17 minute read
"The electricity of the touch, the stability of the hold, the freedom of letting go"
Notes on Lee Su-Feh's Offering Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go
by Kristen Lewis
Lee Su-Feh proposes a body of work called “Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go” (TMHMLMG). She positions the work as an “algorithm,” as a way of playing with the modes in which algorithmic decision-making in the “tech” world condition experience. The algorithm is, one might say, just about as close to the opposite of an actual computer algorithm as one might get, yet also emerges from the beautiful, orderly simplicity of computational syntax.
Su-Feh was in residence at The Dance Centre in June 2023, and offered workshops on the work in May 2023. I was first introduced to this work when she presented it at the 2021 Dance in Vancouver Biennial, and was immediately struck by its at once radical and deeply nurturing power. I later attended a 4-day workshop she offered on the work at the end of July and beginning of August 2022. This article consists of notes I made from ‘inside’ the work, a record in words of the worlds this work unfolded in me. I am grateful to Su-Feh for the deep beauty and transformational power of this work
The work: subjective perspective
As I enter this quieter part of the work, the part where we start to dance together, I am already on the brink of exhaustion—we all are. Our bodies are salt licks, record of hours of struggle we endured—and thrilled in!—to get to this point where our warm bodies start to listen for each other, start to emerge, at the teacher’s invitation, from the safety of selfhood—its absurd little dramas, its glory, its shame, its pride, its struggles.
As our bodies start reaching for each other, I learn in a new way the old familiar electricity of the touch; I learn to distinguish this from the solidity of the hold, to sense for the beautiful point at which a touch wants to become a hold, when a hold craves release into the exquisite freedom of the moment when I— or you—say “let me go” and we do, without hesitation and without complaint. From the vast chambers of our solitude, we listen for the next invitation, arising from ourselves or from each other or from the space itself—we listen beneath the tone to find “what is already happening,” the dance that is there under and beyond our wills, our habits, our ideas of what a dance should or could be. We dance with sensitive feet open to the smell of the possible impossibility. In this way, we learn, slowly, carefully, but also with wild abandon at times— how to dance together.
Their voices, these glorious, skilled, sensitive women I dance with each speak to desire, from desire, so differently: pleasure, apparently, means very different things to different people. If anything is clear it is that we want, almost always, very different things, and that we speak to that wanting differently also. We are bound, here, in this dance-floor space, marked off from the world by the careful constraint of the teacher’s rules. She tells us: we can speak only on behalf of our own desire, which we must tend carefully, listening, as it were, for the desire beneath the desire—softening around obstacles, looking for comfort, feeling for pleasure, for what wants to happen rather than what we think should happen. We must speak that desire in three commands only: “touch me,” “hold me,” or “let me go.” She calls this the ‘algorithm,’ playing on the ubiquity of that form in the current technologized moment. So, this algorithm, “Touch Me, Hold Me, Let Me Go” defines the limits that make up our game—the boundaries that open us up to exquisite impossibilities.
Dance I
This one, for instance is clear and direct with her invitations, delivered invariably with a resonant, assured voice, a deep tenor. Her pleasure has a predictable, self-assured rhythm that is easy to follow: hold my foot, touch my sacrum, hold my head, touch my thigh, touch my shoulder blades, hold my shoulder blades; hold my ribcage, touch my right hip, hold the back of my head; let me go. Repeat, with variations. I can, very early on, predict her rhythm in advance; this makes her asks so easy to deliver on that I feel a sense of accomplishment and even pride in fulfilling them. We travel across the floor in a straight and tidy line, make clear shapes, take small risks, but always with support, planned for in advance. She leaves me with a solid feeling; when we part we smile and bow, put our arms easily around each other, are instant comrades.
Dance II
This one, well, she is much more complicated. She circles around me like a deep and wild animal, blue-hot to my red heat, with equal parts hunger and terror in her eyes. I circle around her also—we are not so different, the two of us. It feels like we are each too big to bear the other yet we want to, with a quiet passion neither will voice. Instead, we catch each other out of the corner of our eye, look away often—both crave and avoid the other’s gaze: if we look at each other we each see straight through the other one. Who wants that. Who doesn’t. But really, also—who does? So, we rarely look each other straight in the eye, lest the heavens open too wide between us.
When she says out of nowhere, with at once the commanding authority of a military officer and the desperation of a starving lover: hold my head, I respond at once like a sergeant at arms, hold her like I will let no harm come to her, ever, like I could hold on for all time if asked. Hold my head. Hold my head. Hold my head. She repeats herself for her own pleasure—she doesn’t have to for my sake. I would die for her, almost—she is that big, that real, that true...and that scared. Before I know it she is relying on me completely, free falling fast towards the floor. I hold her head strong and firm between my hot hands, my legs folding seamlessly beneath me, reminding me how strong we can be when we surrender completely to the task of bearing another.
Then, just as suddenly, she commands me, thanklessly: let me go. And I do. I feel the power of our coming together release into pure, electric spaciousness. It propels us both through space. We circle around each other more and more, our arms grazing and permitting only our fingertips to touch, until, suddenly we are really dancing—parts touch and release without question, without hesitation; her back presses into my sweat- drenched breasts as she leans into me with the shoulders she has ordered me to hold. I hold them and I dance with them, following with my hips as they sway side to side with a gentleness you might not expect to find in such an animal—but, you see, she is equal parts ferocious and kind and in that, also, we are maybe not so different.
Now we are circling again—and she is commanding me again, too: touch my fingertips. Touch my fingertips! And I do. Hold my hips. Hold my hips. Hold my hips. And I grab them firmly and decisively from behind as she slides backwards into me through space— we are flying now and I could lift her, throw her anywhere I like but the instructions are simple and I must obey her command: hold my hips. And so I do. I wonder, how could a person so big be so small?
When it is my turn, I like to play with the orders I give her, so we feel the space between touching and holding, between holding and letting go, let it scramble between us in a whirlwind of possibility offered then revoked and then offered again, only to again be revoked—she is game for the ambiguity and disorientation this provokes in a way few would be: hold-my-let-me-hold-my-hand-let me-go-hold-my-hand-let-me-go-hold. Let go. Let me go! Let me go! Hold Me! Let me Go! Let go!!! And we each fly into the vastness of our stratospheres, sweat covered and laughing, but still with a distance between us, not quite catching the other’s gaze; we bow to each other, it seems, across the expanse of the ages, in deep reverence and having wanted this dance very much, for eons maybe. But equally, we have wanted, also, to protect at great cost the space we let dance between us.
Dance III
This one—well, at first she seems so shy, so reserved, so quiet I think she really does not want to dance with me, hot animal that I am. When I feel her hands on me, so tenderly holding the back of my skull, not moving, I start to see the quiet depth that she is—and, also, how much she does, in her way, want to dance with me. She says in a near monotone (and these are some of the few words I hear from her over the course of a long time dancing together): “you have a kind of wild, infectious joy and I like that. I find it uplifting.” Her hands, when they are on me, are like cool water touched with morning sunlight, so subtle I hardly feel them until my hot body softens under her cooling touch. Later, when I touch her, my hands learn to listen differently, more delicately—hot enough, yes, to hold her, to warm her and never-not there, but finer tuned, gentler.
She is slow and likes slowness and I wait for her; she teaches me a new kind of patience. Hers is a soft but committed clarity and it turns out she is quiet, yes, and slow to open, maybe, but not shy. Far from it. Touch my heart, she says, almost right away. Hold my heart. And I do, one hand on her back and one on her breast, my palms warm and spacious around the places where I feel how she has had to stay frozen, as we all must here and there, to protect this great delicacy that she is. I feel how her coolness both soothes and protects her. Her soft, stoic face is translucent white, almost; she rarely smiles and when she does, her eyes look down— blue eyes that, in these moments, betray no emotion, permit no tears to fall.
Yet she asks, without hesitation, for what she wants—she knows her hungers deeply and is unafraid to feed them. Touch my belly. I feel its softness under me. Hold my belly. Touch my ovaries. Hold my ovaries. And I do, with clear, gentle decisiveness, taking care that my fingertips, resting on her sweat-covered pants, do not graze the place of her opening, whose warmth I feel beneath my touch. Now she is moving—subtly at first, curling inward. She wants to move. She asks, with precision, for just the right kind of support: hold my hamstrings. And I hold them strong and firm, at the top, my wrists having to press into the soft flesh of her buttocks to accomplish the task. And she rises. Touch my wrist, she says. And I do, with the subtlest graze. And now she reaches into space and with my fingers still on her wrist, I am reaching also. Hold the back of my head, she says. And she turns, exquisitely and slowly, with all the time in the world—and by her grace, so do I. Hold my spine, all of it. She says, unconcerned with the impossibility of her ask. I do my best to take all of her in my arms, from tail bone to head; she curls into a soft ball on the floor, fernlike and moist. Hold me. Hold me. Hold my kidneys. Hold me. Hold me. Touch my forearm. Touch my fingertips. Touch my fingertips. Hold my hand. Hold my hand. Let me go. Touch my fingertips. Touch.
Impossible but Still-Possible Dance
I am dancing with an impossibility, too, as we all inevitably are here—dancing with the thing that lurks behind all that is happening, obedient beyond the register of our knowing to the voice that dissolves every time we open our mouths.
Yes, we are dancing, inevitably, with the undanced dance created then at once erased by the very coming-into being of the dances that do make their way onto this dance floor.
This impossible dance, this undanced and in a way maybe un-danceable dance takes form through all the invitations the algorithm excludes—all the possibilities not contained in the constraint of “touch me, hold me, let me go.” These excluded invitations rise in me, as if summoned by the glorious restraint this simple form imposes, by the equation that would seem to authorize their absence: touch me, hold me, let me go. And nothing else.
All registers of the “nothing else” dance inside me as silent orders issued to a dance partner who is not, could not be here, almost definitionally—odd things one maybe does not consider as often as one should, for instance: lick my ankle bone; bite my Achilles tendon, squeeze the side of my quadricep, just above the knee; claw at the sides of my ribcage; run your fingers up the inside of my arm—very lightly! Brush the back of your hand down the back of my arm, all the way to the fingertips. Let go. Pause. Wait. Walk away. Return when I least expect it. Grab my shoulders, from behind. Hold my brain in your hands, softly; trace your fingers with exquisite and gentle precision through the pathways of my mind. Trace barely perceptible circles on my earlobes. Now, hold my ribcage—hard— between your hands. Don’t let go. Stand on my foot. Why so shy? Don’t go lightly! Really stand on it, full weight. Hold my face in your open hands. Sit quietly beside me. Say nothing. Hold my hand. Now, it is your turn—l am ready. My hands are warm. I am not afraid—or if I am, only a little. Know that I take pleasure, too, in that—comfort, after all, is not everything to me, not even close.
Can we unsay the unsayable?
Can we listen and wait, let nothing be the greatest thing we do, together
For now, then, maybe we stay in this simplicity, in this constraint. Yes, yes, let us stick with that, endlessly as need be: touch me, hold me, let me go. Though impossibilities crowd the space between us let us dance, instead, inside the limit, our tongues betraying nothing of the silence out of which no desire can speak. Warm animals, we watch each other from across the room, dreaming, dancing and only so very rarely touching, let alone holding, between the pathways of our difference.
The work: objective perspective
To enter the work, Su-Feh introduces three invitations/commands, and only three: touch me, hold me, let me go. It is within the limits of these three that one must play.
First, we learn to feel for these invitations and commands within our own bodies, with the instruction to “seek pleasure” and to “soften around obstacles.” We touch our arm then listen for the next place that wants something; we touch our knee; we hold our collarbone, we let go. We learn the soft but discernible difference between a touch and a hold; we learn to hold on for long enough to feel for when letting go wants to happen. We let our bodies feel the touch, to smell it almost, to taste it.
We carry on like this for a long time, finding the rhythm within the constraint of these invitations. Later, we do this with the ground; we ask the earth, the planet, to touch our foot, to hold our pelvis, to let go of our thigh. Later still, and only after we have really gotten used to the previous steps, we do this with a partner. First we stay in our own dance but move closer to a partner, and listen as they issue invitations to their own body: they say “touch my shoulder" and they touch their own shoulder. Our partner listens, too, to the invitations we give our bodies: “touch my tailbone,” and we touch our own tailbone.
It is not as easy as one might think to cultivate this kind of dual attention—we are instructed not to abandon our own sense of pleasure as we listen to the other giving voice to theirs; and we want, too, to stay open to the world in all this, to the endlessness of space that courses through all of it, as we are carried through time to a place of never-arriving arrival. We want, for instance, in all this, to still see the sky outside the window, to know that it, as surely as the gulls that fly through it, is there as part of what we are, here, together.
After we get used to this listening to self-and-other, we start, delicately, slowly, but with great commitment, to learn to put our hands on each other, to permit other hands to be put on us— listening, always and carefully for the simple instruction: we will either touch, hold, or let go. Nothing else. And we will be faithful to the instructions: listen for pleasure, soften around obstacles. No definitions of either ‘obstacle’ or ‘pleasure’ are given—those are something we discover and forget, discover and forget, redefine and unravel and reconstitute along new lines, as we go. We find they mean quite different things to different people.
Disclaimer: One might think the work invoked a field that might be called “erotic” but in a way the opposite was true: the work serves, in my experience, to explode most of the habits of being-together that would lead towards registers of “eroticism” and permits an opening into a simple, if shameless innocence, a way of being with our bodies and each other past the confines of the, usually unspoken, habits of being that condition when, how, who we touch and why. Touch is freed, in a way, from having to have what Su-Feh calls “an agenda.” We become, instead, just here, with so much space around our togetherness it becomes possible in a way it would not otherwise be—to touch, to hold, to let go.
Lee Su-Feh (she/her/they/them)’s work encompasses choreography, performance, teaching, dramaturgy, writing and community-organizing. Born and raised in Malaysia, they were indelibly marked by teachers who strove to find a contemporary Asian expression out of the remnants of colonialism and dislocated traditions. Since moving to xʷməθkʷəy əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (TsleilWaututh) Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, in 1988, Su-Feh has created a body of work that explores the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. These works have taken place in theatres, on the streets, on beaches and in the forest, in print and online.
Kristen Lewis, JD, LLM is a dance artist, writer, teacher and advocate. She is the artistic director of Gull Cry Dance Theatre and the director of the Canadian Centre for Men and Families.
