For this episode we speak to Claricia Parinussa, who discusses the ideas that have developed since her previous work with Rhubaba in 2018 for the Such Tender Bodies Cannot Bear So Much Pressure exhibition. Claricia describes how the thoughts and conversations that arise through her research become embedded within her performance works in addition to discussing bodily knowledge(s), how time is constructed as a Western object that is rarely contested and working with arts institutions.
CP: Claricia Parinussa
KK: Khadea Kuchenmeister
LT: Laura Tully
NR: Natasha Ruwona
NR:Claricia — you created a new work as part of Rhubaba’s such tender bodies cannot bear so much pressure exhibition in 2017. This includes responding to other works, performance, sounds and garments. Can you start with chatting about some of the research you did during that project and how it has informed your work since?
CP:Yeah, just it’s funny… I was kind of thinking back to the show the other day. I suppose in the first instance it came from the conversations with Tako [Taal] and with Lauren [Printy Currie]. It was kind of waiting and seeing in a way, Tako’s film was already there and we were able to meet and have a bit of a chat about it and what Lauren was creating. We were talking through materials and ideas and our thoughts were kind of coming together where we had different different ways of thinking through things.
So I think my process… and how each of the works came about, that took a bit more time as the process went on and as it became clearer how the space was going to be and all of these things. So, the physical elements kind of came earlier on and I was in dialogue with Siobhan [Scott, previous Rhubaba committee member] a lot which was just really great to be able to think about my work as being able to come out through these different materials in a way. And to be invited in that way, rather than being invited to respond to something that’s already existing. Like, ‘this exhibition is already up, can you respond to it’? It was actually becoming part of the actual thinking process of that itself was, yeah, it was really great.
I think knowing that my parts were kind of literally the moving parts. There were some things that were decided really, really early on and other things that we just sort of learnt to trust, as they would become clear much closer to the time. I wrote some texts as well at the time. I actually pulled them out recently. Some of the things that I had written at the time (and I didn’t really know what they meant to me fully) they’ve kind of come back around now. It’s just interesting looking back at them and what I thought I was meaning at the time and then what those things mean to me now. It’s a much deeper kind of understanding. And so there’s these kinds of threads that have still come through largely and most of it has — is, still coming through my practice now I would say, in different ways.
KK:So, a lot of your research is around knowledge and the knowledge as knowing felt within bodies and passed through bodies. Could you talk a little bit about your research and about that?
CP:Yeah. I think there’s a sort of line I kept writing to myself, at some point, just: the knowing that it is felt. I think it is probably inherent in being a kind of movement practitioner. But I suppose in the ways that, in my practice or in my performances, it’s more about coming into a kind of, maybe a state? Or it’s a series of things or a kind of structure that I follow that lets me find things. I think that’s what I’ve been developing a little bit in terms of thinking about knowledge that’s held through bodies and passed on through bodies. And that’s not necessarily danced languages. I mean, that is a form — [one of] many, many forms, but also there’s maybe forms that are less explicit than certain movements. And even the conversation actually for this started with “gestures” in the original invitation from Siobhan. And, thinking about it, what does that even mean to everyone: “Gesture?” I think my sense of knowledge held in the body for years has come through a lot deeper now. I felt more acutely it is something that can’t be explained or kind of rationalized in words or even in thought, it’s just felt.
I don’t know if I can even speak to it but it’s something that’s maybe in between encompassing something, everything… or between intuition and inherited knowledge and the ways that we inherit certain forms of knowledge and patterns. And they might be traumas or trying to respond to this. Or all of those. Or learning. I had a moment where I was learning a new physical language and it already felt familiar. I don’t know, but there was just something in learning this particular dance form that I felt like my body on some level already knew it. In some way it knew or it was recognisable or familiar. And I hadn’t seen much of it before so I knew it wasn’t me visually taking something on. My trust in that kind of knowledge is deepened a lot just now. I guess that’s intuition but it’s also something more and what that is to be working in movement to generate that knowledge or to unearth that knowledge.
A lot of the time I don’t really know what a performance is until after I’ve done it. So that makes describing and writing copy really hard but since the show [Such Tender Bodies…] I’ve had some sense of that really working. I’d gotten into really good practice with Francis [Dosoo] and working with sound. Then after that, I was asked to be part of my mentor, Lucy Suggate’s work Spirit Compass and we did some of the last performances, at the end of January, I think it was. And that was kind of a gift to be part of really because it’s kind of like what I do… but to be in a state kind of collectively for two and a half hours and finding all that knowledge and being in that particular constellation. I had these really strong images that would come through and they would just be really clear for me. It’s actually just now, even in the last couple of weeks, that I’ve been researching different things and finding out what those images actually are. And again, it relates back to a kind of knowledge I couldn’t have known and because I hadn’t found this thing before, so yes, it’s [a theme that is] coming up really strongly.
KK:That’s really interesting, ‘cause it feels like you’re having conversations with some of your past work and it’s deepening some of those threads within your research. You have conversations with your collaborators, who you work with and are embedded in the performances and the performance process. It would be really interesting to hear how these non-public aspects are transcribed into the bodily movements.
CP:I think it feels like writing something that’s not been written, a transcription in a sense. The conversations are maybe more of a presence, but I don’t know. There’s less of a direct transference I suppose, from a conversation or thought or word into physical movements that I consciously make. But definitely even if it’s a conversation with myself it has kind of a presence. They’re almost like they can be premonitions in a way.
There was one performance I made before 2012 and I didn’t know what it was, I just had these images that were coming up kind of strongly, and I didn’t know what they were. So I just kind of created with that in mind. And about nine months later I saw some images in a very different situation, which, finally, explained what those images were that I’d seen. They were images on a CT scan. and what was happening with my body at the time they were able to tell me that this was happening for a good few months. So this thing that was like growing, was growing whilst I was making that work.
Ever since then I had this sense of it’s like a language in kind of making something or performing something that your / our bodies are always trying to tell us things. I don’t know if we are able to understand those things fully. The next time I came to make a work, which felt quite important to me, I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder what it is now to come to making the work?’ When I think that I know what the work is about, the same thing happens. What I thought it was about, is something much, much more expanded than what I thought I was doing at the time.
In terms of with collaborators, I suppose for example, with, Francis and the performances, we kind of worked with this structure or trajectory of water as changing different states. The images that we went into brought me into the particular phase of coming into Lucy’s work, which was also to do with water and the sea. In terms of thoughts and things circling, I think everything’s kind of in an ether somehow. It’s in this dense ether of thoughts, of knowings and… kind of does its own thing from the conversations. And then some of that will trace back through the movement, unconsciously, or it might be a link. If someone’s watching, then they might get something from that. But it’s maybe not something I’ve explicitly tried to say.
Sometimes even moving is an undoing of thoughts and conversations that I have or what I have to have. Or what’s unearthed through those and it’s kind of necessary practice in a way. [I’ve been] working with Sequoia Barnes and we’ve been in conversation for two years in this specific way. We kind of have constant conversation that has a presence kind of directly, maybe in certain decisions that I make about work. But it’s also present directly in a lot more ways than I’m aware of or in control of. Things have come up in those conversations, which are more about things to be released. Or it’s about coming into clarity about a statement or some kind of resistance to being defined in certain ways.
I think the movement isn’t necessarily the outcome of conversations but it’s in reaction to sometimes. I guess in collaborating I kind of work with one person on each specific element and they might not be in conversation with each other about this. So the performance can also become like a meeting point of these conversations (which is where I think my new work’s going) where some people I’m just in conversation with privately and other people will have a bit of crossover. I think it’s a kind of constellation of conversations which will eventually sit in time and space in some way. I don’t know how yet. I suppose I would have made and premiered that work like two months ago, the 23rd of May. I was gonna make a whole new piece in five months with new collaborators. To think about that now is kind of crazy in a way, I’m only just getting to a sense of what that work should be, or is. Now I have this kind of working on slow time which feels necessary.
NR:Can I just go back a little bit to make a comment, about what you were saying about felt knowledge… that really resonated with me. I’ve been thinking about this idea of the post-memory, as conceived by Marienne Hirsch and how our collective and cultural histories are passed down within our bodies. We remember things we didn’t experience firsthand… or have knowledge of things that didn’t require study. It just got me thinking about how there’s people left outside or on the margins. They’ve had to actually search for histories and stories. They can still exist within us and it reminds me of how our body really knows itself and the trust signs it gives us. And I know you’ve been thinking about time as something that is nonlinear and having it’s like multiplicities and non binary thinking. Could you talk a little bit about that?
CP:It was really nice to hear you speak about that. You said: ‘our bodies know themselves and we need to trust that’. I think you’re right. I’m definitely in the process right now of trying to understand or find my history because it’s not… it’s not there. Like it is there, but I can’t open up a book in the same way and find that really. Through other bodies, through my grandmother and having those conversations, it’s kind of like reaching back all the time. But knowing that this body is the resource too, it just doesn’t tell us information in the same way. And memory is a form of time, I think that always feels really present in practice and in moving.
And then coming back to time, and time outside of the confines of Western conception… I think everyone’s really hyper aware of it. It has become some kind of new trope or something.
‘Oh, what even is time?’
‘Time’s moving in a different way right now’.
‘I don’t feel time’.
‘Yeah, what day is it? I don’t even know’.
We’re really suspended in that at the moment and being hyper aware of that and how much we subscribed to these constructs that have come from these ideologies. There’s that pressure of… ‘well it’s always been this way you know.’ Blah, blah, blah. But we’re just adhering to things because of that, so there’s no other logic than that. So time itself has perpetuated itself as the norm, because over time it’s had this like repetitive thing and now generations later we’re like well, ‘this is what time is’.
But someone just decided. Like somebody decided that white supremacy was a thing and then people believed them. And here we are. So I suppose being in connection with the body in a certain way a body, one’s body, affords that knowledge to expand what time is and how time is held in the body in a different way. And I suppose, in a personal sense, I feel like I have a disconnected sense of time in my body because of certain procedures I have been through. Like my immune system is five years old, which you can think about one way, but in another way, I think it’s interesting there are already different forms of time in my body and what that means.
Being in this moment now it’s about finding a different sense of agency with time and being really, really aware of what people ask and demand of me and having much stricter boundaries with what is maybe offered to me and sort of counter-offer for myself or artists I’m working with. We’ve seen that we’re bound to these constraints which are set by ‘institutional time.’ It’s those systems that the arts doesn’t think it’s so dependent on but it really is and that’s the irony.
There’s so much care missing in everything, because to me care equals time. I mean, Natasha, we’ve spoken about this a lot before and it’s evident in so many ways. It’s seen as some kind of resistance or being ungrateful, or even rude to say to somebody: ‘you’ve offered me this thing, but the thing that you’re asking me to do it would take a lot more time.’ People seem really perplexed by that and if you’re a certain kind of artist, you should be grateful that you’re being asked to do this ‘thing’. It’s quite telling how different, varying degrees of time are offered for different things to different artists and their communities.
I have two heads all the time as an artist myself or being part of an arts community. Then also as a producer and understanding what those like institutional thought processes are and knowing that actually, you are able to move things. There’s always more room than what seemed to be available. Then this time [the Covid-19 pandemic] people who are used to working in that linear sense of time, it’s been really difficult for [those] people. I’ve sat in conversations where people are really struggling not being able to pin down dates for a certain thing that they said they were doing and… you know it’s kind of not about that at the moment. It’s about making five contingency plans because some people have this privilege of only ever having or always being able to work within linear time and linear time always working for them. I suppose working in different ways in movement and in different works there’s a kind of fluidity that I can feel. I can be on the new time because I have to be but I also can find that fluidity and I try to create that in spaces that I’m working. In Spirit Compass Lucy talks about (I forget the word she used) being in a kind of past and a present and a future all at the same time because movement affords us being in that state. I think performers can hold space in a certain way and can bring about that state of being suspended in time, or being in the past, present and future all at the same time. I think time is always folding into itself and expanding out from itself. Experiencing what I’ve gone through, locked down conditions, they weren’t new for me. Being immunosuppressed before, or in isolation, or in recovery I’ve sort of been bound by a kind of Western medical time. It’s that linear sort of thing of milestones and waiting and statistics and results for seven years just to find out if I would still be existing now. To come out of that and then into this kind of not knowing that we’re in now… it’s been something.
It gave me new questions about this trust that you were talking about Natasha as well. What we put into our bodies and the trust that is these Western ways of thinking and how that pervades medical thinking and what that takes away from us in terms of agency and reductive binarries of sickness and health. We’re being reminded that we’ve never really had control of anything anyway and people aren’t really dealing with that. Time and these other constructs trick us into thinking we have certainties about things and we really don’t! I think this is a time to come back to the knowledge(s) that we know in different ways.
NR:I think for communities of colour this year has been not new. In the ways of how we’ve moved with ourselves and how we’ve experienced things and considering our bodies and spaces; considering things like time and considering Western medicine; that’s never been new for us but it has kind of made it a more widespread and mainstream understanding. So it’s been very interesting to hear people say stuff and it’s like: ‘I knew that’ [laughs]. Things like medical racism and how we have to carry our bodies and support our bodies in space and be considerate of the spaces that we move around. These things are known. I think with time it has become such a fluid thing this year. As I say, I don’t think that’s new but it’s interesting how it’s come to the forefront this year. It’s making people think about these sorts of things (think about them at all) and maybe consider them in new ways as well.
CP:My phone has not stopped, my emails feel… it’s like suddenly people want a certain knowledge that they’re realising they don’t have certain tools. And it’s really interesting, institutions realising they have anti-racist work to do. And it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, now, you know’. Oh, right. ‘Cause we already knew, but we told you back then!’ ‘But that’s fine, I want to post the black square’. It’s really interesting in the ways that people are navigating this kind of ‘reveal’ of the things that they don’t know or that they don’t have and how we’re negotiating that in ourselves I think I’m still making sense of it, because it’s kind of wild. When you have certain conversations, or where you see things and you think this is not new working — working outside of those systems is not new. It’s just new to some people. So it feels like everything’s been kind of like opened, and I hope — I feel we’re moving. I hope we’re moving towards a way where those different forms of knowledge are acknowledged. There’s a lot of work to do.
NR:Yes, absolutely.
CP:Yeah, there’s always ways through it… I feel like I got really negative at the end there. I don’t mean to be.
KK:You got real!
CP:Okay.
NR:It’s the truth though isn’t it? But yes, sometimes that is negative and I think that’s okay.
CP:Or it’s real.
KK:The Western ‘disruption’ because they don’t have the tools for this type of condition. It’s actually a lot of people in our communities, or in different ‘othered’ communities have experienced what it’s like to work in these conditions.
CP:Yeah.
KK:It’s also very sad to know that people haven’t been able to open their eyes and really live outside of their privilege. Or I don’t know if you can do that. Is it possible?
CP:I think also I hold a particular space that I’m always really aware of and I have to be really careful of. That’s been something that I’ve been kind of negotiating and trying to interrogate in a way. Because I’m noticing that I’m visible for certain things in certain ways, which I shouldn’t even be visible. I shouldn’t be the first person that people think of for a certain conversation. The fact that I am and the people who have taught me are less so is just emblematic of what the issues are. So it’s really weird… but also a weird moment. There’s a way into having that conversation now because it can’t be argued anymore. And I’m ‘visible’ and you’ve put me in this position. So I’m going to open the conversation in this way and tell you that, and I’m not even the person you need to be having a conversation with, but let’s talk about that!
LT:It kind of links back to what you’re saying about institutional time as well. I guess it links ultimately to funding timelines in some ways but you’ve got this institutional time where ‘X has to be delivered at Y point.’ What you were talking about how institutions are approaching you and they’ve sort of enabled like a space and a dialogue with you I think that kinda ties into how these institutions work. It’s a kind of reluctance to look outside of what you already have in place. Any sort of threat to their structures… how do they go about dismantling them? Which is what people talk about constantly. But actually when you have moments like the pandemic or like the Black Lives Matter movements; they can’t seem to quite step up and deliver these sort of things that they rhetorically talk about constantly.
CP:Like the point that everyone’s missing is you have to dismantle it in yourself first. You have to find it. Start there. The institutional speak is very external. It’s very white supremacist. You want to have a conversation? Let’s have a conversation. I am your palatable token, but sorry. And also it’s about decision making and the decisions that are made before the decisions are made. ‘This selection panel decided that this person should get this thing.’ Well who decided that these people should be on the selection panel? Who decided that person should decide who gets to be on the panel? Noone’s actually thinking they’re just upholding things that they’ve been given and don’t want to upset things or do things in a different way. The disruption feels necessary and something to be in.
It’s really good to have conversations as well with each other. I think that is something that’s been great about this time. Like I’ve had work to do of course, but sometimes our conversation is necessary.
For this episode we speak to Claricia Parinussa, who discusses the ideas that have developed since her previous work with Rhubaba in 2018 for the Such Tender Bodies Cannot Bear So Much Pressure exhibition. Claricia describes how the thoughts and conversations that arise through her research become embedded within her performance works in addition to discussing bodily knowledge(s), how time is constructed as a Western object that is rarely contested and working with arts institutions.
CP: Claricia Parinussa
KK: Khadea Kuchenmeister
LT: Laura Tully
NR: Natasha Ruwona
NR:Claricia — you created a new work as part of Rhubaba’s such tender bodies cannot bear so much pressure exhibition in 2017. This includes responding to other works, performance, sounds and garments. Can you start with chatting about some of the research you did during that project and how it has informed your work since?
CP:Yeah, just it’s funny… I was kind of thinking back to the show the other day. I suppose in the first instance it came from the conversations with Tako [Taal] and with Lauren [Printy Currie]. It was kind of waiting and seeing in a way, Tako’s film was already there and we were able to meet and have a bit of a chat about it and what Lauren was creating. We were talking through materials and ideas and our thoughts were kind of coming together where we had different different ways of thinking through things.
So I think my process… and how each of the works came about, that took a bit more time as the process went on and as it became clearer how the space was going to be and all of these things. So, the physical elements kind of came earlier on and I was in dialogue with Siobhan [Scott, previous Rhubaba committee member] a lot which was just really great to be able to think about my work as being able to come out through these different materials in a way. And to be invited in that way, rather than being invited to respond to something that’s already existing. Like, ‘this exhibition is already up, can you respond to it’? It was actually becoming part of the actual thinking process of that itself was, yeah, it was really great.
I think knowing that my parts were kind of literally the moving parts. There were some things that were decided really, really early on and other things that we just sort of learnt to trust, as they would become clear much closer to the time. I wrote some texts as well at the time. I actually pulled them out recently. Some of the things that I had written at the time (and I didn’t really know what they meant to me fully) they’ve kind of come back around now. It’s just interesting looking back at them and what I thought I was meaning at the time and then what those things mean to me now. It’s a much deeper kind of understanding. And so there’s these kinds of threads that have still come through largely and most of it has — is, still coming through my practice now I would say, in different ways.
KK:So, a lot of your research is around knowledge and the knowledge as knowing felt within bodies and passed through bodies. Could you talk a little bit about your research and about that?
CP:Yeah. I think there’s a sort of line I kept writing to myself, at some point, just: the knowing that it is felt. I think it is probably inherent in being a kind of movement practitioner. But I suppose in the ways that, in my practice or in my performances, it’s more about coming into a kind of, maybe a state? Or it’s a series of things or a kind of structure that I follow that lets me find things. I think that’s what I’ve been developing a little bit in terms of thinking about knowledge that’s held through bodies and passed on through bodies. And that’s not necessarily danced languages. I mean, that is a form — [one of] many, many forms, but also there’s maybe forms that are less explicit than certain movements. And even the conversation actually for this started with “gestures” in the original invitation from Siobhan. And, thinking about it, what does that even mean to everyone: “Gesture?” I think my sense of knowledge held in the body for years has come through a lot deeper now. I felt more acutely it is something that can’t be explained or kind of rationalized in words or even in thought, it’s just felt.
I don’t know if I can even speak to it but it’s something that’s maybe in between encompassing something, everything… or between intuition and inherited knowledge and the ways that we inherit certain forms of knowledge and patterns. And they might be traumas or trying to respond to this. Or all of those. Or learning. I had a moment where I was learning a new physical language and it already felt familiar. I don’t know, but there was just something in learning this particular dance form that I felt like my body on some level already knew it. In some way it knew or it was recognisable or familiar. And I hadn’t seen much of it before so I knew it wasn’t me visually taking something on. My trust in that kind of knowledge is deepened a lot just now. I guess that’s intuition but it’s also something more and what that is to be working in movement to generate that knowledge or to unearth that knowledge.
A lot of the time I don’t really know what a performance is until after I’ve done it. So that makes describing and writing copy really hard but since the show [Such Tender Bodies…] I’ve had some sense of that really working. I’d gotten into really good practice with Francis [Dosoo] and working with sound. Then after that, I was asked to be part of my mentor, Lucy Suggate’s work Spirit Compass and we did some of the last performances, at the end of January, I think it was. And that was kind of a gift to be part of really because it’s kind of like what I do… but to be in a state kind of collectively for two and a half hours and finding all that knowledge and being in that particular constellation. I had these really strong images that would come through and they would just be really clear for me. It’s actually just now, even in the last couple of weeks, that I’ve been researching different things and finding out what those images actually are. And again, it relates back to a kind of knowledge I couldn’t have known and because I hadn’t found this thing before, so yes, it’s [a theme that is] coming up really strongly.
KK:That’s really interesting, ‘cause it feels like you’re having conversations with some of your past work and it’s deepening some of those threads within your research. You have conversations with your collaborators, who you work with and are embedded in the performances and the performance process. It would be really interesting to hear how these non-public aspects are transcribed into the bodily movements.
CP:I think it feels like writing something that’s not been written, a transcription in a sense. The conversations are maybe more of a presence, but I don’t know. There’s less of a direct transference I suppose, from a conversation or thought or word into physical movements that I consciously make. But definitely even if it’s a conversation with myself it has kind of a presence. They’re almost like they can be premonitions in a way.
There was one performance I made before 2012 and I didn’t know what it was, I just had these images that were coming up kind of strongly, and I didn’t know what they were. So I just kind of created with that in mind. And about nine months later I saw some images in a very different situation, which, finally, explained what those images were that I’d seen. They were images on a CT scan. and what was happening with my body at the time they were able to tell me that this was happening for a good few months. So this thing that was like growing, was growing whilst I was making that work.
Ever since then I had this sense of it’s like a language in kind of making something or performing something that your / our bodies are always trying to tell us things. I don’t know if we are able to understand those things fully. The next time I came to make a work, which felt quite important to me, I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder what it is now to come to making the work?’ When I think that I know what the work is about, the same thing happens. What I thought it was about, is something much, much more expanded than what I thought I was doing at the time.
In terms of with collaborators, I suppose for example, with, Francis and the performances, we kind of worked with this structure or trajectory of water as changing different states. The images that we went into brought me into the particular phase of coming into Lucy’s work, which was also to do with water and the sea. In terms of thoughts and things circling, I think everything’s kind of in an ether somehow. It’s in this dense ether of thoughts, of knowings and… kind of does its own thing from the conversations. And then some of that will trace back through the movement, unconsciously, or it might be a link. If someone’s watching, then they might get something from that. But it’s maybe not something I’ve explicitly tried to say.
Sometimes even moving is an undoing of thoughts and conversations that I have or what I have to have. Or what’s unearthed through those and it’s kind of necessary practice in a way. [I’ve been] working with Sequoia Barnes and we’ve been in conversation for two years in this specific way. We kind of have constant conversation that has a presence kind of directly, maybe in certain decisions that I make about work. But it’s also present directly in a lot more ways than I’m aware of or in control of. Things have come up in those conversations, which are more about things to be released. Or it’s about coming into clarity about a statement or some kind of resistance to being defined in certain ways.
I think the movement isn’t necessarily the outcome of conversations but it’s in reaction to sometimes. I guess in collaborating I kind of work with one person on each specific element and they might not be in conversation with each other about this. So the performance can also become like a meeting point of these conversations (which is where I think my new work’s going) where some people I’m just in conversation with privately and other people will have a bit of crossover. I think it’s a kind of constellation of conversations which will eventually sit in time and space in some way. I don’t know how yet. I suppose I would have made and premiered that work like two months ago, the 23rd of May. I was gonna make a whole new piece in five months with new collaborators. To think about that now is kind of crazy in a way, I’m only just getting to a sense of what that work should be, or is. Now I have this kind of working on slow time which feels necessary.
NR:Can I just go back a little bit to make a comment, about what you were saying about felt knowledge… that really resonated with me. I’ve been thinking about this idea of the post-memory, as conceived by Marienne Hirsch and how our collective and cultural histories are passed down within our bodies. We remember things we didn’t experience firsthand… or have knowledge of things that didn’t require study. It just got me thinking about how there’s people left outside or on the margins. They’ve had to actually search for histories and stories. They can still exist within us and it reminds me of how our body really knows itself and the trust signs it gives us. And I know you’ve been thinking about time as something that is nonlinear and having it’s like multiplicities and non binary thinking. Could you talk a little bit about that?
CP:It was really nice to hear you speak about that. You said: ‘our bodies know themselves and we need to trust that’. I think you’re right. I’m definitely in the process right now of trying to understand or find my history because it’s not… it’s not there. Like it is there, but I can’t open up a book in the same way and find that really. Through other bodies, through my grandmother and having those conversations, it’s kind of like reaching back all the time. But knowing that this body is the resource too, it just doesn’t tell us information in the same way. And memory is a form of time, I think that always feels really present in practice and in moving.
And then coming back to time, and time outside of the confines of Western conception… I think everyone’s really hyper aware of it. It has become some kind of new trope or something.
‘Oh, what even is time?’
‘Time’s moving in a different way right now’.
‘I don’t feel time’.
‘Yeah, what day is it? I don’t even know’.
We’re really suspended in that at the moment and being hyper aware of that and how much we subscribed to these constructs that have come from these ideologies. There’s that pressure of… ‘well it’s always been this way you know.’ Blah, blah, blah. But we’re just adhering to things because of that, so there’s no other logic than that. So time itself has perpetuated itself as the norm, because over time it’s had this like repetitive thing and now generations later we’re like well, ‘this is what time is’.
But someone just decided. Like somebody decided that white supremacy was a thing and then people believed them. And here we are. So I suppose being in connection with the body in a certain way a body, one’s body, affords that knowledge to expand what time is and how time is held in the body in a different way. And I suppose, in a personal sense, I feel like I have a disconnected sense of time in my body because of certain procedures I have been through. Like my immune system is five years old, which you can think about one way, but in another way, I think it’s interesting there are already different forms of time in my body and what that means.
Being in this moment now it’s about finding a different sense of agency with time and being really, really aware of what people ask and demand of me and having much stricter boundaries with what is maybe offered to me and sort of counter-offer for myself or artists I’m working with. We’ve seen that we’re bound to these constraints which are set by ‘institutional time.’ It’s those systems that the arts doesn’t think it’s so dependent on but it really is and that’s the irony.
There’s so much care missing in everything, because to me care equals time. I mean, Natasha, we’ve spoken about this a lot before and it’s evident in so many ways. It’s seen as some kind of resistance or being ungrateful, or even rude to say to somebody: ‘you’ve offered me this thing, but the thing that you’re asking me to do it would take a lot more time.’ People seem really perplexed by that and if you’re a certain kind of artist, you should be grateful that you’re being asked to do this ‘thing’. It’s quite telling how different, varying degrees of time are offered for different things to different artists and their communities.
I have two heads all the time as an artist myself or being part of an arts community. Then also as a producer and understanding what those like institutional thought processes are and knowing that actually, you are able to move things. There’s always more room than what seemed to be available. Then this time [the Covid-19 pandemic] people who are used to working in that linear sense of time, it’s been really difficult for [those] people. I’ve sat in conversations where people are really struggling not being able to pin down dates for a certain thing that they said they were doing and… you know it’s kind of not about that at the moment. It’s about making five contingency plans because some people have this privilege of only ever having or always being able to work within linear time and linear time always working for them. I suppose working in different ways in movement and in different works there’s a kind of fluidity that I can feel. I can be on the new time because I have to be but I also can find that fluidity and I try to create that in spaces that I’m working. In Spirit Compass Lucy talks about (I forget the word she used) being in a kind of past and a present and a future all at the same time because movement affords us being in that state. I think performers can hold space in a certain way and can bring about that state of being suspended in time, or being in the past, present and future all at the same time. I think time is always folding into itself and expanding out from itself. Experiencing what I’ve gone through, locked down conditions, they weren’t new for me. Being immunosuppressed before, or in isolation, or in recovery I’ve sort of been bound by a kind of Western medical time. It’s that linear sort of thing of milestones and waiting and statistics and results for seven years just to find out if I would still be existing now. To come out of that and then into this kind of not knowing that we’re in now… it’s been something.
It gave me new questions about this trust that you were talking about Natasha as well. What we put into our bodies and the trust that is these Western ways of thinking and how that pervades medical thinking and what that takes away from us in terms of agency and reductive binarries of sickness and health. We’re being reminded that we’ve never really had control of anything anyway and people aren’t really dealing with that. Time and these other constructs trick us into thinking we have certainties about things and we really don’t! I think this is a time to come back to the knowledge(s) that we know in different ways.
NR:I think for communities of colour this year has been not new. In the ways of how we’ve moved with ourselves and how we’ve experienced things and considering our bodies and spaces; considering things like time and considering Western medicine; that’s never been new for us but it has kind of made it a more widespread and mainstream understanding. So it’s been very interesting to hear people say stuff and it’s like: ‘I knew that’ [laughs]. Things like medical racism and how we have to carry our bodies and support our bodies in space and be considerate of the spaces that we move around. These things are known. I think with time it has become such a fluid thing this year. As I say, I don’t think that’s new but it’s interesting how it’s come to the forefront this year. It’s making people think about these sorts of things (think about them at all) and maybe consider them in new ways as well.
CP:My phone has not stopped, my emails feel… it’s like suddenly people want a certain knowledge that they’re realising they don’t have certain tools. And it’s really interesting, institutions realising they have anti-racist work to do. And it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, now, you know’. Oh, right. ‘Cause we already knew, but we told you back then!’ ‘But that’s fine, I want to post the black square’. It’s really interesting in the ways that people are navigating this kind of ‘reveal’ of the things that they don’t know or that they don’t have and how we’re negotiating that in ourselves I think I’m still making sense of it, because it’s kind of wild. When you have certain conversations, or where you see things and you think this is not new working — working outside of those systems is not new. It’s just new to some people. So it feels like everything’s been kind of like opened, and I hope — I feel we’re moving. I hope we’re moving towards a way where those different forms of knowledge are acknowledged. There’s a lot of work to do.
NR:Yes, absolutely.
CP:Yeah, there’s always ways through it… I feel like I got really negative at the end there. I don’t mean to be.
KK:You got real!
CP:Okay.
NR:It’s the truth though isn’t it? But yes, sometimes that is negative and I think that’s okay.
CP:Or it’s real.
KK:The Western ‘disruption’ because they don’t have the tools for this type of condition. It’s actually a lot of people in our communities, or in different ‘othered’ communities have experienced what it’s like to work in these conditions.
CP:Yeah.
KK:It’s also very sad to know that people haven’t been able to open their eyes and really live outside of their privilege. Or I don’t know if you can do that. Is it possible?
CP:I think also I hold a particular space that I’m always really aware of and I have to be really careful of. That’s been something that I’ve been kind of negotiating and trying to interrogate in a way. Because I’m noticing that I’m visible for certain things in certain ways, which I shouldn’t even be visible. I shouldn’t be the first person that people think of for a certain conversation. The fact that I am and the people who have taught me are less so is just emblematic of what the issues are. So it’s really weird… but also a weird moment. There’s a way into having that conversation now because it can’t be argued anymore. And I’m ‘visible’ and you’ve put me in this position. So I’m going to open the conversation in this way and tell you that, and I’m not even the person you need to be having a conversation with, but let’s talk about that!
LT:It kind of links back to what you’re saying about institutional time as well. I guess it links ultimately to funding timelines in some ways but you’ve got this institutional time where ‘X has to be delivered at Y point.’ What you were talking about how institutions are approaching you and they’ve sort of enabled like a space and a dialogue with you I think that kinda ties into how these institutions work. It’s a kind of reluctance to look outside of what you already have in place. Any sort of threat to their structures… how do they go about dismantling them? Which is what people talk about constantly. But actually when you have moments like the pandemic or like the Black Lives Matter movements; they can’t seem to quite step up and deliver these sort of things that they rhetorically talk about constantly.
CP:Like the point that everyone’s missing is you have to dismantle it in yourself first. You have to find it. Start there. The institutional speak is very external. It’s very white supremacist. You want to have a conversation? Let’s have a conversation. I am your palatable token, but sorry. And also it’s about decision making and the decisions that are made before the decisions are made. ‘This selection panel decided that this person should get this thing.’ Well who decided that these people should be on the selection panel? Who decided that person should decide who gets to be on the panel? Noone’s actually thinking they’re just upholding things that they’ve been given and don’t want to upset things or do things in a different way. The disruption feels necessary and something to be in.
It’s really good to have conversations as well with each other. I think that is something that’s been great about this time. Like I’ve had work to do of course, but sometimes our conversation is necessary.
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