VOICE VOTIVE VICE

words by Lu Rose Cunningham

in response to CAUSE UNKNOWN

A great burst, a prickling heat. Close eyes, imagine movement. First in the extremities and then

crackling through arteries, nervous system awake and working, but jarred. One might rather be

slumbering, soothed, but then would they be so aware to the changes and chances of this world’s

moment? Soaring through limbs, digits twitching, head titling this way and that. Phosphenes mid-

flight asterisks around retinal image, stars splitting open a passageway from this earthy position to

the past, to the pious, to the patiently waiting. Those who know, who understand her pleasure and

pain; those who have sat longer with this restlessness, tried to explain their internal-external

shifts, have also begun titling this way and that. Know the cycling loop of relapse and recovery, on

the threshold of the two. Maybe an insecurity of the soul, between salvation and perdition. Only to

hear the music again, notes emerging clear and tuneful.

Moving a little more, pace upping with each footing, orbital again and again and again-st the tide

of others - another might call this plagued, remembering a forgotten disease and religious

offerings. She can’t forget though, a devotional obsession, a need for collectiveness - is this

mania? naming it that after so many branding it so - bringing her closer to ancestors, to

contemporaries even? Her body as votive / voice / vice, holding the hurt of saints and women

before, holding woman as misunderstanding as miscommunication as ex-communicated, through

her saint-led sinfulness, through an Outsider not believing in her, not believing through her; ‘cause

unknown’. Seeing difference as defiance as danger as deathliness. Remember the Dancing

Plagues, Pacoria Mania, a medieval misgiving, misunderstanding as miscommunication as ex-

communication through saint-led shifts. Demonic possession another reckons, far from god in

trying to come so close. A constant oscillation in circled ruins. Sketched outlines at times offering

loaded colour and patterned understanding, other times fleeting light and shadowy doubt.

Questioning whether the dancing plague is in fact the dancing cure. Undulations of the body,

between spirit carried and spirit seeking to anchor in assured steps. She pirouettes in a blaze.

Attention on her transposed form comes. The burst begins in small ripples, one being twisting

before another twists too, and now - a searing light, a (un-)godly(?) frenzy, unsettled normalcy

some might say, a closeness to deity, devotion as a flurry of marks etching the landscape across

time and temptation. Between looseness and tightness, a body’s ego. To be human is to be a

stranger they say. Posit Human as Strange. For some an unfamiliar fervour, for some animalistic

tendencies to doggedly run, or soar, to dipping or

dropping, the gaze to her feet. A heaviness - as though all the vice and wanting has collapsed into

a weight at once. Curling foetal like a cat, wrapped up in the spurring rhythms and tendency

towards malady thinking am I mad? in a hazy myrrh enveloping synapses. If one edges closer

they might sense it too, and question what is this feverish feeling, this aching. What does it mean

for time to slow around you, for time to slow but the mind keeps quickening and other beings

around you keep moving / dancing / speaking tongues at a pace faster than yours and you just

want to keep up but —

To the Outsider, she might seem content and stilled, with contempt or assurance - are we, the

Outsiders, in fact mad? - what does it mean, a madness, the maddening feeling to connect and

understand, to grip reality like the falcon? - when really she just keeps shaking in the wind,

illness / unreality / uncertainty a pummelling vortex tunnel at its peak. Like a gauzy moth scored,

racing, your own blood and nervous system, the aching organs and alluvia. A moth hurtling, trying

to hold its own, the body keeping the score, but everything cutting it, wings ripping, flight

unfathomable now

and then. Like puppetry, she picks herself up again. Today is a good day she might announce, the

Outsiders might claim, other dancing deviants might say. Today we are slowing, tomorrow we

continue in our loss, of control / occupying of time and space / of orating what is happening here.

Tomorrow and the next, gathering speed and stepping like ribbons, banderoles through footsteps

notating the ground, the air between toes and fingers. Ribbons as inhalations-exhalations

threading from one entity to the next. From sky to ground, from this moment to antiquity. From

Dionysus’ Bacchae, drunk on twirling hedonism and thirst; from St John and St Vetus -

historically, we place blame on others for our terrors, our truths, our sacred fracture - to our lover

and friend. And eventually, as she tires from this pulsating choreography, - call it a dance, orsimply, living - she looks inwards to herself. Like puppetry she lowers her raised head, slump

forwards her shoulders, and concaves her chest, ribbons crumpling in on themselves, asking,

what is this madness; what is this we call illness? What have we seen, what has been bared.

Banderoles as inscriptions as narrative laid naked.

Banderoles as inscriptions as narrative laid naked. Read this. Might we extend the hand/ribbon/

role in this dance and ask that we hold another, and that they hold us. To hold regard for our

madness and see the maddening, the madder red, the heat of our sun and deep-rooted longing.

To seek the Old English and note madness as out of one’s mind, note feelings are out of one sole

mind, and from the mind of another. Feeling that requires others, shaped by others; madness

prescribed by those who can’t fully comprehend, prescribed by a suffering health service /

suffering modernity, prescribed by another who is out of mind - we all need someone to see us -

to proclaim we move in a time of extremity, stuttering at times in our dance - to move is to live,

moves some can’t stop - with symptoms of a society polarised, with sickness felt sooner by some

- are we, All, feeling it coming? Bodies warred against, displaced, immunity troubled, impacted

upon by too much rising heat. Not one cause known.

Shivering against the system / against expectation / against one’s own body. Dance as a body's

animated pain and resistance. Pain her, transform her, offer a body to read, reparitively. What if

she addressed it for its strengthening, re-constructing; her evolved lease, evolved version of her

present character. Shedding, like dropped tears, the version another ascribes. Forwarding,

illuminated. Her Sick And True Form negotiated anew, every time another dancer, healer, and

Outsider, speaks to it, every time she speaks to it. Like dance, navigating. Self in and as flux. Her

Self, verbalising, verbing, more adjectives. Embodying language, ontology. Past present future

happening within. Shedding, one skin for another.

Ask this. Might we allow more quickstepping, support the uncontrollable dancing, find a way to

give home to chaos, this writhing yearning, this ode to faith in something beyond. Instil hope in

this performed hopelessness - *a deep sigh as you note the potential for comfort*. Might we

perhaps hold, heal, hear and keep going? Come together in formation; accept the furore? Open

up, our mind out and freewheeling. Regard faith that living is to live and leave, from Old Norse, to

live on, of fire, to burn, to continue.

A great burst, a prickling heat. Another feels it, and she extends her hand - she is madder red,

with loving and recognition in her blood-flow - for the next dancer, together in persistence,

perhaps partnership. A quiet act of communion. In the pause between pain and reaction, she

looks to the firmament, remembers the eternal round-dance.