ClaireCunningham and Luke Pell for TWR/FST

CC Hi I’m Claire Cunningham, I’m a short white woman, blue eyes, short dark brown hair with-thanks to lockdown-the remains of grey dyed hair, I’m wearing clear rimmed glasses. I’m disabled and part of me are my 2 (NHS style) grey elbow crutches. I’m wearing a bright red plain sweatshirt and jeans.My pronouns are she/her.

LP I’m a quiet creature in a loud blouse, I’m long or willowy, fairly furry and white with blond closely shaved hair, grey eyes and full lips, I use the pronouns he, him, or they theirs but this is not us, this is just our invited voices, our breath Will we take a moment... to acknowledge all the lives that have been lost, all the folk who aren’t here, aren’t with us anymore, the absence of all those voices, all that lived experience, all that love and life. And what about all the folk who cantor wont or really struggle to be online, for whom this shiny dulling digital world doesn’t work, is inaccessible and...the quiet and the shy and the sad, the invisible, the forgotten, the entirely overwhelmed, exhausted and the bereft...

It takes, it will take more than a moment to sit with that, to sit with them and we must.

Where might we even begin from here...?

Tell me something you love?
Luke
Listening, well
Kissing
Sweat and breath and flesh
Leaning in, looking in someone else’s eye
The brush of a hand
TOUCH

Tell me something you love?
Claire
Hugs
Laughing
Being held
Looking in someone’s eyes
Hearing different voices all around me
People cooking for me

Tell me about somethings you have loved and lost?
CC
the person I am when I perform, the wholeness
the confidence being onstage brings me
sitting in the dark watching the theatre technicians set up a show
privacy
the feeling of contributing
rolling and squishing with Jess when we warm up to do the duet
the feeling of taking off in a plane

LP
My crip/queer family–found and made, always out there, on the road not on
screen
in the small scattering of spaces I could go where I felt safe
and All the alongsides and inbetweens, the chance to encounter, meet all the folk
I don’t know to hear things I was not told, did not live or see
All the folks who aren’t online and all the folks who aren’t outside-who have
always been running on different rhythms.
The lonely folk, bar stools...and all the places people go to gather for company,
for solace, to dream, for joy

What about
Time and space to grieve
To sit with
To not move on
To linger, to lament

How do we hold those who have been shattered, those who don’t know how to cope? Who don’t know how to function in these different ways? Those who have carried others and need respite. How are we the spaces for them? Being prepared not for bums on seats but tears in the foyer. Knowing the first time I see a friend again will break me...how do we not forget those who still cannot come out? Don’t just tell them they can watch it online....know now that there is now no excuse not to offer this, but it doesn’t not get to be the excuse....

How do we really meet ‘and touch’ across geographies and generations, now?
What will it take for us to feel at home–safe-in our own skins?
What will grow in difficult conditions?
How do we find language for loss?
How do we stay soft and slow and strongHow do we hold each other again?
What about hope?
How to be hope full
in an online onslaught

What about our sanctuaries? Being able to say no. privacy. I don’t know you so you cant come into my house. not even on a camera. Because where do I go from here? If you hurt me... there is no dressing room to transform through. No drive home to let it go. To leave things behind in. how quickly we presume that something is acceptable. Normative. Expected. Pressured. Required.

This might be a liberation for a few but it is not the access it pretends to be. I can’t feel you breathe from here....how do I know you’re alive?

And now this rush of spume
to return to a new–never was for some–normal
What happens in these wakes?

What is required? Care. Attentiveness. How do we speak to what is actually needed by communities and not by what we want to do or what we did? Not shows but spaces to learn to be together again. To trust. To share their stories. To learn we can touch again, in the hands of care full handlers, the artists who have known how to do this....

Choreography is a craft of care
To think and feel and move and be
through practice

In dance we home
Have been-in all of our ways
Homing, in

We have some knowledge
As to how to hold
And touch
And host
To be, alongside, together
To honour and celebrate and let go
Gently

There are not vulnerable people. That is the language of predators. High risk perhaps. Of being forgotten. Of being feared and shut away, or the opposite, of being pushed to the front...to clean the way,(the stage? the toilets) for everyone else? There are not vulnerable people. That is the language of predators.

How do we care
When care is hard
We must care harder