Issue no. 3 by Steal This MagaZine

Steal This

MagaZine ISSUE no.3

DANCING WITH MYSELF

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dancing With Myself Men in Conversation Hands For Feet My Journey With Social Anxiety Making Contact The Indulgent Image Adventures in Woamb Reading Dancing Inside Out

[Je]: subject pronoun corresponding to English I

When I think about the loneliest times while traveling I think about eating alone. I’m the loner who brings her travel books written by other lonely travelers with me when I eat. In Barcelona, at La Cantina Mexicana, I take the corner bar seat where napkins are usually folded by staff. Nestled between the bar and line cooks, I’m enamored by the managers tentacle arms answering phones, pouring drinks and ringing up bills. The line cooks work the kitchen like crew on a rolling ship at sea. Oil hits the fryer, pans cackle and waitresses call “Guacamole!”. I leave a big tip.

2 3 7 11 13 15 17 19

In Bordeaux, at the Bar de Vins, I’m seated at the bar again. I write bad poetry on napkins but take note of waiters swigging the newly opened wines. Two of them tease another to boost his flirting game with the ladies at table #4. He blushes and takes a swig of wine. “That’s 4 euros in tips, Gentlemen. Félicitations!”, one waiter boasts facetiously. My third glass of wine sets in and I wonder if the waiters notice my flushed cheeks or the slur in my words. Midnight on the crowded Paris subway and I feel heat rise in me from the sexual energy of the couple standing by. I avert my eyes but catch those of a man who enters at the next stop. Here we are in an intimate capsule racing underground and my mind runs wild with romantic Parisian dreams. I have no pity for myself. Not even for the fact I’m completely sober. That night I read another chapter and tucked myself in a heap of five pillows. Sirens outside hum me to sleep.

by Sarah Jane McIntyre Illustrations by Yon Chau Beh

What are your criteria for allowing someone get close to you? How do you feel sharing your inner world? How does that make you vulnerable and how do you decide to share a particular part of yourself that you would not normally share with others? I think I do it by how much I connect with someone. It depends how like deep I connect with someone basically. I would say it’s a gradual process; I don’t try to force it like it can happen over years. When I sat down with three of my guy friends to talk about their relationship to their own masculinity, I was surprised to see how crucial deep bonds of friendship and feelings of social acceptance and were in allowing them to be themselves. Throughout our conversation, we touched on the role of vulnerability in intimacy, and what it means to feel that we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable. When was the last time you felt vulnerable and how did you deal with it? Well, there was the other day when I had an immense and very emotional chat with one of my friends about how we felt about each other, and it was just us in the room and for the first time I was saying stuff that I’d only ever kind of repeated to myself in my head. Or, like, hinted at to my housemates and stuff and it was… I think the vulnerable part was that it’s easy to say stuff to yourself in your head, but actually having to put it to words, you know, and I had to kind of stop myself to gather my thoughts and whatever. I think I feel vulnerable a lot of the time, because I’m . I felt vulnerable particularly when I first moved into this house, when I left London. Back home you have multiple places to go to for feeling sad or feeling vulnerable, you have some networks, you know the area, you’re far more familiarized. Back in London how I deal with it is that I kind of just like see my friends and try to circumvent that. Friends ground me a lot so if I have strong friends and a strong friendship, being around that at a time when I’m feeling very uprooted is something that helps regulate me. It sounds quite jokes, but I think I feel especially vulnerable when I make really close connections with people. I know a small percentage of people that I’d call close friends or whatever, and after I share things that I wouldn’t say to the average person, that kind of puts me in a vulnerable position. That happened with my close friend, my best friend now. I’ve only known her for two or three years, but we got close very quickly as opposed to people that I’ve known for like a long time. Even when we would call each other and she’d say stuff like , and she’d be waiting for me to say it back to her, and I don’t know if it was some kind of bravado but it was just me trying to keep myself in. She’s my best friend but I found it really difficult to say. The other day when she was like “I love you” and she didn’t mean it like ‘I’m IN love with you’, but because it was her saying it I was like “bruh”. I eventually said it but I stuttered. I think that’s probably the place I feel vulnerable.

I think it’s if you have anything to gain from opening up like that. For instance: my housemate, I can tell him anything because no matter what I tell him he’ll always come back a reaction or advice that ends up benefiting me in the long run. It’s like getting it out to someone else puts it in their hands. I think for me it’s about honesty. If I feel a massive sense of honesty from someone and I feel like the way that they see the world is similar to my , then it means that I can open up to them. But obviously, as the other guys just said, a lot of it is to do with building trust over a period of time. It’s also about like weighing it up if this person is trustworthy. I hope that me opening up will allow others to open up as well, and I feel that friendships should be open and about working together. I wanted to address something that a lot of people think in their own minds – which is: I can be vulnerable and I want to be vulnerable but I don’t want the ugly side to come out. Do you think it’s important, or necessary, in intimate moments to show that aspect; or is it something that you think “oh that’s just for me”? I think you can’t separate the two. When you make the decision to be vulnerable to someone, that’s it. You have to open yourself up completely, and part of that is as well. The whole point of a friendship is not necessarily to improve as people but if, for example, your ugly side is that you drink a lot or that you’re kind of selfish, then if there’s dialogue then those things can be addressed. Dialogue is just key. When people have anger issues, drinking problems or jealousy – any character flaw — everyone is really practiced at pushing those things down; not just from other people but also from themselves. If someone’s got any sort of mental block, it’s much easier for someone that knows them to say ‘look… this is what’s going on… this is what you need to do about it’ and . Intimacy in some ways is good at going about that. If you spend an intimate amount of time with someone – different or vulnerable situations – they might see that kind of thing and not be scared to mention it; whereas you’d be scared to think of it yourself. What about intimacy with yourself? Do you have those moments of stillness – what are you doing in those moments? I play quite a lot of music. It’s great being with people but then it’s also great being by yourself in a – it’s quite a unique thing that’s hard to describe or pin it down. I just kind of like being by myself or sharing my thoughts with someone who really knows me. When someone sees your vulnerable side, then there’s no repercussion. That’s quite peaceful.

In terms of identity, if I’m alone I’ll be talking in a closed loop to myself; I’m simultaneously the speaker and the listener. As I’m thinking things there’ll be another part of my head that kind of analyses what I’m thinking and reminding myself ‘no that’s not a bad thought that’s a good thought’. It really came about when i started , because I started when I was quite young and not many other people my age were around to smoke with. I take time to almost have a conversation with myself, getting some of the same benefits you might get from opening up to someone. Do you guys feel that there’s different expectations for you to act a certain way or show/not show certain emotions? And what are those expectations in your eyes? I think culture is a big thing in this conversation because in the culture I was raised in, emotions aren’t really spoken about. It’s pretty much action instead. But, growing up here, my parents are very emotionally present and the biggest reminder that it isn’t that accepted is when I went on holiday this summer and got a bit too high and I felt pretty anxious. I tried to voice it to my cousin and his two other friends as well and... , they flipped it… Just because I was opening up. After that it felt really depressing, depressing in terms of the force, I felt like something was pushing me, pulling me down. I enjoy university because I can be emotionally open but I don’t enjoy it at the same time because, at times, I feel like what I think is wrong and I shouldn’t be talking about my emotions. What do you think about expectations? What do you think is so scary about vulnerability that men need to act that way towards each other and themselves? There are definitely expectations for men to hide it all in within the society. I feel like that’s partly why men are less likely to go to the doctors when there is a problem. I was quite emotional in primary school. I was not afraid to cry and so on but when I went into secondary school — it wasn’t the worst school in London but it was a very rough environment — I definitely had to grow the tough skin, like three or four layers of it, because you don’t want anyone to see you as vulnerable. It’s the last thing you want anyone to see and I was not trying to be the alpha male but I was not also trying to be trampled upon. So you would often carry yourself in words to not seem ‘wussy’. You don’t want to be thought as gay and such, almost like what said. If someone said something really insulting, you didn’t have the time to feel bad or think of what the person said, you just said something five times worse just to get back at him. That’s also why men are so afraid of opening up because obviously there is that competitive element of “Am I going to be put down for this?”. Probably yeah because the way men see opening up to someone is as a form of weakness. You don’t see cliché successful guys be open like that. In the states, there was this ‘American guy’ stereotype. I remember back in primary school, there were kids in my class who fit that build. They were macho, their dads would take them hunting, they had a girlfriend and stuff like this. I always looked up to them not because they were ‘good’ people but just because ‘oh they get to be that thing!’. It’s like you see in the movies or in real life, successful politicians, athletes and such, . Not necessarily as a competition against other guys but a competition amongst themselves to meet that standard.

How do you guys overcome those standards and create your own? And when you do meet the kind of people that won’t accept that, how do you react and how does it make you feel now? The kind of household that I lived in was one which you were not praised for how much ego you had, and in fact if you had too much ego, you risked getting a talking to. In a way it was a place to be yourself. When I went home I did not have to yell at anyone and tell them to shut up. At home generally was a good environment for me to just be myself and kind of follow my own interest without judgements or anything like it. I would say the first three or four years of secondary school, I was quite boisterous and partying, not necessary because I really wanted to but almost like I had to — I felt like I had to be some sort of fighter or play-fighting to subconsciously set up some kind of masculinity. But at a certain age . I remember a time in secondary school during a ‘wear your own clothes day’, I would dress very differently to everyone else and some people would have some very interesting opinions. Some people good, some people bad but at the same time in my head, I was just kind of like, ‘fuck it’. It definitely was a leap into the unknown because you had to try to be you in a very masculine environment. Being vulnerable in yourself, to your best friends or to everyone is a way of saying ‘I am not succeeding at meeting these expectations’ in whatever context. On the surface of it, if your typical jock that is deep in that competition to be the best were to stop getting girls, or drinking the most and say ‘this is upsetting’, it would be him admitting to his friends that he is not able to meet that standard and that is perceived as a weakness. But it can also be really empowering, because if you admit that there are unreachable standards, it’s like holding your head up and saying In my experience, the place that I come from and the people I am surrounded by, I did not really have the confidence to break away and open up that vulnerability, so I was on my own. In high school I could not really do it because I felt like I needed to survive and I would be ostracized otherwise. If everyone was playing football and I were to say ‘guys everyone is playing football now but let us talk about how we feel’, it would not have gone down. In sixth form, my transition from my rough working class high school to my middle class school was a whole different experience. It was because I am black but they were all white. On the surface they seemed fine but ultimately, they all went to the same high school together with parents knowing one another, and integrating into that community was difficult. It was almost like . The hardest moment was when I realized that this was not me. I am not that model. I am not that guy. The fact that I am built the way that I am, the fact that I carry myself the way I do. I think the most dangerous things about masculinity and vulnerability is when you don’t know what you’re doing. The moment you realize who you are, you can then navigate your own masculinity and there is no uniform to it.

As the interviewees wanted their identities undisclosed these shapes will represent their identities by Axelle Van Wynsberghe

When gazing upon his work we see pens, Indian Ink, Lino, and splashes of watercolour are all embraced by Alastair Knowles-Lenoir to produce these illustrations. The focus of these illustrations is to envisage the sensations felt during his personal experiences of surfing and exploring forests and woodlands.

His works are not intended to be a direct representation of events but rather of his “feelings at the time.” Knowles-Lenoir states that the process is interesting as regardless of whether “it’s good or bad [it’s] a way of producing some interesting pieces and keeping things fresh in your mind.” Thus, when one looks at his work we see abstract visions that Knowles-Lenoir has embraced in order to produce his illustrations.

You can find more of Alastair’s work on his Instagram @handsforfeet

My Journey With Social Anxiety What does mental illness feel like? Although I don’t suffer from depression, Schizophrenia, or Psychosis, my experience with social anxiety has imparted a lot of wisdom to me about what it feels like to not be able to function ‘normally’. I understand what it feels like to not be experiencing the ‘appropriate’ emotions to the situation, and I understand mental illness to be a time in which a person in not experiencing ‘appropriate’ emotions to a point that it is having a detrimental effect on their mentality, happiness, productivity and view of self. When I found out I had a potentially-life threatening brain tumour one year ago, I didn’t and still don’t really care. In fact I was almost a little relieved. I thought this could be a physical explanation for my social anxiety and one that wouldn’t reflect badly on my character. At the time I wanted the doctors to perform a futile operation to remove the tumor with a blindly optimistic hope that they might catch some part of the brain that would rid me of my social anxiety. Due to my brain tumor, I was allowed to defer from university for a year, but in truth I had just used this an excuse that people couldn’t judge me for. The real reason I was inferring from university for a year was because of the chronic unhappiness and fragile sense of self that social anxiety had landed me in, not to mention the huge drop in self esteem I had endured from feeling like a socially inept freak on the days when I did manage to drag myself out of my hungover state of self pity to briefly interact with other humans. I just needed to spend some time with my family and remember who I was. How can you be yourself around people when you constantly feel on edge? I had told my friends every grisly detail of my entire life and I still felt as if they didn’t know who I was because I was never relaxed enough to actually be myself. I had

made countless attempts to be myself through the anxiety but it was just impossible! My laughs didn’t feel right, my smiles were awkward and I felt like I didn’t deserve to be around my friends unless I was smiling and laughing all the time. A huge aspect of our identities depends on who we are when we are around other people, and I felt invisible. So using my tumor as a valid excuse, I left for home in January to try to remember who I was. Things didn’t change much at home. My mental illness was having a really negative affect on my sense of self. Every time I would be in a social situation where I would react in a way that I thought was anything less than perfect, my self esteem would take a hit. Every time someone would ask me how I was, or if I was okay today, I would feel like they were attacking me or tricking me, and that I had to react enthusiastically and happily which was utterly exhausting when I just felt anxious. I’d forgotten that I was allowed to be sad and scared and unhappy and insecure. All I thought I could be was happy and confident and the only place I didn’t feel that pressure was in my home around my family and that is where I spent my next two months. I had started to panic because despite the fact that my home was a refuge to me, I didn’t want to spend my life as a recluse, wishing my mental illness away, desperately trying to hold on to who I was before I developed social anxiety. Using all the willpower I had, and not before almost running away at the airport, I got on a plane to thailand where I was to stay at a meditation retreat. I remember now that this was actually half an attempt to escape reality but I knew meditation was going to help. Hindsight has given me an almost absolute sense of clarity on the whole situation. I can see now what other people must have seen. What my mum must have seen when I told her that I felt so messed up that I needed to live in a retreat for two

months at the other side of the world. I mustn't have seemed any different through the lense of sanity aside from the fact that I was spending a lot of time alone. But I felt worlds away from everyone because no one could understand how I felt. And I felt too scared to show people how I felt, as this is the nature of social anxiety.

myself to drink to escape the anxiety I felt. The anxiety was still as bad as before; it just didn’t have the same control over me as it did then. So, my life has continued like this until after I started writing this article last week, when I had a revelation that completely changed my perspective on everything.

Eventually I arrived at the meditation retreat in northern Thailand. The journey there was much less scary than I had anticipated. I met a friend in Chiang Mai city and we traveled to Chom Thong together which is a traditional non-touristy town located in Chiang Mai province. The only westerners here were the people staying at the international meditation centre, which generally seemed to be around 6-20 people at a time and a huge contrast to the amount of foreigners in Chiang Mai city. I felt a huge sense of relief at the temple. No one could judge me here and knowing that, my anxiety disappeared as soon as I arrived at the meditation centre, which was slightly separated, but still situated within the grounds of a temple.

After having an intense conversation with a friend on mental illness I realised I wasn’t allowing myself to express all my emotions. I was trying to laugh when I didn’t want to. I was trying to stop myself from blushing when I was embarrassed and it is this need to control the way I behave all the time that creates the anxiety. Now, when I feel something, I allow it to show in my behaviour no matter what that is. Now, when someone asks me if I’m sad or unhappy it doesn’t feel so much like a knife to the chest as it did before, and I realise they are just wondering why it is that I am not enjoying myself.

At first, the lack of interaction between everyone at the temple made me feel like I’d joined a cult, but soon enough I had to exhibit this behavior myself through the practice of mindfulness and soon understood its benefit. Without getting into too much detail of how the practice works (as that is the wish of the teachers at the centre), through the techniques of meditation and mindfulness I understood what was happening to my mind and body at every waking second and this reduced my anxiety to exactly what it was, an emotion. It was no longer an overwhelming aspect of my identity that was unbearable to endure and was ruining my life. When I returned to the real world I now, for the first time had a tool to help me deal with social anxiety. This was the all-important first step in getting over my mental illness because through mindfulness I would no longer avoid situations that scared me and I would no longer allow

I still suffer from social anxiety and at times it will still prevent me from being happy. But the fundamental difference between now and before is that I’m allowing myself to suffer from social anxiety. This means that when I feel anxious or upset or vulnerable, I’m allowed to show it, and if someone notices or even judges me for it then my self esteem isn’t going to take a hit because all I’m doing is allowing myself to be seen. Even though there has been little true happiness in my life in the past two years, I wouldn’t change this journey that social anxiety has taken me on. I was going to title this article “my battle with social anxiety” but i decided to go with “my journey with social anxiety” because the battle was only the beginning of my journey, and I don’t need to battle it anymore. If there is one final thing that I can conclude from this journey it is that feeling weak all the time has made me realise how strong I can actually be.

by Jacob Cassidy

Luckily, we can represent memories linguistically, which given the fact we are essentially alone in our minds otherwise, is extremely important. It gives us a means of communication, a means of expression. Language is our most powerful tool, the only bridge we have to other people and, actually, to ourselves. Without it we would be stuck forever with our conditioned reactions and responses, they would be the unconditional dictators of our lives. We would essentially be robots. But we can abstract linguistically from our sensory experience, represent and express our hopes, fears, desires and aversions, our beliefs, to one another and to ourselves. Romantic intimacy is arguably one of the most highly valued relationships in our society. We are all programmed to search for it, maybe that we are entitled to it, that it is our destiny. It is possible but there are prerequisites. To engage intimately with someone else you must first have engaged intimately with yourself. You need to acknowledge your emotions. Actually feel them, sit with them, don’t run or hide from them, have courage.

You are, consciously, a single point of attention experiencing a continuous string of sensory information. These sensations are either visual, auditory, kinesthetic or olfactory. You are more likely to remember the most emotionally meaningful experiences you have, encoding them into memory as imagery, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes or a combination. Throughout your life you have gained experiences which let you know what to move towards, things that feel good, and what to move away from, things that feel bad. You have generalised from your experiences and organised your mind into schemas, stereotypes and expectations. These beliefs, or educated guesses, help you to navigate your environment, toward the ends of survival and reproduction. Most of your schemas work pretty well, they stop you from having more of the same painful experiences as before and facilitate having more pleasurable ones more often. Some of these aversions and desires have become so deeply ingrained in your mind that you identify with them, you call them you, your personality.

It’s no secret that masculinity in the modern western world is characterised by stoicism. Nor that suicide rates among men in the UK are three times higher than for women. This is causally connected but it is not just a problem for men, many people are out of touch with themselves. The sentiment ‘vomit up them feels’ speaks for itself. Do not be vulnerable. Do not get intimate. Meet your physical needs and leave. Facing your feelings and making yourself vulnerable enough to be intimate with someone is tough, no one is saying it isn’t, but it is rewarding. It strengthens you, it strengthens your relationships, giving them the potential to blossom and bloom into something beautiful. Its healthy. What I am trying to say is, engage with your emotions, be honest with yourself, speak to those closest to you. Open up and fall in love. Its fucking awesome.

by Timmy Davis Illustrated by Phillipa Leigh

Sometimes you find yourself acting in certain ways that make no sense, ‘why am I doing this?’, ways that bring you pain. Sometimes you learnt these behaviours because they had a secondary gain. An infant who only got comfort and attention from its mother when it was sad learns that the only way to get comfort and attention is to be sad. Going into the future, this behaviour is retained, to the detriment of the adult whose new partner does not understand that these behavioural cues are cries for attention and comfort which, of course, creates a negative feedback loop. The cues are misinterpreted and the secondary gain of comfort is not received, driving the suffering individual further into despair. It is these unconscious patterns which dictate our lives and relationships.

THE INDULGENT IMAGE Traditionally, the female nude in western art has never embraced body positivity or individuality, rather it routinely, almost a tradition, turned subject into object, to be nothing more than the viewing pleasure of the male gaze. The nude had been reduced to an aesthetic pleasure that has never been developed to mean more than an offering of flesh.

However, there has been a contemporary, western reprisal of the nude that has allowed many artists to explore the complex constructs surrounding our bodies as well as critique cultures that has allowed for it to endure. Contemporary artists have taken to social media to address censorship and body positivity. Frieda Ford, a young English artist, has used photography and embroidery to explore the conflict between women and their culturally constructed image. In Censorship of the Nipple Pt.1 a nude is sewn on plain linen. The threaded line structure, reminiscent of Egon Schiele, infers an intimate, self-indulgent nature that is uncommon to classical depictions of nudes. Amongst the curved, black stitches, are small rivulets of woolen colour. Delicate yet abrasive against the monochromatic background they allude to the absurd nature of censorship over the female body. The artwork is not surreal but rather political; by exploring the transgressional concepts of society, and how a woman struggles to assert her body and form in a society that considers it theirs as much as it is hers.

This message is continued in Fordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s other works, Censorship of the Nipple Pt.2 and Liberation of Body Hair. All works use the contrast of textures to emphasise the influence of gender politics. In Censorship of the Nipple everything is normal except for the protruding sprinkles that whilst add comical humour, illustrate the disjointed, unnatural nature of censorship, removing what is natural and instead turning it into an unnecessary complexity that removes us from our own identities. by PHILIPPA LEIGH ARTWORK BY FRIEDA FORD

You can find more of Friedaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work on her Facebook page.

Adventures in Womb Reading When my friend suggested I come along to her ‘womb reading’, at first I had been somewhat sceptical. My mother’s life long aversion to what she terms ‘middle class hippies’ is ingrained in me, and faint warning bells had been sounded by the incense, the mandala patterned wall hangings, the words ‘womb’ and ‘reading’ in the same sentence…but the Curious Anthropologist, and the Soul In Need Of Healing within me win the tussle against the Cynic. Thus, on Wednesday I meet this friend at Pure Magik and we are led up the shop’s narrow winding staircase to a small attic. A ‘womb reading’ it turns out, is not quite as literal as it sounds. It is not focused on fertility or exclusive to women. Maryam describes her aim is to “create a space to dream in the daytime”. We discuss alternative sources of knowledge, that which arises from our subconscious, our dreams, our bodies, the hierarchy of mind over body and what consequence this has for society. We reckon no one can lead a purely ‘rational’ life. “Even the most rational people dream” says Maryam. After this we are both inducted into the session (though I am merely there as an intruding observer) with incense and a prayer then, after a visualisation, cards representing different elements and gods are chosen blindly. These are used to build up a picture of my friend’s current emotional state and comprise the ‘reading’. Maryam interprets the cards and my friend expands on what she says.

emotion we don’t really have language for (for example, the hundreds of subtly but distinctly differing emotional states that are often lumped together under the word ‘sad’). Maryam ends the session by giving suggestions on way of moving forward from the issues that arose during the reading and hugs us. We stumble out into a bustling Canterbury, both in a daze. My friend, however, had quite a different experience to me, the third party observer, and would probably write quite a different piece on the reading, perhaps focusing more on knowledge from the body or the healing process. Maryam may have written about the spiritual significance of a womb reading. It was not an experience that dictated to you one way of engaging with it. And that is where I think it’s value lies.

Maryam Elen Jones describes herself as a 'Priestess of the sacred spiral' and specializes in Angel and Goddess Readings. You can find the Pure Magik shop where she does her readings on the high street or on Facebook.

The result is a dialogue between ‘symbol’ and ‘reality’. Personal revelations surface which probably would not have without the ‘womb reading’’s symbolic framework to reveal them. The more empirically minded may argue that the cards, the beliefs, are not ‘true’ but that misses the point. They cannot be ‘proven’ because there is no proof, there is only the effect they have, the meaningful life they facilitate. It struck me that for many people this would be an improvement on the more sterile frameworks for discussing emotion found in mainstream counselling. Symbols of the elements- fire, water, air- and the focus on the body create an empowering framework to explore negativity rather than a purely vulnerable one, while discussion through metaphor provides a way to express those nuances of

by Claudia Shearman

Dancing Inside Out “I could do a pirouette. But do I need to? Does it have to happen? Not necessarily.”

Michael Stone, masters student at CCCU, choreographs ‘Modern Minuet, a modern version of the original courting dance. After loving the process of his personally revealing solo “Ich, Mich”, “I, Myself ”, he decided to use the similar approach of unlocking deep emotions with his dancers of ‘Modern Minuet’. He uses cognitive processes, breathing exercises, and music such as that of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone to get his dancers comfortable with throwing emotions on the table in various ways. According to him, these exercises allow for the dance to evolve more organically and for a more realistic performance. In Michael’s own words, “It was quite interesting to see my work go from very dancy and movement orientated, to just cathartic, human, feeling, dancing inside out.”

“I’m not setting out to entertain the audience - that’d be lovely if they are, that’d be great! But, I’m setting out to reveal something to them that makes them think.”

“feel how you wish to feel”

Michael Stone Interview by Axelle Van Wynsberghe Photography byFrancis Consorte-Mcrea

Epilogue Intimacy & Transformation: The Art of Being in Touch When I feel intimacy the strongest, it is when I can recognize something in the other and embrace it as a part of me, as that other person recognizes something in me and takes it as a part of them —when we recognize the fundamentality of each other in the moment, which, although fleeting, leaves its lasting impressions on who we are and are becoming. Intimacy is transformative. It touches us in the most vulnerable and undefined aspects of our soul as we start to value and appreciate another person’s evaluation of how we are how we are, and observe with curiosity how they attempt to make sense of us. This is perhaps a reason why so many of us struggle with intimacy. We struggle to show the aspects of us that we might feel ashamed of, reject, or even be afraid of. We struggle to accept the other as he or she is as well, when the parts that we’ve disowned from ourselves show up in their character. In a world where we are often raised to know love conditionally, we struggle to show unconditional presence, despite it being what we all want the most. Lately, I have been pondering on what contexts allow for intimacy. To some degree, intimacy entails exclusivity; it implies that there are aspects of you that are not available or evident at the surface, and that only a particular few could understand. This limitation of the intimate space is conversely what allows for the mutual acts of selfdisclosure and affirmation that are crucial in bonding at this deeper level —where the self is a work in progress and your inner contradictions are laid out. You are inviting someone to co-create with you, and address some questions that you may have been asking yourself for a long time. Intimacy takes a different form and carries different meanings and gifts depending on the boundaries and definitions of the nature of every relationship. This is why this issue has dealt with intimacy in the plural’ with ‘intimacies’. This plurality hints at how intimacy is not only embedded in our social relations but is also relevant in wider cultural and political spheres.

editor-in-chief

Axelle Van Wynsberghe

design director

Maria Velasquez

art director writers Sarah Jane McIntyre Jacob Cassidy Timmy Davis Claudia Shearman

Philippa Leigh

creatives Yon Chau Beh Philippa Leigh Axelle Van Wynsberghe Alastair Knowles-Lenoir Frieda Ford Michael Stone Francis Consorte-Mcrea

We hope that you enjoyed this issue as much as we enjoyed making it, and that you find some phrases and themes that connect with your inner musings. This particular issue required much bravery on the part of many of our writers, and they offer many little nuggets of wisdom that we can all relate with. For this, I applaud them.

[Suis]: subject pronoun corresponding to English am

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