Laressa Dickey

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist and writer based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation. She researches the dancer's use of language and the writer's use to/for dance. She’s the author of Syncopations and Twang.

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Reversibility

The difference between animal and human ritual is that animals are always performing what they are, while humans can choose to perform what/who they are not.

--R Schechner

1

Can/not be un/done is not palindrome/is not drone, all the syncopations out— It is not just take out knots, folds, move back- or for-wards I asked and they said no

There was a mimosa tree outside my window

I had had a window, and it was near our back door

Only one person had every spied on me through it

The field in front of the window covered with flat snow

You can or cannot take it back

To step back into the step you just took

To step back from the step and unstep it

And then to retract the hand from the forward line

It had been moving in

But even the language fails, assumes a true line

From the forward being progressing in time

And the backward being moving into the past

The butter will not come out of the toast

But then they did revive that guy from death--

Birds flying backwards, tail first, it happens?

2

The mother walks to the store down the street. It is a wide street with four lanes. The street is on a hill and the mother’s house has no view down that hill. She exits her door which faces street and car and cycles.

She will go to the street and turn left, then right and across it, then right again, ending up at the store, which is actually just across the wide street from her own house.

When she comes back after shopping, she reverses the route, with little variation except that she is carrying two plastic shopping bags weighed down with food, and her back is going forward, as determined from the original directions set by this story.

Why this action necessary, why this needs back and front and side are varied, rearrange depending who is center or what is center or when the center is multiple facing all directions. Up is down; down up down up. It is not possible to get back to what was. 4 can never match 3.

3

A woman sits down in a chair in a kitchen in a dimly lit room. She slumps, imitating a bird sleeping. A woman sits down and slumps like a bird. In places where women imitate birds, this is where she spent her life. In the beginning, the bird was a robin, but later it appeared as a magpie. In the beginning, there were few birds, and few women imitating them. A woman slumps in a kitchen chair. The dimness of the light has made a small room for her, within the room. The woman is touching the light and the light is touching the woman. These actions go back and forth in time. Also in space. She imitated the bird and tried afterwards to reverse it, be bird that imitated the woman. This was a harder task, being the woman being the bird being the woman.

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