“ユアファントムアイ、アワクリスタライズペイン / 

ur phantom eyes, our crystalized pains ” 

(wip)

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機内で読んでいた茨木のり子の「美しい言葉とは」(1970) というエッセイの中で ”いつまでも忘れられない言葉は美しい言葉である—”として、”人間の弱さや弱点を隠さなかった言葉は、おおむね忘れがたい”とあり、書き記され残るはずの言葉が残らないものとして語られ、身体にその言葉が残るかどうかをある種の美しさの基準とすること、そしてこの弱さに対する思考は、訓練された身体が弱さや弱点を消すのではなく隠さないことへの支えになるという、どのように身体を訓練していくかという自分の中にずっとある問いの一つに対してハッとさせられるものでした。言葉の美しさを緊張感や伝達正確性に対するせめてもの近似値への指向から語る中で、鴎外の短編「最後の一句」を挙げて“言葉の発し手と、受け手とが、ぴたり切りむすんだ時、初めて言葉が成立するという秘密”について書かれているのを読み、今回私が試行していること、『複数人で誰の身体でもない身体を立ち上げ、そこに生まれる新しい身体言語で観客にどう発話することができるか』と同じことを、文学の中で、さらに隠されたものとして鮮やかに語っているなと感嘆しました。

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There is no translation anywhere. 

This is not translation.

 

 So I need our own temporary new language even if it is ephemeral.

 To touch your wet phantoms.

 

“  ”

 

I would like to start by doubting it is taken as granted to us that my body is mine, and your body is yours. This doubt makes the boundaries blur not only my body but also other humans and non-humans and the meaning of “I” and “we” and “they”.

 

“       ”

 

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

 

 

This sentence is a quotation from the book “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.

 

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. 

 

 

I 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 never belonging to anyone with a movement that shows strange sensations like a feeling itself before that becomes an emotion. 

 

 

Lastly I would like to thank again to two amazing dancers, Ching Shu Huang, Géraldine Haas, who shared their bodies and creativities and Steven De Belder, Olga Rutayisire and Calvin Ferdinando Carrier and all other members who supported my research and the audience coming here today. 

 

 

 

Osamu Shikichi  / 28th June 2023 (Wed)