ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE live performance at the Brick Theater, Brooklyn New York, August 2022.
For the last six months my only audience has been a familiar (filial) and foreign life form.
My mind and body served as a living installation for my offspring.
I was a landscape in motion producing alternative and muffled noise. My body and its movements had one function, creating a fracture between light and shadow, and maybe space and time.
I was not a performer during that moment in time, merely a father. I was an anchor and a landscape, it offered me a unique opportunity to be the present but unseen one.
I was able to perform for myself while being a part of someone else’s foray into life, without any notion of the self or the other.
During the next months of this mammal relationship, she and I developed a rhizomic one.
I was observed, summoned and excused at her will, at an industrial but genuine pace.
My thoughts, feelings and motions existed sorely on demand. I was commissioned to be, be there and nothing else. Muted but in sync with my emotions and my intuition like never before, I executed all these visceral instructions without neither questioning their meaning nor outcomes. I felt free and trapped at the same time. Although I never felt unsettled during a performance of mine or someone else, this duet, where the passenger was — and still is — in charge, opened a new definition of shared space and absolute intimacy with someone coming from me.
It has been six months, I'm not sure about being a father, I do not want to be one, I mean one more. It doesn't seem to be enough, too functional and premeditated for an intimate relationship. I’ll be something else, maybe someone else.
The only thing I know is that, for now, I'm her clown.
She observed me researching, training, experimenting, drawing and writing for my first performance in six months. I felt being a space with no related witnesses wasn't my place for few months. And when I was ready to expose my neo-vulnerability to the rest of the creation, my body, life, the pandemic and capitalism took another few months away from me. But I was back, my back demanded to be the vessel for an entire audience, once again.
I think it is when I decided that it was time.
Not being seen by others but being able to invite them home, inside.
It has been almost three long years since I performed ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE. The last time was in Copenhagen. I engineered it as a live goodbye letter for the autochtones.
My purpose was to question what was the place of tribalism within humanity. Living for seven years a in country where, at that time (in 2019), social distancing was the cultural baseline — except under the influence of alcohol and nationalism — gave me the perfect context to explore the multiple definitions of intimacy/cies. More than that, when the religion of the tribe is happiness, what is the individual and collective definition of the other?
A simple table, two chairs and people should have helped me resolve the enigma... It didn't. Instead a body and eye confession among strangers brought up other questions about the time and space of the other. It also sent me back to my relation to universalism in France.
I was among a crowd thinking more about why I wanted to publicly unfold them. They didn’t willingly let me unwrap their being, while staring at the phone I asked them to put screen down on the table.
ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE was a better incentive and title than Strip tease among everyone. Without their phones, with me, they were looking at a mirror to avoid my face but couldn’t escape the space and the others’ sight. This was the premise of the performance, the experience.
How being seen and unseen as a subject or object transforms someone’s nature and function inside an "open" cultural space.
Since then, I moved from Copenhagen, from Denmark, from Scandinavia, from Europe and I, like all of us, have experienced a pandemic and its economic consequences.
As for ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE, its nature and function changed.
The collective body and individual trauma have shifted drastically.
A schism of that magnitude can’t be fully understood yet, but the relationship between le moi and collective unconsciousness became the invisible compass of our daily interactions.
How is the definition of the shared space interrogating us mentally and physiologically every time we are leaving our home? This not an “I” moment. “I” is an impossible process in our space. And it is not only about us, as well, but primarily us with/among the other.
I often wonder whether we have that cognitive recollection of the other before we submit to a structural system embedding humanity into societies.
The function of space and the nature of our interactions are another vast topic, that I will explore later, with more time indoor/outdoor/no door experimenting among people.
I’m back and my back as well, but it can’t be about me anymore.
I knew that I wanted to open my space to someone else, but more importantly the others. It couldn't have been a one-to-one this time. No phone instructions, no mirror, no nothing, except a table and two chairs to set a model of intimacy.
I'm a reformed misanthrope missing my ephemeral family.
I decided to open the performance as a first encounter. It is not a safe space, nowhere is or has been. It is life and an open field, an opportunity to try and explore from any side of the table. And then I realized that what I needed and missed was more dysfunctional tribalism than orderly civilization.
I decided that we should all be together, on top of, and underneath each other’s blind spot because a disrupted field of vision fractured our civilized definition of a space and the other. It was an intentional dance without premeditation. It was more about our arms than wrestling, and then arms before bodies, eyes and intimacy/ies. An organized confusion dictated by the elasticity of multiple selves from within them to the other. The final form resembles a collective epigenetic cadavre exquis in motion, a collective epigenetic of the pandemic — our pandemic — extracting our visceral and invisible links from the mundane.
The performance has been about sight, silence, micro distance, pseudo-mimicking and primal togetherness. It wasn’t about me coming out to present a performance after six months. It has been about being an anchor and a landscape for people which is far more crucial and greater than a staged act or an art architecture.
PS: I did document this performance. I firmly think that documentations are vital for experiential/live/performance arts, but the idea that it will become an additional amount of data is depressing. How many livestreams have been stored or lost in the last two years? Documentation should be a part of liveness, not displayed as an abstraction or compiled into another digital ecosystem. We are still living and vegetating into the digital realm, so I decided to combine the immediacy of physicality with disjointed liveness. I’ll present an in-person and 360-degree installation about ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE. The outside and tangible component will be as important as the 360-degree digital representation. This experience is about the situational self, connected to disconnection.
PS2: Many thanks to Esther Neff, Jasmeene Francois, Jess Applebaum, and the Brick Theater.