Rafi – The Gills Beneath our Flesh
Descriptions
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Rafi
Octavia sits in front of their wheelchair. Facing out with their microphone and speaking to the audience. They are white, tall and thin. In line behind their wheelchair is Rafi’s wheelchair, then rafi, hiding behind and listening. They are white and small, with long curly hair. Both dancers wear selkie/fish monster costumes of brown unitards adorned in garbage. Octavia has on a pink swim cap.
(Narrated: She’s coming closer. She’s coming to meet us. I can sense it.)
Octavia looks around warily before peeling off the arms of their pelt and crossing and tying it around their neck harshly. They crawl up into their chair and zoom into the audience, leaving rafi and their chair onstage.
(Narrated: Wait, can you feel it? Quaking, shuffling, she’s right here… (rafi begins to slink from behind their chair) rising up in our skin, in our bodies. I can feel her growing bigger, I can feel her blubber boiling. Her coat against mine, engulfing us from the inside out.)
As Octavia speaks, rafi begins to dance, sloshing through invisible water, arms across oil slicks, thick CP steps as through mud. Fingers spread, arms swim, almost frantic, flowing. They reach around, arms engulfing the space. They move through disgust and pain, with effort and curving motion, sweeping the air and audience in towards them as they move from kneeling to standing, shoulders rolling. They move straight arms and hands through a flurry of linear motions, waving geometric shapes into the space past their eyeline, crouching their monster self on crooked little ankles.
(Narrated: Should she run? Should she hide? Does she have a choice? We pushed her too far, her ozone’s collapsing it might be too late! Its…. wait-)
Blowing a puff of air through their fingers, they ladder curved hands up. As the narration becomes more frantic, so too autistic hands swipe lines through the air, coming to sweep slowly around away from their body. They emanate their attention out towards Octavia who is zooming back to the center through the audience. Rafi crouches warily, guarding the ground with hungry arms. Octavia plants their feet wide on either side of their chair and speaks down into Rafi’s face.
(Narrated: I think this is it. I think this is the moment you told us about. It’s… [audible inhale, gulping in air])
Rafi’s arms sweep through the oil slicks, slowly raising above their head and towards Octavia. They pass the mic to rafi, who pulls in their breath. The two breathe out together.
Hi Rafi, Thank you for creating this mysterious, funny, imaginative world in which to contemplate “the body.” Here are some of my experiences, as I watched your piece: One dancer (Octavia) is a narrator, as if from a science fiction film. “She’s coming…” and as she comes, Octavia narrates, “Do you feel it?” Slinking from behind her chair, Rafi seems to shift between being an unfamiliar otherworldly being, and a force/phenomena in the shape of a person, who is expanding and engulfing us. Undulating, maneuvering on the ground, swiping arms, gesturing like climbing a ladder. This dance suggests that the body is a product of both lived experience and the imagination. A monster, a selkie, a person: imagination is the key.
Rafi,
What I get from the videoe is mostly the spoken word, which narrates the end of something, perhaps the end of something that could have been avoided. Octavia’s vocal performance is impassioned and ominous, and this mood is enhanced by the echoing space, and the throbbing music/soundscape. There’s a moment when I hear the sound of Octavia’s wheel squeaking on the floor, that intensifies my listening, so the final moment of breathing later, really hits home for me.
When I ask what is the body, I am again drawn to the question of the multiple embodiments the disabled dancers live and work in. I am drawn again to the provocation of movement with and without wheelchairs of floor work, chair work, and the necessity of all embodiments. There are no stable answers to these questions and nor should they be. They are ongoing manifestations and expressions within individual and collective practices. Although the sample set up, using horror filmic discourses, the idea of an approaching being that may or may not be threatening or dangerous – the monster – I don’t know that the idea of “the monstrous” would necessarily have settled with me how do I not engaged with the descriptive text above. I found myself exploring again the question of the board alliance between animal/ creature/human and thinking about what these things mean within the context of disability studies and disability arts. Again, noting a thread around the contextualization of human and maybe not human (?) and water. What are the stakes of the animal and the monster for you? Octavia’s presence as narrator or intermediary or facilitator – it’s a very multifaceted role– invites again for me the question or the relationship between words, embodiment and movement. I find myself asking whether or not I should trust them? They were the costume that signals an alliance with Rafi, but they act in a kind of non-negotiated intermediate space., Raising the question of sidedness. Whose side are they on what world do they have it where do they come from and where are they going? Octavia and Rafi share breath — and it is a different breath from Octavia’s breathing earlier. Does breathe ultimately link or divide them?
It would be interesting to think about how this duet could merge integrated audio description, captioning, and narration through the continuous voice of the speaker/dancer which could be an auditory form of the dance while conventional captioning could run below the video form of the dance.
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