Some notes taken at ‘Simultaneous Solos = Spontaneous Duets’: The Little Con at Studio 202, Balaclava, Friday 30th June, with performers Joey Lehrer, Michaela Pegum, Jo White, Ann-Maree Ellis, Peter Fraser, Feng Feng Wang, Penny Chivas and Grace Walpole (curator) and a large audience. _____________________________ ‘On your toes’, ‘Hands up’, ‘Go on’, ‘Back down’ – they are all there: body matter shaping and re-shaping itself. You can see by their shadows that bodies have extensive elastic properties. I am looking down two cricket pitches or practice nets, slow-bowling my gaze towards some batsmen gone awry. The very fact of a man standing close to a wall that separates tells immediately of its firmness or fragility. Testing boundaries, he conjures up the corrugated iron pleasures of my childhood by running his hand along a curtain… Front/back, horizontal /vertical, man/woman, light/shade, death/life. These duets are making me see in binaries. I notice that women bend more than men. I am a sucker for the spiral: I feel it begin and am caught up in its vortex. There can be eloquence in a transfer of weight. Humans here are bird-like. Even though I compose their divided dance as one, they are also doing ‘parallel play’. But at times there is a hint of ‘Lives of Others’. They could be listening through the screen with their whole bodies to the rustle of an inaccessible other. In the final duet a warm glow and the music are caressing, separately, the two dancers. Their presences and concentration has an archaic quality. This necessary ritual of intransitive doing – this performance of improvised dance - is shifting gear. I feel as if I am in an ‘epic’ or tragic situation, being asked to make a fundamental choice… Watching, I am in the process of identifying as a woman.