Following Unease

(Written after a Women's Eid Festival in Stoke Newington, London 16th Sept.
Many fast treatments- many people with physical pains.


Treatment- two handed Shiatsu. Inhabiting two disparate areas with contrasting feelings of going in, bouncing out. Residing there. Letting the affects of these differences mix as the hands stream back through the arms back into your one body. Even as they remain outstretched on the body of someone else. A momentary feeling of oppression. Like a tightness at the chest. Than a series of shifts that come to be felt as different qualities of emphasis. A continually re-grafted depth reading. Calibrated between two bodies.

An expansiveness in the chest and throat that travels out from the disruption in all directions whilst allowing one to stay put. The sense of driving or walking through a space so that the hands operate together as a push-me pull-you pressure and release. Honing in - like a remote probe or sensor- with one hand deepening and the other lessening off. Following the settlement /unsettlement of this breathing that becomes one in recipient and you. Their chest, your chest, rising and falling. Your hands slack off as the belly expands. Accomodating it. This breathing could be the body forwarding, turning, reversing, pausing as it has many times before and now even as it lies there it goes about these calibrations. Certainly they are of a temperament of a body in anguish, joy, fear, relief, contemplation, dreaming and waking. Interspersing one with the other to build into the fine nuances of expression, response. An engaged affect as an on-going state of changing.

Twist and torsion of your own body the steering wheel of fractional adjustments in your hands relating to the bulk of a body turning, aligning, aggregating with the redistributed circulation- of flows and stoppage. Utilizing these oppositions as the differentials of a moving system. Making this vehicle between you. That being operated in the slight pull and twist between chest, rib-cage and the flesh just below the umbilical. A slight resistance like the prizing apart of a too rigidly knitted form. Tenderizing it. The seperation and coming apart of the two hands in this slow twist and torsion of an opening. The dropping of stitches and the pulling of certain single threads that span the body and tighten at the mid-point as the body pulls away in two directions, to be a reinvigorated breath.

So the oppression  in the chest becomes the guide for a recalibration and a re-tunement of the way in which you configure your own body in relation to the recipient. The way their breathing alters. How this relates again to your placement. And so it goes on.This placement the tweaking of a dial which to begin with is the certain angling of your whole body in relation to the recipient. An opening like a valve is constructed - a gateway between a certain address that becomes a workable device- a way through. Until another seizure of pain or constriction; of all too sudden release or a thought about situation suddenly dawns and a reconfiguration is pending as another area becomes emotive like a sudden giveway point that then drains away and floods into another remote place. As the thing gets going the recipient becomes the active force, the breathing punching in and out your hand from which your whole body is attached. Recipient is a moment of reception not a fixed role, an actual person. It is the logging in the pulse of the blood, the holding together of flesh, the letting go of air, of a body's responsivenes. A spasm and flickering with each minute in-take and out-take of breath. Then firming into place certain exposures, certain pauses that put on hold, detour and make into an accumulated response, the drama. It is their body. Their drama. Their contours. But it is happening also in your body catching into it as the rapid darting of a messaging going back and forward. The messaging is not unwrapped. Can not be interpreted because it is building and breaking in upon itself on the spot. It is pure affect forcefully there and equally subverted on to something else shaping what it can be according to the responses held in the balance and tipped this way and that way over and over again by everyone present on the day.

Addressing the specific is a way to create these lines of association that run through from head to toe, from body to body. There's this compulsion in chasing the aggravation- like a mouse set loose and on the rampage- areas of pain, emergant bumps and dips that ripple over the body in order to course through admixtures where these assaults finally cancel one another out. The mouse is not destroyed it is brought into the light. It panics and darts for cover. But there is none. Then moments of calmness begin to build out of these very distractions and the rapid coursing back and forward of opposing tendencies at last begin to relate. So a dialogue that is sporadic and can not be kept in one place ensues. That dialogue being nothing more than this attention to unease spread out between the two or more bodies and conjoined at the interface and the multi-directional fine tuning it aggravates in order to ride that unease into various air-passages, parallel lines of reserve, a certain ease about and in the situation. That state exists right on the verge of a catastrophe that is touched in and out of and is tentatively let be. It is dramatized with remote but not disengaged attention. So the dialogue is about states of awareness that are arrived at through bodies constantly distilling out of each other's frissure. Another name for that could be environment.