&Now 2019 Conference

bodies of light. ensue is a collaborative project situated within the failure of language.  The project is a joint effort by writer Niko Lazetic and butoh dancer Julie Dind; it is primarily an attempt to, by breakage, suggest and articulate a hopeful intimacy that holds together different layers of alienation.

The text – a poetic fragmentation of the self’s given points – is an encounter with statelessness and difference, inasmuch as these terms can envelop the condition of existing within multiple temporalities at once. Drifting in and out of languages – English dissolving into cinders of Serbo-Croatian – the poem explores displacement not as a form of removal, but as state of being excluded from within. The speaker is not concerned with revealing a single truth or unweaving the origin of violence; she is well aware that languages, apart yet intertwined, are forms of violence. Refusing to say, mean or express, the dance explores what the French poet and educator Fernand Deligny defined as the “place that is not the place of saying.” It represents an Autistic attempt to reclaim movements as more than mere placeholders for language and expression, to reclaim the right for gestures to say nothing and mean nothing, but simply move.

Dind & Lazetic seek symbiosis beyond ‘meaning’; their ritual of understanding does not seek witnesses but demands the empowering empathy of wit[h]ness. The project is invested in eroding terminology and challenging the ways we hear/see/experience ‘the other’, memorialize trauma, and replicate anger; it seeks to counter conflict by imposing radical tenderness that is a response to being ‘held prisoner’ by the origin, as well as receiving cultures.