Reverse Lap Dances

For one person with Layton Lachman, mara poliak, a painting, and other objects/beings.

Reverse Lap Dances is for and with you, and also for and with us, and others who are in/not in the room.

Reverse Lap Dances is a non-dyadic visceral experience between three bodies in our/not our space.

The duration of this work will be co-determined by all people involved, and it is possible to sit, be in a wheelchair, stand, lie down, change position.

*

A person enters the room/gallery/cave/tent/place. We engage in figuring it out together. We discuss boundaries and surrogacy — physical, emotional, and consent to intimacy. We discuss time. How long this will last. How duration feels. We discuss accessibility, believing that the body is a dynamic organism that feels pain and pleasure in different ways at different times. We discuss the cloud/chorus of voices who are in the room with us.

Then we begin the visceral experience. This unfolds, or at least begins, as we have figured out together. Lastly, after the visceral experience, we ask if more references, ancestors, voices want to be added to the cloud/chorus/swarm/herd/assemblage.

Through the figuring it out together, and the visceral experience, and additions to the assemblage, we are trying to experience physical and emotional contact differently. An experience that is extra.

*

cloud/chorus/swarm/herd/assemblage/sources/conspirators/beings/articulations to which we owe this work, and oftentimes our lives:

ancestors

What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out ∞ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Decolonization is not a metaphor (land and bodies) ∞ Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

Acts which unsettle innocence ∞ Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

Opening the door and inviting in all beings ∞ Pema Chodron

A structure made to host dreams, desires, and basic necessities ∞ T.E.N.T.

Sex work ∞ sex workers

Consistent emotional cleansing and maintenance ∞ Linda Mary Montano

A work is an object which is infinite and singular ∞ Matthew Ghoulish

The dolphin game ∞ The Wheel of Consent

Reverse Cowgirl ∞ McKenzie Wark

Body as material ∞ Maria F. Scaroni

Beverly Glenn Copeland ∞ Shanti Celeste ∞ Phambinho

Oil action ∞ Keith Hennessy, Tessa Wills, Dossie Easton

Our Blindness oracle cards ∞ Maria F. Scaroni and Ezra Green

Rage is care work ∞ Johanna Hedva and Constantina Zavitsanos

Tuning scores ∞ Lisa Nelson, Margit Galanter

Deep Listening ∞ Pauline Oliveiros

Bios and mythoi ∞ Sylvia Wynter

time ∞ time

mara poliak and Layton Lachman are dance artists in a 10+ year long-distance artistic relationship between Oakland California and Berlin Germany. Our shared practice is centered in study and collective authorship — with the understanding that we are always collaborating with those who come before, after, and with us. Our symbiotic approach to collaboration makes space for difference, friction, and a deep trust that allows for challenge and risk. Moving between dance, painting, writing, and performance, our work is interested in complicity and care, in how an encounter can invite new forms of relating. Our current work grew out of a ripe compost pile of study, producing a performance — Reverse Lap Dances — for one person at a time. Reverse Lap Dances is a visceral experience with a third, and includes paintings we have made together, text, touch and discussion.

///////////////