on Bodies, by Ray Young
by Maddy Costa
Six weeks before:
On the day I book my ticket for Bodies, I haven’t been in a swimming pool for three weeks. I’m a poor swimmer, hate the chill of municipal pool water, and yet in pandemic those 25 lengths, with lengthy pauses to catch my breath, became a twice-weekly restorative joy. Bodies takes place in a swimming pool: from this distance, its appeal is irresistible.
Six hours before:
It sinks in that all ticket-holders are invited to change in and out of swimwear in the same communal changing room. I am overwhelmed with anxiety and consider returning my ticket.
Sixteen minutes before:
The kind of anxiety that feels like queasiness, imminent diarrhoea. But at the entrance I bump into a cis-female friend I don’t feel self-conscious with, and the room is almost empty. Stress begins to ebb.
Six minutes before:
Bodies with pale skin. Bodies with dark brown skin and light brown skin. Bodies with tan-line stripes like awkward sticks of rock. Bodies slim-toned, muscled, padded with fat. Tall and short. Bodies furry or spiky or shaved, with tufts of hair here and none there, tufts of hair there and none here. Callouses, scars, patches of rough skin; chewed nails, acrylic nails; wrinkles, freckles, dimples, moles. Bodies with protrusions, sensing and sensual. Wide noses, narrow noses. The complicated whorls of each ear.
During:
Bodies seated along two edges of a rectangle of water. Feet submerged, water between toes. I don’t recall noticing anyone who was disabled: but then, what does it mean to notice? And what causes the disabling? Those factors have been minimised here. Each body has been assigned the name of a river, a body of water; each is geographically distinct but what is the material difference, when each is made of the same essential matter, hydrogen fused with oxygen? The same matter inside human bodies as well. Where are the edges?
Each body slides into the water. Limbs float, stretch, paddle. A merging takes place, multiple bodies moving in relation to each other, affecting the water around them with each movement. The water I touch touches you. The water you push at washes over me. Ripple effects, connections in constant flux. And again, each body is a river: a body of water used as a border, or for trade, economic and political gain. These bodies meet in the pool and geographies collapse. Designations made by humans collapse.
Skin begins to soften, edges soften, and the hard lines of the municipal swimming pool are softened too, by washes of colour projected along walls and ceiling, washes of ambient sound. Listening below the surface, sound becomes a feeling, becomes internal. A small group of people synchronise movements. Others splash in a fountain. So subtle, these shifts, these nuances of difference.
The voice inviting movement speaks more explicitly of change. Two large projection screens scroll images of rolling waves and falling rains and water that is strong enough to batter and break. Structures crumble. What might it look like for people to come together the way droplets of rain amass in a river, a river with the power to swell and flood its banks? What might it look like for people to resist the way water resists rock, slowly surely slowly insistently wearing away at the rock until a river cuts through a course to the sea?
Inflatable pillows spill into the water. Allow yourself to lie back and dream.
We coalesce in the shallows, flowing together, says the voice, the voice of Water.
Before genetics, gender, before species … migrating and gathering together.
With the power to shape shift, the power to give life so freely and in the same breath, to take it away.
Able to conjure a future of our choice.
If you’re willing to work.
Six minutes after:
I’m in the communal shower, my friend to my right, a body assumed cis-male to the right of her. Is it the residue of anxiety or its sudden draining from my body that is making me so giddy? The changing room is packed and yes I am mostly hiding behind my towel but all the different kinds of bodies with their muscles and hair and protrusions are around me and I am OK. The time in the swimming pool has brought down my guard; the gentle insistent refusal to categorise difference, or sort it into hierarchies, has washed its way through fear.
Sixteen minutes after:
My friend hadn’t booked her own ticket, and hadn’t received the pre-event information about the communal changing room, and was shocked at first by the all-gender room. And then, standing naked beside a body assumed cis-male, she realised: it really doesn’t matter, does it? And this not mattering is in fact the point. These constructs of gender, the violence with which they’re policed, the enforcement of gender difference to divide and rule and maintain the power of some over others: Bodies works to make it all irrelevant.
And yet, as we walk together in the rain, my friend admits she was less convinced – transported – by the body of the work than me. She wonders whether it skates over the surface, wanted it to dive more deeply into its politics. I hear you, I say: by covering so many issues – body image, gender, climate emergency, political resistance – in such a soft-focus way, it potentially communicates as bland, toothless, woolly. But I wonder whether that is its skill, its strength. What if the work of social change really is as simple as people allowing themselves to come together? What if the work of social change really is as simple as recognising that humans are made from the same chemical matter that surrounds us on the planet that houses us, and organise ourselves accordingly? What if activism and resistance organising are not categories of labour but ways of being in the world, the way rain just is, and seas just are? What if people noticed how each of their small actions has a ripple effect and that together these effects can be huge, and directed those small actions towards supporting the planet and other people, every day, every moment, always?
Six hours after:
The day’s rain has passed. I am back at the computer, alone. What if…?
Six weeks after:
I’m part of two unions, one in which I’m completely inactive, one where I’m trying to be involved. So far involvement has been limited to showing up for meetings, getting a feel for what’s discussed, listening to learn. Because what do I really know about unions, except that they organise strike actions that fight for higher pay?
In this particular meeting, something more intimate is being discussed than mass protest. Individual cases of people needing support to chase down unpaid invoices, or think through the disparities between what a contract says they should be doing and the actual demands of the job. This support happens in the workers solidarity group and I realise: that is also what a union can provide. Community. Mutual aid. Bodies aligning with other bodies to make sure each one is cared for. It reminds me again to move away from this mindset of muddling on alone, do it yourself. To unite: to do it together.
What if the movements of people were no more complex than the fall of raindrops down a window pane, meeting and changing course together?
I am part of you, says the voice, Water, to the audience/participants, made of water, like you are a part of me.
Give yourself to me and I will support you.
There are no mistakes – only new possibilities.
Something Other 