On sapphic imagination and desire
Swans For Play is a voyeuristic experience. An experience of something intense. Something a viewer might want to become a part of but is only allowed to witness from the margins. What happens is never fully given. It stays suspended between what is visible and what is imagined. Like sapphic seduction, the work remains soft and subtle, almost invisible, yet charged and dangerous, like sitting in a car just before it crashes.
I pretend not to see you, though I am aware. I feel you before I see you.
In Swans For Play, Emma Bertuchoz, together with dancer Alina Arshi and musician Giuliana Gjorgjevski, explores a dynamic between two protagonists who irresistibly desire each other. The piece unfolds in four acts, moving between what is genuine and what is performed, between what remains implicit and what becomes explicit. They approach and step back, moving between human, deer, and swan.
Extending the intimacy of Emma’s work, Moving Discourse is delighted to shares her personal notes, letting us follow the process of imagining a stage where desire can grow. These notes mix playful observations, scores for improvisation, and reflections on making costumes—a gesture of love. Central to the work isthe intimate process of makingshoes for her co-performer, describing to us how, by moulding the other’s body, she moulds her desire.
“Our (lesbian) reality is the fictional as it is socially accepted, our symbols deny the traditional symbols and are fictional for traditional male culture, and we possess an entire fiction into which we project ourselves and which is already a possible reality. It is our fiction that validates us.”
Monique Wittig, Le Corps Lesbien
I believe many projects are born from amoureuses states, carried by a special energy that feels both imaginative and a little naïve. My images of swans and deer came directly from the tenderness I felt for a woman I fell in love with at that time. Through her gaze I reconnected with my own desire and began to recognize myself anew. For the first time, my femme side was not only acknowledged but also desired in the way I had always imagined it could be.
Lying together with our eyes closed, we daydream a common landscape and its sensations:
Green, black, and dark blue. We are resting on very soft grass, at the edge of a pond. There is a low mist and a gentle breeze that brushes against our skin and fills us with fresh air. It is light and silent. We can hear our own breath, slow and close. It is neither warm nor cold. Our skin feels porous, as if it belongs to the ecosystem. We are surrounded by small bushes and taller trees. Some of the grass is bent, revealing paths that lead deeper into the forest. Beneath us, the water stirs, a bubble rising, a soft sound spreading. Like mycelium, it connects and quietly sustains the world around us. The water is immensely dark. We see our reflection in it, but we are not afraid of its depth. The water has its own gravity. It supports our hooves, carries us, lets us glide, sway, and commit.
It is here that our embodied imagination takes shape, through played anticipation, movement research and the secret codes of our costume:
We are two deer about to meet in a park. I am already outside, standing by an apple tree, peacefully waiting. You are inside your home, preparing to step out. You are the dark, watchful deer, spying on me, approaching slowly and silently. I pretend not to see you, though I am aware. I feel you before I see you…
A leather skirt barely darker than your skin, with little white feathers pushing outward, eager to meet the wind
White pointed leather shoes on your strong legs, like the curve of a swan’s neck brushing mine
“You spread your wings over m/e. I search their undersides with m/y beak, a slight moisture comes to m/y two respiratory orifices. Among the down I touch the delicate skin, I peck at it, you submit, then you stiffen briskly flapping your wings snapping your beak attempting a cry.”
Monique Wittig, Le Corps Lesbien
There is something undeniably intimate in creating shoes or costumes for someone else. So much care and attention go into making an object that another body will inhabit. While working on your pair, I constantly thought about your anatomy: what adjustments would give you the perfect fit, what might amplify your beauty, how the object could both serve and shape your performance. In this way, the making was never just about shoes. It was about the collaboration, about you testing them, inhabiting them, and becoming my partner in what I sometimes think of as soft, self-sadistic equipment.
I had decided, mostly for aesthetic reasons, to make the shoes without heels. I found them much hotter this way, bold and audacious. They also feature a curved metallic part that keeps the arch intact, even when walking flat. That meant the shoes allowed both a resting position and tiptoe, but with little actual support. Performing in them conditions our bodies: it keeps us on our toes, quite literally, balancing in constant muscular engagement. You love this, because it already shapes the way you move and performs.
I modified roller skates, for the final swan-like scene. I made them to be worn in a bent-knee position, but our bodies are different. What is slightly uncomfortable for me after seven minutes is already unbearable for you from the start. I spent a lot of time adjusting the skates to your body, taking precise measurements to support the right parts of your feet. I admire how you advocate for your body’s safety while still embracing the challenge. When I suggest changing the choreography so you would not have to wear the skates, you insist it is not necessary. You trust that we would find a way to negotiate and adapt. You trust my imagination.
I trust your body
I trust our suspension
I trust desire