Sitting with the small fact about me that
I used to want blonde hair and blue eyes
So it was. A glitch. Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes.
Desiring her is a young act of falling away from myself.
When I catch my reflection in a window in Deptford market, I shudder. These moments are when I glitch. This is when I slip…
What to fall into? Fictional movement.
I often wonder what brown person in history I could be mistaken for. My brown-ness falling into anonymity. The cultural washing of ‘blackness’ we all look the same – are you two – me and another mixed-race person standing in a canteen queue – sisters? Is my imagined blonde haired companion also a sister?
Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes. She stands in the shadow of the door for a while before going to stand in the shadow of her mother.
Is she trying to capture loss fleeing uncontrollably?
Is she trying to have the resilience found in nature?
Is she meeting her emptiness?
Is she cruel and comforting?
Perhaps she is sucking the last juice of a sugar cane
Perhaps she is krumping.
Perhaps she is twerking…slowly…
A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes and blonde hair of a little white girl.
What if this becomes a study in being seen,
What if the filter comes off?
How can I harness the displacing I did as a younger me into the displacement of falling.
Of falling through time.
Slowing down a fall into a slide.
I am being purposefully opaque.
What if the space of a fall is one of dissonance and disconnect –
The pop of skin
The popstar empowerment
The pop of pressure released
The pop of a puncture?
Of pop empowerment.
The fall of the pound
The fall of a building next door
The fall up some stairs
The fall of the global north
Under its own arrogance
Haunted by the ghost of the girl I used to be
I am waiting for my spine to cascade
I’m still trying for everything to be allowed
Is she trying to capture loss fleeing uncontrollably?
Is she trying to have the resilience found in nature?
Perhaps she is krumping.
Perhaps she is twerking…slowly
Does it happen right away
Something like a sense of resistance. Something to lock your body into as if locking into the cosmos, the portals of time, an organic spaceship.
A little ghost came
A little light gets in
She is steady, she has feet
She is steady she has feet
In a movement study, she is orientating herself around an absence.
Why is the absence her centre? Where did her power go?
This ghost of her
These ghosts of them
Where is she without them? She feels like she flies apart
She will fly, she will fly apart at any moment, any given moment, she will fly apart
They are far away, she is far away but she has feet and she’s steady, no more jittering, no more just doing, no more need for doubt.
The yearning of blonde beauty is a horrific freefall.
She loses her mind.
A free fall awash with indigo oceans, indigo galaxies of questions to slip through. They cannot be outrun like the threat of oncoming traffic. It’s part of the fun never knowing where the swerving aircurrents will take your body next.
Later…somehow… she lands and is able to truly leave the yearning in some other place.
The day before she found out they had truly left each other, she lay next to her memory of them and she let them go. They were spooning their memory – her memory of them. Them and her bodies lay spooned together. She felt the memory of their arm laced around her and she shifted away, and she let them go.
———
Written and then woven into sound for a 10 minute solo as part of Hagit Yakira’s Sadler’s Wells WildCard, October 2016.
