Joana Saraiva
I know all the beats. I know perfectly well how each beat strikes me on my feet, shoulders, and fingertips.
I know how to dance down to my fingertips, and even my fingers! – know how to beat to the music.
Funcionamos em cadeia, a música e eu.
We work in tandem, the music and I.
I’m in control of the beat and the beat is in control of me. It feels good when it’s like this, when I lose myself and pass the leadership to another hand.
When I give my hand to the unknown, when I’m just catharsis, when I go – when I go, that’s it – without even knowing exactly where, but I go anyway because not going is not even an option. (If you try focusing only on the bass, I swear you’ll float. I swear the beat comes from your guts.
I swear you feel more yourself, closer to yourself, closer to the best version of yourself!)
Sometimes I lose myself. I lose myself on purpose because I get bored of myself. I lose myself in the lack of control of the beat, I redesign myself in other forms, at other speeds. Neither you nor I know me anymore, and that’s exactly the chorus I was looking for. Now they can’t define me in embarrassment, guess me in constraint, find me only in shapes. I killed them, the shapes, when I lost control in the beat.
The solemn occasion called for a matching lipstick: red, of course. The hair deserved a party adornment, so I made a rose bloom under my left ear: red, of course. When I reached my arms towards the sky, satin slipped through my hands, arms, then chest and belly. And when I finally felt the seam three fingers above the knee and the last button of the dress closed on my back, I grew three centimeters: the display was perfectly where it should be. Then magic happened: sculpted between some black glass tights, my legs, thighs, and hips drew themselves into enviable maturity. The hips were finished off on the feet when I put on patent heels, and voilà, from the candid “early twenties,” I passed to the solemnity of the “almost thirty.” (I would later learn that gaining a handful of springs in half time would never be a reason for euphoria again. However, for now, I thanked the miracle).
The form was redesigned. This my version 2.0 was ready to lose control in the beat. Little did the beat know what awaited it when I appeared, like never before sure of myself; more than ever prepared to reinvent myself, to let the bass of the music guide me again on the path where I am more myself. I know perfectly well all the beats and how they beat me on the body. I know perfectly well what I’m going to do when the lights come on and without hesitation, I will be superbly, I will exist without embarrassment and without constraints. When I dance, I feel like this, more myself. My body doesn’t bring captions, and I don’t want them for anything.
The captions, however, insist on taking ground and come to me in the form of A4 paper and smelling of fresh printer ink. “You’re the one with the rose!” they told me. To be the one with the rose, I explain, means that it is the rose that proudly distinguishes those that are my lines. It means that beneath the rose, there are written letters and consequently words that it is up to me to decipher, read, and say out loud. This my version 2.0, although I don’t see any letters, was ready to take control of the case. The case starts with the line before the pink, stretches over the understanding of how many other colors would together with me read the unknown letters, and ends in the theme of the party: this was the case, and with this information, I was already taking care of it.
They called us with a decreasing tempo and my heart, out of rhythm, felt it against the sweaty and intertwined fingers in the “J+C” buried in a second heart bathed in love and silver. The room was full, the air was warm. There was a leftover red lipstick on the collar of my dress 3 cm above the knee and I didn’t want to know or care. When the lights dazzled me for the first time and when I first realized the room was full, I took control of the beat. I ensured the precise entrance with whoever said to me: “you speak after me, ok?” Ok. And so the entrance was clean, of course: it always is. To the paper full of codes, for me indecipherable, I winked occasionally, lest they think that the printer’s ink and the pink marker ink had been in vain. I calculated the rhythm of others’ words, the size of my pink spot compared to theirs, and I went. Just that, I went. I killed them, those words, when I lost control in the beat. I made them dance in my mouth and gain power in my eyes. I rewrote my dance when I gave my hand to the unknown and reinvented myself without shapes and without captions. These that were given to me – or any others that may come my way – I put them on my body: I identify their meaning, kill their form, and resurrect them in music. No one knew – and will never know (or at least I hope so) – if I followed the choreography. If I rhetorically fulfilled the commas and interjections or the “two to the left, two to the right”. If you focus only on the bass, if you close your eyes and let the beat be your oxygen, no one will ever know.
I am my version 2.0.
I am my beat, I am my text, I am my protest, and I don’t want captions for anything.
For she who takes care of her own world