An Ongoing Song

I find myself in a place where a certain playfulness is expected or, rather, imposed. An unwanted desire to always be with the other, to perform codependency. Here, me and him are together in a way I imagine my cells would be together with a virus, in a manner directed by science, out of my hands but, nevertheless, controlled. Hyacinths gardened in my medication bottles. Deborah, Yvonne, Insert Your Name and Pina. A Sims version of a burning love, a drug OD faked for a film scene, a deadly plague described in a book. A (previously) unreleased letter that keeps writing itself. I wondered about ways to express the weightlessness of this duet. About the phantom pains I felt from the open wounds of others before me, and the testament of life that they bequeathed to me. I embraced the unexpected kinships and made genealogies dance together. Virus is a terrific performer. (One in a million, once for a lifetime). Mouthwatering. The global population of the infected makes up for a country almost as big as the one I come from. And this is a tragedy.
An Ongoing Song is a piece of visually and physically conceived theatre. It takes a form of a duet to imagine onstage a relationship of a body to an undetectable virus inhabiting its blood.By the reiteration and reinvestment of inherited performative gestures, the performance juggles the complexities of human relationships, risk-taking, danger, desire, vulnerability, self-infliction, dependency, loss of innocence, morbid humor and affection. Although the performance is based on a singular experience in its poetics, it wishes to address the individual life-changing events that many of us have lived through.