Kit Hall Guest Blog: I Like It. What is It?
Image: Kit Hall
I Like It. What is It?, supported by Jerwood Developing Artist Fund, is a two year residency programme that gives artists the space to explore boomerang ideas; the ones that they believe in but haven’t had the chance to find their form yet. Each artist represents a different kind of boomerang idea. Ones that have the potential to be wild and beautiful.
Instead of the typical headshot and bio, we wanted to give the artists freedom to announce their idea and residency in a way that is special to them. Below is a blogpost written by Kit Hall, one of our I Like It. What is It? residents. Kit is a dancer, choreographer, performer, producer and holistic massage therapist based in Bristol, UK. Their dancing is currently curious with: the material of the body, improvisation, exploring what it is to stay(dance) in touch, attention, liveness, growing imagination and community building.
I like slime. When I was younger, I loved playing with the sticky, neon green gum from the plastic pot stretching and squashing it. Still now, slime, this known and unknown, this body moving between stationary-to-moving-to-fluid-to-solid draws me in.
I like that slime is a material of many different movements and characteristics. It can be its own singularity, it can connect things together, it can morph between entities. I like that slime spends much of its existence in the in between spaces:
between the layers and organs in our bodies,
between being absolutely get-away-from-me-repulsive and can’t-get-enough-of-it-pleasure,
between being a solid or a liquid,
between being containable and then woah, it’s spilling out everywhere,
between being appropriate, necessary and then suddenly very very awkwardly embarrassing, please look away as I pull this out of my body, the disgust is folding in,
between water, earth and air.
Slime. It’s everywhere. We wouldn’t be here without it.
I like seeing all the slimy trails glistening that snails leave behind so that they can travel and know how to return to their place of rest.
Do you know of the expandable slime of Hagfish which they release when stressed or in defence?
I’m thinking of the slimy regurgitated nests built by swiftlets.
I’m wondering about what my home would look like if all the slime that has left my body and woven out into the world in some way, full of protection or pollution, was more visible. I’m thinking about how we eat each other's slime.
I’m thinking about the toxic slime scum rising in our rivers, canals, and lakes.
I’m thinking about the multiple mucus gloop protection systems in the body.
I’m thinking about the goo within the aloe vera plant behind me as I write this, and how similar goo is also in the handwash in the bathroom next door, and how I’ve just slathered this on my hands for extra defence.
Being someone with a chronic condition, I’m curious about how slime can be a vehicle for pollutants into the body or earth and yet also be one of our body or earth's strongest defences. A space of resistance and transmission at the same time. This presence of slime in our bodies and the world makes me think about our different experiences of immunity and our different ideas of what immunity is and can be.
It makes me think about the beauty and tragedy of being porous. Of dancing with pollution and pleasure all at once, of deep time oozes beyond all the surfaces, of common grounds that are very slippery, of feeling through indirection and direction, of tentacular thinking (Donna Haraway), of the in betweenness of communications, of co-building beyond what we are sure of, of keeping/dancing in touch.
And I wonder; how might the movements that are at play in those gloopy slippy territories where there is potential for all kinds of communication and transformations, support us to reflect on feelings about the health of the world and our bodies?
During my residency I’m diving into the world of slime. Not because I have fixed plans to create a new performance that involves or is all about slime. Rather, I am interested in beginning with it, to explore and experiment with the materiality and movements that slime carries and sustains, to be inspired by it, let it swill and think about the notion of a slime commons.
I imagine this residency might include conversations with slime experts, a series of workshop labs and studio experiments with collaborators to begin exploring some of the dancing and choreographic research starting points that I have gathered, in the hope to discover dance, sound and material for a new performance work.
I have visions of a tactile 1-1 work that involves hand massage techniques, movement and flooding slime-like-materials, of an ensemble dance work expressing the potent slippage between pollution and pleasure, and visions of a co-built digital work…though at this stage, as I play and explore, I’m open and welcome to other visions for a new performance work popping up and forming along the way. And, I’m really excited to be exploring a different corner of my choreographic practice in working and co-building this work with a community of people with different routes into dancing and different relations to slime.
I'm feeling hugely buzzed to begin this exploration, to meet the other artists in this residency, to be supported by MAYK and to share in the big creative questions. Here’s to more dancing, finding and making!