Weichu Huang
Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto
No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity, because we are in our soft girl era and the two cannot coexist, or so I have been told
Among other things, such as yes! I am committed to de-centring western dynamics of privilege in my praxis
and
have you tried manifesting?
No to the heroic....... because my body is a floppy inflatable tube man
going thwap thwap thwap on Wellington Harbour.
No to the anti-heroic because I am making waves, baby!
Bend my body in half
And swim across the Cook Strait wrapped in the deconstructed balloons of my limbs!
I will not seduce you by being sexy & glamorous
I will not attempt to convince you that my drinking alone in a dark corner of the bar is mysterious & not
A ritual drowning of learnt sorrows...... Nevertheless
You will be transfixed by the way I drink my Hawkes Bay rosé as durational performance.
Call your walk through the New World Metro on Willis St a social choreography!
Call your drunken fall through the threshold of your parents’ house at 4 in the morning a somatic investigation!
We must not hope to move or be moved by dancing. In fact......
If we do not move at all
If we let our bodies be eaten by the earth which once birthed us
If we fragment ourselves into the one million dust particles that stream through my skylight in the morning, and bear witness to our own incandescence....…..
It would be the greatest performance we have given.
untitled
after Gabrielle
(sounding, unannounced, on polycarbonate sheeting)
of fruitful harvest, your poetry
is disintegrating on the apple tree
cloyingly close beneath the treehouse
fruit dropped after autumn storm
dripping translucent on the clothesline
your thoughts served alongside borrowed silverware
plucked polished from secret garden
that we nibble at, shyly, with our eyes
on a rare wet morning
you remark to me, late in this season
(carried, tenderly, dangled clandestine)
that afternoon we gather
to rehang drying words like
snatched from colliding fingers, lips and muddy feet
generously you left us
apples, grapes and green tomatoes
blushed and mellow in this sultry heat
Weichu Huang is interested in dancing, happiness, linen bedsheets and abundance. You can find their previous work in Starling Issue 14.