve fudged each other's energetic worlds. One for the other, you perform a slither of the grace or gracelessness of life, the naturalness and stiff resistance – the tragicomedy we all endure. We could barely ask for more.
What simple guts and kindness you bestow us, dancing on my own behalf, catching and enunciating dainty smudges of the felt that pass through all our heaving bodied selves. Through all our lives. Shudders and slippings ten to the dozen unconsciously alive at any given moment.
Thank you – for your simple self-love, and your freedom.
The above writing was a spontaneous response to A Revealed Study by Serena Ruth & Franziska Boehm. Performed at ‘Resolution’, The Place Theatre, London 9th June 2022.
The duet was performed within an evening of three performances during the 2022 Resolution festival of new dance works for stage. A Revealed Study came after the structured improvisation surface tension of the unknown by Colleen Bartley / Beithe Movement Collective (which ended with the floating in the space of twisting sheets of gold leaf); and before Shallow Water Waves by Katie Serridge.
Serena Ruth and Franziska Boehm – A Revealed Study. Programme Note
How honest can we be in our reveal of what is true in our bodies right now, in this moment? Through nuanced processes of sensing, sounding, imagining and moving, this duet works to reveal honest expressions of moment to moment felt sensations; as discomfort, as bliss, as desire, as stuck, as rage, as fragile, as alive. From slow, subtle moments which feel vulnerable and shaky, to bold bouts of rage which are loud expressions of unadulterated truth, ‘A revealed study’ proposes permission; to feel without shame, to sense with greater respect, and to sound with truth always.