MANY SIDED, DOUBLE FISTED, TUNA FEM (2017 - 2018)
Directed and performed by: Romany Dear
Music used: Song originally produced by: Hudson Mohawk and edited by Tom Marshallsay
Presented at:
Being and Appearing, The Swiss Church, London, UK, 2019
Teatro Latino, Bogota, Colombia, 2017
Many Sided, Double Fisted, Tuna Fem is about how to break binaries between gender through practices of the body without recreating other binaries or stereotypes. Many sided, double fisted tuna fem (previously known as Mis Dos Lados) is a solo work that I developed during my stay in Colombia and was later re worked and presented in London. The work explores the body and identity as questionable constructions. I read aloud a letter I wrote to myself using a looper pedal, a microphone and parts of a track recorded by artist Hudson Mohark. My movements and the layers of the verbal and non-verbal language highlight the dualities, contradictions and intermediate spaces that exist within the genre. It presents a constellation of multiple and unstable positions that make visible the many beings or sides we inhabit, including the so-called sides "masculine" and/or "feminine". The piece intends to explore what is created when those sides converse or are queer-ing. It is a reciprocal love letter from body to body. To oneself from oneself and all the selves that may include. Its a private dance from body to body.
DEAR FEM
It’s me your tuna I write to you with a tenderness.
Tender Tuna. Tender Fem.
I have things to share.
I hope it reads like a love letter.
A letter from body to body.
Any body to any body.
My tender tuna.
Your tender fem.
Self to self, side to side.
I have an invitation, a proposal, a date, a reminder, to invite you to visit me more often.
A note to self, a note to body to remember that we exist, supposed opposites,
forced to resist or to fall in love.
Deep puddles or bottomless pits
of never ending
definitions and assumptions.
Contractions that are expected to live
in utopian union
yet always be able to
differentiate themselves.
Gender order /
know your place.
Know your neighbours but not too much. Live with your flatmates and forever hold secret, silent complex crushes. I want to draw a huge curvy line from here to there. Construct a small but sturdy cardboard bridge from me to you.
To invite us to, to be both the bridge and the water underneath it.
How can we exist outside these terms whilst simultaneously accepting that they are part of our landscape.
What could we call this? How do we move across it. Navigate its borders and inner policing? How can I show up more for you? And do you invite me?
How to propel forward? Go diving / Jump off rocks and levitate. Leave rooms without goodbyes / sleep outside/ paint eggs and our many nails/ doing with less thinking, feeling with less feeling + feeling with more feeling.
I invite you to occupy this self.
Your self.To erase and amplify or amplify and erase. We name ourselves.
With much love and continuous admiration.
Your TMH Xx ”