Risking Mediocrity [hez stalcup + melissa word]

Hez and Mel go to Boston for Lion’s Jaw, a 5-day festival of experimental dance and performance

Hez has an inspiring allegiance to morning rituals, Mel stops to document houseplants pressed up against windows on their walk to the studio everyday

9am to 9pm we are at it, jostling ourselves through a cosmic dance carwash that scrubs and jiggles our cellular makeup, our senses of self, our sensing selves

some transmissions from the jaws //

1.

Writing without stopping. It doesn’t have to make sense, just keep writing. I wonder about continuiety - that was wrong. I didn’t spell that based on a form, but fuck FORMS! And I use that form to speak and make poetry and love from afar. So maybe, CLOSE to a form… but imperfect is a sweet spot.

Which is THE spot. Sweet.

I can be sweet.

What did Portishead say “IT could be sweet.”

Which reminds me of I.T. and I wonder if I.T. can be sweet? 

I hope so. I hope a lot of unexpected pairings can and do happen. Thats how we all got gay. I think the world will get gayer and gayer as the infinite flavor combinations continue to combine until we are all the same muddy pile of leftover sex like a soda machine suicide, and thats when the end will come. One big cosmic, earthy ejaculation into space.

And nothing will have gotten done, but everyone 

will be finished

and that is a relief.

Wow I was really stoked that was going to be the perfect ending to this writing exercise.

And now that it isn’t, I feel like I - well, I don’t feel unhappy.

I think…and that means there’s more things to write.

I wonder if I can write something I’m not thinking:

(imagine unruly pencil marks slightly resembling letters)

It looks like maybe I got out “soy” and “she” but I can’t take credit for “shape” because I thought it half way through writing it.

Embodied practices for surviving the apocalypse

The contents of me rearrange by the minute here, so many encounters so many gestures

I am a shapeshifting transformer toy erupting into new form at a dizzying pace I’m  a 7-headed dog I’m a cathedral I have horns now now one hundred teeth hair from my nipples that grows to the floor I’m combing it now I do hair choreography now I am a spaceship no I’m floating a spacesuit cord cut loose from the craft I’m a black hole I was a wave I was a trash I’m a bite sized thing I’m a no thing I was a ta-da a whale in kids clothes a siren an invisible nobody.

Touch politics in the infinite blackbox

What are the tools to recalibrate, to be in spaces together with all of our histories and traumas and judgements, and really be present and available with one another? How do dancing bodies meet this improbable ask? How do we all feel safe to play?

Dominant culture is always in the room everything is always in the room marooned on the fangs of the lion’s jaw

What is the dance between us?

What is the navigating of my no’s and yeses up against your no’s and yeses, changing and shape-shifting, our greasy slide

I came here to get my whole damn life and turn myself on from the inside out in the cauldron of desire, thrust into the blinding hot white of the spotlight, centerstage alone together

This is a place to be witnessed in my totality, in the fullness full mess of me mess of we

Alone together, seeing and being seen 

By the light of the full moon, spells were cast, visions of radical queer futures were penned and named and danced. We made space for anger and confusion, and reeling, complex maneuvers

The alchemy of failure, problems of relating, fighting for joy with a sweaty persistence disinterested in my fragility

2.

Going with this thought realizing how much 

the sounds of stomping and action 

and laughter is making me me have major 

fomo about what is going on next - 

Yesterday there was rain and today there is light rain

Someones phone had a sweet sound 

like a children’s show as a ringtone

And it went off just now

Its quiet next door I’m imagining

The immersion and the ecstasy

Realizing I don’t know that I will get to be in that room for Lion’s Jaw

And that means EVER since the

Building will be sold

My sensation is sticky my socks are 

Still wet from my porous shoes

And my shirt is now wet from 

Sweat

Now I hear yelling I think its from 

Fayes and I think I am 

Feeling glitched.

3.

I was shaking in the studio with everyone 

Else and I realized my eyes were making a movie of the space- or

To be accurate, my eyes decided what

the movie was, so I put all the bodies

In the periphery and watched a shoe

Next to a coffee cup. It felt like a DAVID

LYNCH long cut. Everyone shaking

In the blurry foreground and sides

I resisted a slow pan. More time with the

Shoe felt compositionally important.

What am I giving attention to that 

feels compositionally important

In my life? Not stories but

Scenes and Framing of Moments

And LONG CUTS. What’s in the 

background?

Maybe no one needs to be in the 

center of the frame, just shaking

w/o assignments all around - 

Molecules freed from the responsibility 

Of meaning making.

Nothing

—