In the dark belly of a boat, two bodies push makeshift prosthetics to their limits. A collection of utilitarian objects is strewn across the floor: this assortment of tubes, pumps, ropes, and bellows feels at once vaguely medical, industrial, and medieval. As soon as these objects are in play, they become bodily. A performer pulls a rope and a set of suspended bellows wheezes, gasps. A second performer, stooped and hunched, lurches on clear acrylic platforms that squeeze out a “ha” of air with each step. Bellows are lungs; levers and pulleys are joints and tendons; the tubes esophageal. Bodies are turned inside out, their mechanisms for breath and sound and movement externalised as makeshift kinetic assemblages and provisional-feeling wearables. These are activated by bodies that are whole, whose machinations are encased in skin, whose basic functions are invisible, and so a kind of magic.
The performance also takes place inside a body. The curved beams of the boat are ribs, we are all encased and held by this whale-hull. Outside, a sudden, violent rainstorm has passed, and I am aware of my own sopping, shivering, blanket-wrapped body – so still – while these performers’ bodies work themselves slick with sweat, and the boat-body holds us, and mechanical bodies screech and shriek. There are slow builds that are scraping, mesmerising; then focus and patience give way to ecstatic, breathy urgency.
The performers’ bodies work alone and together at a strange labour. Its goal might be to power some process we cannot see, to generate sounds, or to test the limits of both themselves and the objects they press and pull, coax and crush. Bodies pump bellows with hands and arms, through an intermediary bladder of air, or by sitting, stomping, squashing. In the absence of a clear goal, labour and process become ends in and of themselves. I think of the gym (“hold for three, two, one…”) and its Sisyphean labour of tension and relief; I think of the kink and queer coding of ropes, carabiners, and straps; I think of the fervour and release of sex and orgasm; of mindless labour that keeps capital cycling, always out of view and out of reach. Like bodily functions, the economy is also invisible and so a kind of magic – a collective agreement based on faith.
Cycling through curiosity and exploration, intensity and frenzy, ecstasy and release, the performers build a strange machine-body soundscape. By the end it’s hard to tell which sounds of breath and strain are issuing from the prosthetics and which from the performers. Internal and external, flesh and machine have become entangled and contingent. We know these dependencies well, but in Hold For three they are made visible and visceral.
Hold for Three, Lottie Sebes and Kayla Elrod, Hošek Contemporary and Projektraum Zwitschermaschine, Berlin, 21 July 2023