“I Ask You This…” was a performance that explored displacement gesture and uncommon boundaries as a site-responsive performance work.

Within the cartography of being in an open space for three days, I explored my development of everyday choreographies, movements and gestures, performative texts and encounters as process for translating peripheral embodied space. In performing a movement meditation of slow gestures, I explored and played out the relationship between escape, anchorage, and embodied memory. Feeling my way through the intimacy and fragility of boundaries, it became a dance of both presence and absence. The shifting body providing more questions than answers. An unmapped journey…

I place a large white bag, a container larger than my body, on the floor.

I open it up, like an enormous envelope, the sound interrupting the space, like a cracking from a hollow. For some time, my hands slowly smooth its corners, explore its hidden folds.

And then I climb inside. A body within a body.

I hold a piece of metal. A heavy scaffold bolt.

It performs as anchor, as bone, as spine, as shackle…

It performs with me, in part procallus.

Fragile boundaries blurring, I am my own stowaway…

My body slowly turns, folds in on itself, curves, pushes, retracts.

I ask to be free and I asked to be held. I am asking this of myself.

The audience here today passes by, but next time should I ask…

hold or release?

The walls of the bag begin to cave in, enveloping my body.

I watch the ceiling disappear through a reducing slit of space.

Someone’s face appears, and quickly retracts.

The bag envelopes me completely.

I stay still. Silent.

It has called time.