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limbs as a conduit






A score crafted from found choreography, granular synthesis, and ancestral veneration.         

Listen with earphones.







expanded




In 2018, during a period of spiritual transition, I wrote a piece of choreography in my journal. After finding this choreography with no context other than written cues, I chose revisit it.

Today, my daily journals have become a space for ancestral veneration, particularly to my ancestor Ashiokai Ahinaekwa, the daughter of Chief Ahinaekwa and wife of Carl Gustav Engmann, through whom my family carries our surname. While we once believed that Carl Gustav Engmann was a Danish missionary, we later learned that he held a high rank at the Danish slave-trading corporation based in Ghana. This prompted me to seek Ashiokai’s story beyond her affiliations, and found very little archival information about her interior life or voice.

In her absence, I have been speaking to her through my writing, using the body as a conduit for remembrance and dialogue. Returning to the 2018 written choreography, I treated each movement cue as a prompt for communication, writing poems that function as prayers, offerings, questions, and attempts at awakening. The poems read like rehearsal notes, spoken cues, or short utterances meant to accompany the body as it searches, kneels, offers, listens, and rises.

I created a soundscape to support these poems using granular synthesis, sonically embodying Ashiokai’s fragmented and hidden story as it disappears and re-emerges. I recorded myself moving through the choreography while vocalizing the poems. The recording was the primary source material for the granular synthesis. I live-manipulated the grains, allowing the prayers to dissolve, blur, repeat, and resurface. I also incorporated noise from 2018 voice memos to further bring my past self into conversation with my present practice.



poem’s featured:


my body is wading

thinking about you
who were you before he took
spin while moving
dizzy from search and hard to find

across floor with legs
towards drowned truth
crossed torso bent
dismembered attempt to remember

and fluid moving body in
may tide carry back
slight direction of spinning
guided by delusion

hunched over squat
wading at rememory

roll onto ground belly
folding into weight

on ground lift body up
i’ll still carry your name

cross arms together
holding myself hopefully in image.

if i give you my big toe, will you assist?

end knees into low of squat
should i kneel and receive
look down
find what is bestowed upon me
squat
i found before you

hold leg out in front
i offer this limb
pointed toe
as narrow bridge
perching out of other hand
is that where i’ll find daybreak

sweeping arm down
gathering what clings
as leg bends
doesn’t belong to me but i persist
sweep from behind
contorting into your bunker
body and back to front
shift inside the discomfort

as you bend
i fold too
as you go down
i might follow you

lose control
into the undercurrent
leg i let it hover
i’ll try not to overstay.

the sound of the void’s pulse

sway/flow/fluid back
softening to uncertainty
up to stand
perked to the possibility of your voice

arms flail
feeling for you, or for me
swing back
not sure what is mine

body arch back
receiving whatever might be real
hold behind back before arch
pausing at belief or just an echo
of the need to find it

all fours
crawl into void
and glide
hoping the null may uncover

back chest pump
shadow your breath
isolate
break to check for your pulse
lunge forward
oh, i thought i caught you.
back up to standing

hold body up
ascending in protection

keep feet on the ground
rooted in the message you sent

side of head
immortalized imprint

sweep feet out
clearing space for the found

laying on back
allowing it to settle in skin and bone

move rest of body
it’s become a conduit for offering

floor circling body
every revolution a thank you

onto knees
lowering in reverence

back up to standing.

performance: shorebirds; video/sound: council, limbs a conduit, from greenland’s icy mountains, wata song; sculpture: what holds, between wata and self; graphic