"My lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made"

「私の唇はあなたの耳に、あなたの手は私の手となり、私たちが作った影の下で動く言葉」

 - Hyper Ambient Club 2023 - 

  

 

 

 

 

About Title

 

The title of this performance was quoted from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean

Vuong, a novel written in the form of a letter to his mother, who cannot read English. The

Japanese title is my translation adapted to the performance and the concept of my

practice, which I have been consistently practicing through dance in recent years.

This sentence portrays the scene of Ocean, the son of immigrants from Vietnam to the

United States after the Vietnam War, trying to teach how to write and read English to his

mother by using his body when he back home, in the same way like his experience in the

after school class that his teacher taught him how to read and speak English by placing

her/his hand on the top of his hand, writing sentences together and whispering them in

his ear during an English extracurricular class for non-native English speaking children.

And after this attempt, the mother could not stand the frustration and the situation where

the hierarchy of mother and son seemed to be reversed and hit her son again. I felt this

act of treating the other's body as if it were one's own, offering one's own body as if it

were the other's, and moving one's body with blurred boundaries in order to obtain a new

language is what exactly I have been practicing recently: anonymizing the body, hacking

and sharing parts of it, and trying to recycle it.

I was impressed by the novel’s painful yet beautifully written complex identity struggles,

its questions about ideas of country and history, and its gaze at the United States from an

Asian’s perspective. The experience of reading the letter written at the age of 28, the

same age as me, over and over again in Brussels, where I live now and where various

languages are spoken, and in Senegal, a Muslim country that has been colonized by

France and where people speak French as a common language and exchange Islamic

greetings in Arabic, even though they speak their own language called Wölöf,

unexpectedly led me to quote part of it as the title at the end.

We hope you can catch a glimpse of the moment when something new words are uttered,

like words moving underneath the shadows, from the body that is shared like royalty free

materials and rises up to the surface momentary being without belonging to someone

derived from a feeling itself before that becomes an emotion with a movement that shows

strange sensations.

Lastly I would like to express my deepest gratitude to everyone on credit, including all the

dancers who created the work together, the dramaturge, the coordinators, Creative

Center Osaka, people from Chishima Foundation for Creative Osaka, and to the

audience.

 

Osamu Shikichi        

​

​

​

From Dramaturge

​

The sea from the beach of Barcelona in February is like two lines

of the blues - a transparent pale blue and a deep peacock blue -

brushed horizontally between the light blue of the sky and the

beach’s beige. Watching the scenery makes me feel like I can get

out of myself. Even now, in the off-season, there are lots of locals

and dogs walking around, ceaselessly.

I saw the sea of the same blue on the beach of Crete in Greece,

also in the Mediterranean. It was last summer and there were many

people, like a public swimming pool during summer vacation

before the pandemic. It was so much fun to see the people of all

ages there, tall and short, thin and big, all with different bodies.

Then, suddenly I realized that the perfectly proportioned human

bodies of ancient Greek sculptures made of marble and bronze

that I saw in the museum before I went to the sea are just an ideal.

There is no such body as the bronze statue of Poseidon in my high

school history textbook. Such an idealized image is established by

ignoring the reality full of variety I saw on the beach of Crete.

Today in the 21st century, unlike ancient Greece where you had

to go to a special place like a temple to see such images, you are

always surrounded by the flood of images everywhere. On a

smartphone display that is always in your hand, you can watch any

pictures and images, true or false, from all over the world, 24 hours

a day if you want. However, most of these images are edited and

directed with some intention, and are far from the truth. They are

just what we can stare at from a safe zone, never to be touched

through the display, never to affect each other. This is not like

walking through the sand, getting your feet caught in the soft sand,

and then turning up the collar of your jacket to look out over the

sea in Barcelona because the sea breeze is much stronger than

you think.

The sea just keeps waving up and down, reflecting the dark and

light colors of the sky, without any intentions. However, the images

inside the display usually have some ideal face or body as the

unspoken rule, choreographed to move our emotions and

fingertips in some direction, for example, to press the like or

purchase button. When I stare blankly at the sea which seems

uninterested in such manipulations, I find the shapes and

movements of the people around me more interesting than usual,

just as I did on the beach in Crete. I look closely at the details of

someone’s body in front of me, not the image of an ideal face or

body that I’m always made to assume. Let’s focus our awareness

and senses on the shape and movement of the fingers, arms, torso,

legs, and feet, which cannot be fully described in words, and on

the unfathomable energy inside our skin. Then, our self-image and

self-consciousness will become unimportant, and we can move in

a different way. This place where you have come today also makes

it easy to do that, so I hope you will try.

​

Paku Kenyu

​

​