Livers & Lovers
I’m splashing in water with a butterfly net, hoping it will come to contain something. Placing words on something so fragile fills me with a sense of responsibility, because moments with no words, ironically enough, make them more sacred. Even handwritten notes feel like pressed declarations of some made-up truth. This immediate kind of a writing format is like acid reflux – I vomit it out before I fully digest it. Although this, too, is a way of knowing… this trusting the gut. So, those words are in connection to Suspírame Lira. They are not “about” it, “on” it, “describing”, “translating” or “explaining” it. Perhaps, if even, they are “with” it.
Spinal cord
Veza sits in front of the audience, wearing a greenish sequin dress. The sequins reflect moving splashes of light on the black dance floor.
Floating rib
Lifting my left leg to cross it over the right one. Pulling my blouse down. The fabric is wrinkled underneath my armpits. The length of my pants folds with me as I bend my knees. The performance bubbles in my chest and it’s shaped like the letter T that’s upside down.
Pancreas
The bass can be felt about two centimetres below the ribcage, somewhere between the pancreas and the liver. Violin sound moves in two vertical lines across the stomach. Who knew I don’t need *five point five* years of dance education and *four hundred* pages of Camus to know what the human experience is about.
Cornea
This practice involves frequent eye contact with the audience, CT-ing us with precision. Humans are the only species known to blush. I do. ⸝⸝๑ ̫ ๑⸝⸝⸝
Lungs
Through the nostrils, through the olfactory bulb, through my hippocampus and amygdala, deep in my guts, I feel all sorts of odor-triggered past encounters in my chest. After three shows of Suspírame Lira, litres and litres of Comme des Garçons will evaporate from the seats during the autopsy of this building.
Mirror neuron
This performance welcomes the audience into the dissection of bodies. The show me – watch me relationship is gently negotiated, reimagining a sort of ingrained transactionality in this relationship. This practice has no elitist approach to the body, there is no idea of someone inventing “the body”, “connection” or “it”, at least I don’t perceive it as such. The body expands further than the skin, accommodates quirks, sounds, trauma, joy, and who knows what else. It is continuous brewing.
Teeth
Anatomy is the study of an individual body. But once dissected, it’s harder to count individually. The fragments are always inevitably connected.
Heart
I’d like to be able to place my hands under my skin to comfort my organs when they ache.
Tonsil
I know the performance is not yet about to end. There is something sparkly hanging from the ceiling.
Hipbone
Creating such a femmetopian atmosphere is a statement, when not adapting to stereotypically masculine characteristics on stage is soooooo *niche*.
Fiber tissue
I know that to understand through words is to rob myself from fully feeling things, yet I can’t stop. (Just tell me what it means, what it really really means). Like a talking head I watch and nod, watch and nod, squint my eyes and nod again, cross my arms, uncross them once or twice, I’m thinking about the performance, thinking about *feminist theory*, thinking of words to use, thinking of 2-3 rhyming syllables and thinking thinking thinking… until my left leg dies under pressure. I am a puppet to my liver, lungs, and ligaments.
Hair follicle
During the night I dream about *an art critic* looking at a pile of *slime*. Some of it has stuck to his fingers. He tells the world it’s gross because it’s not *solid* nor *liquid*, he writes that ambiguity means lack of dramaturgy. He enjoyed art more before everything was post-something. He throws his macbook out of the window when the editor replies to his email with “and where do you feel it in your body?”.
Salivary glands
The machine that informs taste and my ways of making sense has loosened its grip. The machine has started to eat its own guts and replant its roots into the non-places that the dominant ways of knowledge production rarely want to host. Tapeworm core.
Parietal lobe
I know the performance is not yet about to end. There is a black and white guitar standing at the back of the stage.
Viscera
The work really considers the audience, I find. Even though the practice is coming from deep within the body of the performers, the audience is actively invited into this. It is a special skill not to have to communicate the “door” to the audience, but to work without doors. You could talk about the marginalization of queer bodies, say the work is informed by unethical medical practices from the past, you could talk about the Western colonial gaze and how it has formed our conventional ways of producing sound, moving, sensing, knowing, and what has been left aside, stamped as primal. Or if you’re feeling bold you could say Suspírame Lira is a staging of The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig. But then again, Suspírame Lira’s center would then move towards being more of a commodity, a container of keywords.
Bone marrow
This is what I will be when you just let me be.
Heneliis Notton is a freelance writer and curator from Estonia. She mainly works with text and researches various writing practices, trying to playfully discover collaborative ways of creating text. As a curator and project manager they’re currently working with the performing arts festivals SAAL Biennaal and Baltic Take Over. Previously she worked as the in-house-dramaturg of a performing arts center Kanuti Gildi SAAL in Estonia. They’re currently acquiring their MA degree in Queer Performance at Rose Bruford College in London and they’re also guest lecturing at UT Viljandi Culture Academy. In 2021 her play Emesis won a prize at the playwriting competition by the Estonian Theatre Agency and was published as a book in 2022.