Pour | Reflections: Yuii Savage
Pour is Life (force): blood, water, organs, bones, energy, thoughts
As I shift in my seat at the back of the black box theatre, a soprano voice reaches for a sharp crescendo in the darkness. The audience sits with anticipation in the lucid atmosphere. Feet shuffle and before us is the faint veneer of a figure standing in the back corner of the stage. After momentarily finding strange comfort in an invisible body shrieking melodically across the floor, a silent position is assumed. Fluorescent lights attack the stage. Before us are a pale ice-white floor and Daina Ashbee’s performer Paige Culley standing front and center, returning our gaze. Noticeably close in proximity to the first row, she stands tall and strong clad only in a pair of loose jeans. A drone-like humming loudly commences and Culley locks eyes with one member in the audience. With slow choreographed progression, she begins to very slowly unbutton her jeans.
Pour is an uncensored life force recalling the tribulations of an enduring and resilient body. Paige Culley performs within and outside the confines of what appears to be a white gridlocked rectangular floor. For most of the performance, we are confronted with a naked body who peeled off her jeans center-stage to be left behind like a discarded abject indigo skin. Daina Ashbee choreographs a series of gestures difficult to derive singular meaning from; they are vulnerable, subversive, deviant and more. Through the consistent acknowledgment of the audience as active rather than passive, I am reminded of a feminist performance art sensibility that concedes the body as charged with politics and invisible histories. This is a body enacting dissent with full disclosure.
Within the vein of this performance, her body is not only limited to the vocabulary of dance nor articulation of movement. Culley employs her body also as a vocal apparatus that externalizes a multitude of emotions. This voice is laced with: relief, desperation, anguish, terror, grief, joy and strength. All the while, the artist makes her presence known amongst us. She walks around the edges and occasionally breaks this line by walking “off stage” and towards the audience. She remains distantly close at all times. Her gaze is both confrontational and vacuous, but not invasive or unaware. Through eye contact, she gauges and communicates with her audience. Rolling across the ice-like floor, her body coats slick and wet. Her breathing grows heavier throughout the performance depending on what the dance demands of her next. At times, she pauses and folds over as if in raw recovery. Then, she rises and undulates in a slow crawl towards the other side of the stage, a trail of wet tracing behind her. In instances of absorption, she will turn and acknowledge our watchful eyes.
In one moment, Culley begins to forcefully thrust with her pelvis into the air, the rest of the body violently reverberating and quaking. Every muscle, fat, skin, bone, cell is activated. We then see parts of the body dislocate and move in a completely opposite direction, yet remain adhered by the joints to this uncontrolled abandon. She repeats this moment again, but now turns to face and stare back, her deadpan gaze watching us watch.
Ashbee’s piece made me think of the nuanced complexities and cycles of violence. She breaks through a superficial understanding of trauma and reminds us of the importance of rest, pause, elation, and relief. In this performance, I am reminded that with enduring and surviving systemic oppression, language can fail to articulate all the ways in which we are affected laterally. I am reminded that identity is not a stable fixture. Rather, it resists by the very nature of the body existing within spaces that it fluidly orients itself within. I am confronted by an unapologetic body that pauses, rests, thumps, cries guttural throat songs that reverberate through the theatre down my spine. This is a performance in which all artifices of pretension evaporate and we distill in the layered complexity of encountering pain. It is not resolved, but it also is not hopeless. Where language fails, the body speaks. This is a body that has endured and despite how it dresses or undresses, she continues to live and persevere.
Yuii Savage is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently completing their BFA at the Alberta University of the Arts on Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkinstis/Calgary. They work with text, video, performance, and sculpture to investigate a future through queer feminist science fiction lens. They write as a curator for the Marion Nicoll Gallery have written for Luma Quarterly and The Pidgin Collective.