My body, my mind, my movements and my words are performing right now in art center Le Quartier.
Each of my movements is located in a different body part:
A wavy motion is located in the left arm.
Fast circles go up and down in the shoulders.
Slower horizontal circles dance in my bent right knee.
My head moves freely, my eyes gaze at the public.
My words are also inside my body. From there – they report to you.
The performance goes well for a while, until my movements start rebelling.
My movements wish to emancipate themselves from the regime of the body. Each of them fights for independence, They want to co-exist as many different movements. My body puts resistance by merging them into one movement. It wants harmony. It refuses facilitating too many movements at once. My body hates coordination. The movements insist on fragmentation. None of them gives up, and none is close to win.
My mind positions itself on the side of the movements. It travels inside my body and tries to concentrate on each of the 4 movements at the same time. Unfortunately, inside the territory of my body even my mind cannot do as it wishes. While giving attention to one movement, it risks forgetting another.
The fight inside the body gets long and tiring and my mind drifts off. It leaves my body and settles in the body of a man who sits in the public.
My mind sees the performance from inside the head of the man. My mind realizes that, what feels like a battlefield inside the body, looks like a harmless, formless, uncoordinated, soft jelly thing from outside. My mind sets off on a search for an image that would help my movements stay independent. It quickly leaves the man’s head and goes back into my own head. In there, my mind finds a memory of the movie ‘Being John Malkovich’. It imagines that an army of old people enters through a portal in my head and each of them settles in a different body part.
The image helps. My mind is focused, my body is fragmented, my movements are disconnected, my words are talking to the public.
Within this invasion the hip gets conquered as well. A hundred old people are dancing disco inside it. The hip moves even faster than the shoulders.
A new problem: the movement in the hip confuses the other movements. They start competing each other for the attention of the mind. It is not clear anymore who is fighting against whom.
My body sweats and is in pain. My mind starts asking itself what’s the sense of all this.
My mind admits to itself that it wants to make love and not war. It’s fed up with fighting the body. It leaves the performance again and settles inside a computer in the office of the art center. It enters the cyberspace, where human bodies can’t enter. My mind is having a virtual orgy with millions of other minds inside the web and not showing any intention to ever come back to the actual world.
In the meantime, the fight inside the art center continues.
The absence of the mind is felt in every unit. It’s a chance for the body to take advantage of the situation, but its already too weak to take over.
My body is exhausted.
It wishes to take a rest but it’s forced to keep on going.
On the search for a way out of this situation, it remembers a scene from the movie Mulholland Drive: A woman sings a famous song. Her voice and body seem to be fully engaged in the passionate style of the song. Before the song ends, her body escapes by collapsing on the floor and her mouth stops singing, but her voice continues singing by itself.
Inspired by this memory, my body collapses on the floor but the movements continue dancing by themselves. My body stands up, leaves the performance and joins the public.
It seems that the war is over and all the units are dispersed. My body sits among other bodies in the public. My mind is floating somewhere in the ether. My movements are still at the art center, performing. At this point there is nothing more to tell and the narrator is not needed any longer. Let it be my movements who say the last words.