liminal witches
🌚 notes on the unknowable
My one regret from going to Vietnam this year is that I didn’t save my printed boarding passes. I chucked them out when I got home and unpacked all the holiday crap from my suitcase: the mess of overused socks, instant coffee sachets, crushed biscuits and soggy bits of paper that accumulate during a trip. I wish I’d kept the boarding passes, and put them in a frame.
The eight different airports we went through (RIP my carbon footprint) were all so different. Doha Airport was like a supersized, glitzy floor of Selfridges. The boarding lounge at Ho Chi Minh City Airport, full of budget sandwich counters and hammer and sickle bunting hanging everywhere, could have been a student union bar. Some airports were completely grey and featureless, like you’d walked through an office stationery cupboard that became an infinite void. My favourite airport, Phnom Penh in Cambodia where we had a long layover, was like being in a temple set thousands of years in the future, or a scene from Dune.
📸 João Rodrigues
Me and my best friend’s brother started ranking the different airports in order of Best Liminal Spaces. I remember the hours of in-betweeney time and parts of the holiday in transit being as vivid as the cities, beaches, temples and restaurants we were getting to.
***
A few years ago I got an Arts Council grant to develop my work as a pole dance artist, and I was crying down the phone to my friend Heather as a traumatic bereavement meant I’d had to reschedule everything. My brain was fried from the combination of honking, out-of-control ADHD with really vicious, sticky grief. Making decisions felt like trying to move huge blocks of glass around in hot concrete. I was completely overwhelmed, stressed about reorganising all the dates with collaborators and managing a real, grown-up production budget by myself. I rambled to Heather while I stomped around the park and sobbed that I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to do this anymore, and feeling completely out of my depth.
“Listen,” she explained, “you are a little hermit crab at the bottom of the ocean, and you’ve crawled out of one shell. You’re going to find another shell but in the meantime, you’re flailing around naked on the ocean floor with your butt hanging out. So yeah, you’re gonna be stressed.”
I think a lot about the naked butt shrimp of change image that Heather patiently explained to me while she was talking me off a ledge. It comes up when I’m in a period where there’s lots of uncertainty, and I’m not sure what to do next. Or when friends tell me about a time in their lives where a clear plan, a relationship, or a big part of their identity fell apart. When they were standing in the ruins of one version of themselves, flailing around and feeling horribly exposed, before a new one crystallised into place around them.
“In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow.”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
***
The more time I spend in pole world, the more I feel like it’s a medium that resists being categorised as any one thing, and that’s a big part of its magic.
I’m always curious about what beginner pole students want to get out of a class. There’s never any expectation for students to disclose to me why they’ve chosen to hurl their body around a metal stick. For some people it will be intensely private. Maybe forever. But I’m intrigued by why they’ve come to the studio, and what they think pole dancing actually is.
From their outfit choices and mischievous vibe, I take a calculated guess that some people’s approach to pole dancing is “WE ARE HERE FOR THE SEXY” (Wonderful.) Other students are intensely focussed on the parts of a class that will make them very strong. Sometimes, what I feel people reaching around for is some slippery concept and slightly ineffable “something else.” That’s probably the closest reason to why I’m there, and I don’t have an explanation yet for what it really is myself. It feels like it’s flickering just outside my field of vision, but also very tangible in its own, elusive way.
“I am in training, don’t kiss me” Claude Cahun, 1927
I am in a pole phase of wanting to build a lot more strength, but also actively work on the sense of self-trust that I can handle the unknowable. Pole dancing is a very, very effective tool to get comfortable with being uncomfortable (take one class and feel the bruising, you’ll see what I mean) and to stretch yourself through the uncertainty instead of stagnating in things you’ve outgrown. It’s taken me months to recover enough from an injury that I can really get back into taking classes, and into my own training. I had to push through how disheartening it can be to feel like you’re having to retrain things that used to be second nature from the ground up. But now I’m getting back into it, and it’s feeling really good.
I am also, as usual, using pole as a tool to remind myself general skills about creativity. Creativity isn’t about perfection, certainty, or control: it’s about building more courage and self-trust to sit with the unknowable, and gather evidence that you can handle it while making cool things. Surrendering to the unknown and using that to unlock new perspectives is a big part of my work, and what keeps me excited about it. I chose the photo on the front page of my website to represent the Hanged Man card from Tarot, which signifies exactly this.
📸 Millie Robson
I talked about this on a podcast where we had a fun chat about how the role of an artist is to slosh around in the unknowable, and ask lots of questions. I also described what I’d like to see in the form of clear, practical resources to support creatives during the “messy middle” phase of a career. Have a listen, I’d love you to let me know what you think.
