Bubble Crew & ATROPOS

I take a seat in the front row not too far from a little stool and bare feet securely set on the ground. People walk past, in between me and a pair of hands carefully studying lacy stories knotted into curvy shapes. I think of my grandmother, who knits pieces of clothing to her offspring and whispers a prayer onto every stitch.

Watching the fingers read the lace takes me beyond time. The sight finds its parallel from the depths of my mind. A picture of an ancient city center, one I have possibly once visited, an open space, a market square perhaps, filled with soft light, a person sitting in the middle of it immersed in something they are accustomed to do, by-passers walking on a street a lot older than any of us, the person occupied with their timeless deed. I know I am gazing at someone who belongs.

A large hand appears for everyone to see. I think of the words merkki (a sign), merkitys (a meaning) and merkillinen (remarkable, peculiar).

Then a removal of a supportive piece of clothing, the acts of setting aside and aparting, moving away and letting something remain it the candle lit place of always-being.

*

A thread of heritage, a person is measuring themselves against its length.

Learning old things anew. Stories and mouths finding each other, pulling the sense of being into new postures. Discovering words, tasting them and trying if they will find a place in the mouth, if they have in fact always been there.

Comfort and grief are intertwined. I think of people whom I love, who have been told that they are from cultures they do not know, of which they have started to learn about only as adults. I think of people whom I love who have learned immensely about cultures they are told they don’t belong to. I think about the culture I am told is mine and how I don’t feel it means much to me when I am surrounded by it but how living far from its usual habitat always generates an inescapable sense of being a little off. I think of the tiny ways we die daily in order to live in the light of this all.

*

A looping ritual of tasting, hearing and feeling. I watch a finger touch an ear, and this stays with me. I ponder how ears remember, how the event of hearing cannot be undone, how the echo of something that has once reached your ear cannot be completely removed from the way you hear onwards. 

Another piece of clothing is removed. I think of how experiencing new things is letting go of the versions of yourself you were before those sensations. 

I begin to mourn the ways my ears once heard, before they had received all the things they now have. I mourn the perceiver I used to be, and that I have lost in becoming something else. It is not mourning in the sense that I would wish to reverse anything, it is more acknowledging that I cannot fully choose how my being is molded by and molds others. 

The looping ritual creates a space for emotion. It appears as an act of negotiation between connection and rejection, of finding a way to exist in the surroundings that could potentially be overpowering, to keep hold of your configuration while remaining a moving being, to not simply preserve the things you have carried in you but to yield room for them to continue evolving. 

Then a stomping that feels like an invitation, a tearless cry 

*

When the room is red and the movements at their most unpatterned, the soundscape surrounds everything with a clear rhythm. 

I think of how a person cannot exist in randomness nor isolation, how we are touched by inevitable and often unexplainable ties. 

I find myself touching my face in a manner I do not recognise. It is not a clear gesture, such as covering my eyes or mouth, it expresses something without taking the form of the expressions I know. Maybe I am mirroring the liveliness of the movements I have now witnessed for several moments, maybe in perceiving them I am becoming molded by them. 

*

Layers of lived experience resting on each other like folds of fabric. 

Three seeing eyes. Being seen in relation to something, as part of something.

Kuoleman jatkumo, johon synnymme ja jota synnyttämme. We are born into and we give birth to a continuum of death. 

There is movement in dying.