This is a performance about harsh feelings and soothing thoughts or, the other way round or simultaneously, how things should be or how we should like them to be but always presented by feelings and thoughts. Skin deep.

I propose some “slight anonmalies” to daily life and perhaps something that might be seen as extraordinary —one can never tell what is truly brewing behind a gaze—. We offer (there are many of us) minimum but perceptible modifications of the mutual use of the body and its sensorimotor system, of the contribution of the senses in the world of feelings, of the ineffable combination of mind and body interactions while avoiding both dualisms and confusions.

I show myself, we show ourselves, so that you may show yourselves to whom you like; we move away and we draw closer on the perturbing axis that asymmetry provides. The uncertainty of senses and feeling: the uncertainty of life and experience, of the here and now, of…. And we will speak about capture and release, of liberty imagined and wasted, of imperceptible and naturalised prisons.

We shall observe/think/feel the pain and pleasure of bodies, of emotions, of right and wrong, of comfort and fear, of trust and panic. Or of love and its emptiness, of the unexpected caress that sometimes deceives in an apparent aggression, revealing, lucid and playful, but never malicious and always consented, desires almost always wrongly interpreted as genuine. A game.

For the audience who accompany and collaborate with us ( a small gesture that entails no risk to anybody) there will be a perplexing gift that represents the vulnerability of our gaze; a gift for our BEING, contingent and incomplete but nevertheless PERFECT and unique. Pain and literally a blank stare that allows us space and time to become: to see further than the obvious, not judgemental just desiring “good fortune”.

Wïttgenstein, in the memorably famous phrase from his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, (written between 1914 and 1916 in the trenches of the Great War as it was then called before World War II happened) stated that  “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. I paraphrase this, without contradicting it, a century of experiences later, in similar times under even worse threats: “Whereof one cannot speak, it is better to play”. Play seriously. Asymmetry of the feelings, about actions and desires, of speaking and doing and also of holding one’s peace and waiting our turn.

Joaquín Ivars