On Emilie Gregersen’s new piece On My Tongue which moves through a world that is full of desire and touch. It is playful and occasionally uncanny – dealing with questions of consent and intimacy.
Two couples are lying on the floor, a shiny dance carpet. One in a close hug, their legs intertwined, the other couple in a spooning position. Eventually they shift: lying on top of each other. They touch each other’s faces, caress, slide their hands along each other’s legs or start moving across the floor together while holding on to the embrace.
It’s Sigrid Stigsdatter Mathiassen [S], Paolo de Venecia Gile [P], Emilie Gregersen [E] and Luisa Fernanda Alfonso [L] in Emilie Gregersen’s new work On MyTongue (premiering at Dansehallerne, Nov. 19, 2024).
I am here with them as an intern. I am witnessing the piece being born, so to say, and I am swapping between seeing it from outside and moving and learning parts of the material they are working with. It becomes incredibly familiar to me and then unfamiliar again as I see things shift and develop anew.
Continuing the scene:
They are entangled and lying on the floor still. One couple faces each other with their mouths open. Using their hands they push each other’s faces away – as in a teasing quarrel.
“Touch – touch – touch – touch – touch”, S.’s hand moves across P.’s body.
It stops, “This is your heart.”
And then they crawl on all fours and closely behind each other.
I look at E. and L., they seem calm and even mysterious to me. They only move every now and then. They are close together, resting in explicit sex-positions until they shift again.
P., “I’m touching myself.”
S., “Touch – touch – touch – touch – touch – stop.”
E. and L. reach the back wall, E. is leaning against it while L.’s face is disappearing in E.’s crotch. They stay there for a while.
Pauline Michel [PM]: Emilie, you are working with a very sensuous mode of moving and being together and an imagery which appears very erotic. What is your interest in the erotics?
Emilie Gregersen [EG]: I think the erotic is related to desire. And after all, desire is what pulls us closer to other bodies. There’s something in the erotic that pierces my skin a little bit in the sense that it’s a pleasurable state – it’s highlighting pleasures. But it’s also evoking a perverse and strange side of yourself. Perhaps an unknown side that we carry within ourselves. There is something, in the gross and the delicious or between the ugly and the beauty. For me a magnetic field of desire and erotics comes to life, and I think it is a very interesting place to work from.
PM: You sometimes speak of choreographing On My Tongue as in building a universe. How do you see this universe?
EG: The piece is set in this quite uncanny universe where things are very heightened. It has a heightened performativity and that’s what makes it feel like characters, or figures. I see the different relations, the different characters that meet. They go through these worlds of very melancholic spaces that suddenly flip into a state of euphoria. I think I’m dealing with the psychological and emotional journeys that are happening in these opposing forces. These characters, they’re somehow confronted with their desires. They are all talking about the same thing, but maybe they have different understandings of what we’re talking about. That creates a friction that I find quite interesting, and I think that friction is what I am choreographing. And then it’s in the meeting between us that the poetic, the sensuous, the funny, the erotic somehow happens.
It was the end of this summer when I started joining the rehearsals of On MyTongue. We were standing in the studio, spread out in a bent quadrant. Our movements were subtle, traveling along our spines and a soft and inviting gaze was what Emilie asked for.
As if an engine inside had started, my spine would move in loops, wave-like motions or change directions. Soft also, like an inner caress. I remember my mouth would open and it appeared as if something would build up inside of us, move up our throats, but stay in our mouths and stay wordless, as if it’s not graspable. From outside I would always think of an empty space or another planet and slightly alien figures, which were moving in an animated motion.
PM: The title On My Tongue has an oral connotation: it’s something that is sitting somewhere in your mouth, but has not been formulated yet. I know you’re also singing a lot. What role does the mouth play for you?
EG: The title is playing with an erotic connotation obviously, but it touches upon communication also. It’s like there is something that you want to say, but you can’t quite say it. For me the title is about communication. And it’s also about what lies beyond communication which is more of a visceral place.
PM: You’ve also been working with asking for and communicating consent…
EG: When I then started working with other performers, I found it necessary to get to know them through working with the ‘wheel of consent’ (A/N conceptualization of consent by Betty Martins), where we would ask each other, “may I do this with you?”, “Yes. But maybe in this way.” We would practice understanding each other as well as our own limits and desire’s. It was not so much to create political correctness between us. More to set an antipode to experiences I made in dance throughout my education, but my professional life also, where personal boundaries were overstepped, or just not considered – and to bring pleasure in working with contact again. I was trying to understand how far we can go together when moving and using physical touch through working with a very explicit way of communicating.
We would exaggerate language before movement, just to see what happens then. We said: “let’s ask for everything before we do it.” And to be honest, it did not bring us further. It was limiting to work like that, because then we would stay in the realm of affirmative consent (A/N giving consent consciously and voluntarily to a proposal while understanding its consequences). When working with dance it is the other way around often: you enter a journey, and you don’t know where it ends.
It feels closer to the idea of limited consent where I say yes to something unknown, but we have a sensuous understanding of each other that allows us to go in that place, because we have trust, and we have a safe word if things fuck up. We were only able to work like this since we had been working with affirmative consent before though and had been building trust between us. Artistically, working with affirmative consent was the first step into creating this piece also.
I am in the rehearsal studio where I join what is a contradictory, but playful mix of caressing and wrestling as a group. I am down to the floor and hold on to someone’s calf. Someone is stroking my face, then pushing it away. I have a loose orientation of everyone’s body parts around me and I am inside a pile. I resist when I feel a pull in my forearm. I change my mind and l follow. I slide over someone’s belly. Suddenly we are in a different constellation, and I caress someone’s back.
While I watch images blur so suddenly between abjection, someone’s desire to move in one direction, someone’s resistance or someone’s intimate gesture towards someone else. Emilie calls it “the carestle” and in it I see an ever-shifting picture of four different people negotiating their desire’s.
Negotiating desires appears so human and as a topic that is entangled in social behaviors. While I watch On My Tongue the uncanny in Emilie’s work follows me, I see the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time. As they perform their facial expressions shift so swiftly and I sense that something is off. In the course of the piece, they find a specific way of walking; pushing the ground with their feet, bent knees, moving their hips forward, a slight ripple in their spines. It’s not quite robotic and not human either.
PM: How do you work with such twists in seemingly familiar movements, Emilie?
EG: I work with heightened senses, or heightened movement qualities, in order to get out of the just human body. It’s like exaggerating something, exaggerating a situation. And by exaggerating it becomes something else that is either more synthetic or more animalistic, more childish, more erotic. For me that can create this feeling of the cyborg, because it is like a little bit of an extension of yourself. This spilling out into something that’s more synthetic can amplify what is already. Perhaps it can even bring us closer to ourselves in our behaviors and relations.
PM: I understand that you are using the idea of the android more as a strategy to exaggerate, or amplify. Is there something similar in how you approach the erotic on stage?
EG: I use this expression, “erotic living”. I remember the phrase from reading Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde. When we were making Caresses (A/N earlier work of Emilie’s touch trilogy, that On My Tongue is part of), we used the idea of ‘erotic living’ to highlight our sensations of things. It became a bit of a joke between us, but also a sincere feeling. We would say “that’s so erotic living” whenever we did something. It had to do with, pleasuring it a little bit extra, staying a little bit longer, giving in a little bit more – like an amplification of being. You can do like we normally do, but you can also really go into the feeling of things. And I think that is when you start queering the space. It’s twisting it. It’s when you question what the norms are. I think that can be a very erotic place to work from and to experience from. And I think that is basically what the work is about.
