Speaking Across Lanes
Shivaangee Agrawal & Katye Coe
Image: J N Harrington
I begin with a memory of that wild sea scape that we met in Margate last weekend.
It looked and felt so different on Saturday to how it was on Sunday. From morning to night-time. Water is so vast and unaffected by us. Water in swimming pools feels relatively friendly, indulgent in letting us play and immerse, but it’s just a cousin of the ocean, which on the other end of the spectrum feels menacing, threatening, like it could squash us in a second and it wouldn’t even realise. It feels strange even using ‘it’ to pronoun the ocean, like that’s inadequate for something with so much power and personality.
I enter the sea rarely but when I do I think I experience the immersion that you spoke of with a kind of intensity that takes all my embodied concentration to stay in and to quell the fear that comes with the vastness of it. Pat’s comments that the water I swim in is the same water that our grandmothers and children drink feels super helpful.
And with an anticipatory thought that I will go to the pool and sauna this lunch time - it is a women only session. I am looking forward to the sauna and to the water.
I am also remembering some of the thoughts we have shared around the ethics in the pool. And of loud swimmers driving me out of the water because I don't want a confrontation.
Swimming is the only time that I feel fully held by the world around me. There’s something about a complete immersion of my body in the water, something about how sound too becomes distorted and other-worldly, how every part of my skin is kissed and touched.
I have been thinking about tactility. I was performing (dancing) yesterday evening and afterwards there were lots of hugs and I felt the hunger in myself and others for touch. To be held, and so I wonder if there is something happening in my relationship to water that is also a surrogate for being held by humans.
Fast
At the moment swimming/ sauna (they come together for me in the colder seasons) is also acting as a place and time to slow down (I don’t try to swim faster than I can maintain a sense of my whole body moving).
I love swimming fast.
The temptation to swim fast makes me breathless and I can panic, I lose track of myself. I can run fast and maintain a whole awareness but not with swimming - swimming is too new as a practice. I don't know it well enough. That is also why I avoid swimming near folk that are on a mission, because the competitor in me wants to go on a mission with them.
Swimming fast is always a little scary for me. There is a sort of thrill; drowning and death seem so close at hand but each time that I pause to breathe, the water is the same as ever, it waits for me. I take minutes at the side of the pool breathing rapidly and regaining composure. The water doesn’t change, no matter how much I push myself into the fear or comfort of it.
I took inspiration from you the other day and I swam fast. I couldn’t maintain it for more than a couple of lengths without a breather but I liked it more than I thought - there is a thrill there and I don't think I was too splashy! I had a lane to myself.
Connecting
I think you are probably one of the swimmers that I would want to spend time watching. Good skilled swimming is beautiful to watch.
I hope so…. I always wonder if there’s something more lecherous going on when people stare but I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I am also aware of what watching does. If I do watch someone I always let them know. I watch to learn and I watch because I really appreciate their skill. That's what I say to them and I am always fleeting in my watching. There is a Monday morning ‘lesson time’ when watching others is encouraged by the coach poolside (Wow!) and that's brilliant because I think it changes the culture of watching at other times too
The lechy stuff is grim, but somehow if I deny myself the act of seeing others from a good place then I am doing something weird too?
The first time that I tried lounging on the poolside instead of just going straight back into the changing rooms, I was taken aback by how much it did feel like I was somewhere on holiday, somewhere social. Just the presence of a body of water transformed the kind of clinical, artificial environment completely.
Sometimes there are great chats in the showers or changing rooms - rarely in the water though.
Why is that!? Is it like being on the tube when no one wants to acknowledge that we are all on the tube together?
Definitely the women’s changing room at my local pool is a sanctuary. I can be as private or as social as I like and there is no judgement. Choose a cubicle or shared bench, naked shower or costumed shower. All ages and shapes of bodies are there and I sense very little shame. I love this. My own body prejudices have been present differently since swimming more frequently. And it is so rare in the UK that there is a place where unself-conscious nakedness with others can feel safe and functional. So I learn there too. It feels different to dance changing rooms and yoga changing rooms in my experience. Where a body seems to be scrutinised in a whole different way.
Relating
Pat Mcabe says that the water (all water) is the same water forever, that water is ancient and so it is literally unchanging:
‘Speaking to the water’ … it's 5 minutes long (please ignore the weird photos that have been edited in) - but Woman Stands Shining (Pat) is wise.
I love the idea that water has its own consciousness and intention, and that we should yield to it.
Yes water is sentient and I am finding ways to acknowledge that when I come into contact with bodies of water. To say thank you. I wish I had been taught to do that early on.
My mum is really specific with greeting the sea before stepping into it - she does this by touching the water with her hand, and taking it to her eyes, before her feet come into contact with it. It’s making me think how central water is to so many of the religious rituals she has in her day - every morning she stands barefoot outside, holds a cup of water up to the skies and lets it pour to the ground from that height, while reciting something about the sun and the gods and water and nature. I’m feeling sad that I don’t know any of her rituals, that she tried so hard to teach me and I was never interested.
This really touches me. Would you like to ask her to teach you?
The way that you described her morning ritual makes me think that you do know it somehow.
That’s really lovely. Thank you.
Last night, I had a really long bath and felt so calmed / hugged / held as soon as I submerged my body. I forget how much water holds me, sometimes so much more fully and lovingly than people do. I’ve missed swimming this week. I think I need to reckon with the possibility that I need to be in water; that it’s more than leisure and maybe it really does love me in a way that I need. Maybe it’s about the levity of floating.
Texture / Rupture
I have been performing every evening. My part in it is a danced and spoken lamentation on felled trees. Yesterday I found out that some ancient woodland, that is a focus in my script, has had a felling licence issued on it. It is all a bit devastating and last night I felt very heavy with it all. And then at the end of the work (we go to a car park roof and sing) I had a really unexpected memory of that floating experience and the grief and despair was replaced by a stillness and a sense of being held.
Wow. I’m thinking about the contrast of those two images - of trees being felled, and of you floating, and how one feels really texturally rough / deathly / painful / overwhelming and the other feels weightless / soft / calm / slow.
I’m thinking about rupture and how part of the healing feeling of being held is also to do with water’s softness - especially in the bath or in the pool. How it envelopes you and smoothes over the surface, it finds its own stillness, and in those moments, you don’t have to reckon with all the sharp edges of what’s distressing, because it temporarily reminds you of the softness that is possible.
The bath last night felt like a balm, a soothing antidote to the ruptures of late, but in a really physical / literal way. How I don’t have to contend with the violent image of something breaking, of even physical injury or pain (rehearsals this week have been hard on my body), when the water sort of just irons it all out for some moments.
My body is also super sore from moving across a lot of very hard surfaces and water is what I turn to for recovery. An antidote.
It makes perfect sense in the way that we need all the different textures - we need the ground, we need the air, we need the heat, we need the water. And it’s making me wonder why I don’t already think of my needs in that way. Now that you’ve said it, swimming feels like a natural antidote to the experience of dancing - at least specifically in bharatanatyam, which feels like it’s all about the ground.
Slow
Maybe that’s connected to my sense of being held by the swimming pool. It holds me as I literally float up from my feet. It’s the only time that I can travel without pressuring my joints and legs and spine in that vertical oppression kind of way. I spend a good chunk of time (when there’s no one around) just floating on my back.
I have a friend who finds it very painful to move / walk but that being in water supports her differently. In that way water makes me and her closer in moving because each of our bodies are not dealing with gravity in the same way.
I am going to try some floating today.I have a sense that the 1.00 time will be uncrowded. It isn’t all lanes so thats helpful! I often go in the slow lane on my back with my arms overhead and just minimal kicking, so I still travel but it's slow!
Floating is such a delicate balance of vulnerability and pleasure. You can’t see who’s around you, behind you, really anywhere. You can only see upwards, and slight disturbances in the water can threaten any sense of safety.
I went to the pool after our first writing session and it was a women only session and hardly anyone was there. I did float, for ages. The ceiling of the pool is glass and it was a blue sky day.
I did too, and I also enjoyed floating, and I also looked at the sky on my back… and for the first time, I felt that I had company in my swim, as I imagined what you might look like when you swim. It was strange to know that someone I know was swimming with thoughts of what we thought of swimming, all at the same time!
I love this - I am going today too, a second time for swimming soon after spending time thinking and speaking to you about swimming.
Edges
But water is also not separate to us? We are mostly water too…
That’s true. I guess that water and bodies of water feel so unbound and unrestricted, in a way that our bodies don’t. We have edges but water feels like it defies any boundary.
Is water borderless then?
In essence, yes? It takes up any border given to it.. It’s as borderless as can be? Actually, no. I guess gases are more borderless than liquids, which are more so than solids.
This may be a tangent but this makes me think about the humans that are coming over water to flee their lives elsewhere and that it is water that is carrying them across borders. I was listening to the French MP for Calais speak about this ‘problem’ this morning.
And how we can be thankful that at least water allies us / carries us / connects us in ways that we often refuse to for each other.
I have not thought about that before, that water carries me and carries those refugees and I also have not thought about my panic as somehow a way to at least recognise the determination of those people as they travel.
Yes, this connection between swimming and escaping is new for me too. I was about to talk about how water is somewhat of an equaliser in its ability to remove us all from gravity to the same extent, but that thought has been dwarfed by this.
I would like to talk about the way that we create boundaries in water, like swimming lanes. Somehow I’m also thinking about the way that the sea in Margate flouted the concrete walls by spraying up and over…
Lanes are utterly exclusive (like motorways where the fast expensive cars and the drivers who want to break the speed limit go in the outside lane and the cautious people or old cars and lorries stay in the nearside lane) They are useful ways to divide the able from the ‘less able’ and the old from the young and the confident from the less confident and always used badly by at least a few people.
It sounds like you hate the lanes! :)
I am a lane lover and a lane swapper.
What about the older people who are so glad not to be splashed by me as I race up and down in a separate lane, minimally disturbing their calm?
Right! I know …
It feels connected to the way that water/swimming does invite in a range of different bodies. And actually lanes can allow, in a slightly problematic way, a range of bodies to swim at the same time.
Yeah…I can see it being less problematic if there were more slow lanes / more space for people to swim at different speeds and energies…Are you going to say that the problem is my splashing?
Can I just say I’m really thrilled to be having an inter-lanal conversation.
Yes - so first I want to say that I can't imagine you being very splashy. You are not splashy in my experience … haha! But as a lane swapper, depending on the day and the time and my mood, I can have problems in all of them! Says something about how easily dissatisfied I am!
Or maybe it says something about the lack of lanes! What if there were 25 different lanes each calibrated more specifically to the energy you’d like to bring?
The best lane is an empty one?
I agree. What does that say about us! That ultimately swimming isn’t a social experience and wish we could all just have our own private pools…? I went for a social swimming experience with Janine in Brockwell Lido in the ‘summer’ and I found it quite overwhelming - there were 20-30 people in each lane. The lanes were so wide that there were no clear pathways within each lane.
Ahh, so there is a super interesting moment at my pool - when there has been a ‘public swim’ with no lanes and then there is a lane swim after. Often the attendants are a bit late to reinstate the lanes and then the lane swimmers all get in and start to swim anyway, and for a few minutes everyone is self organising. Mostly we find a human sized pathway from one end to the other and it works. Sometimes I have to avoid a body but it's actually very respectful. Till the lanes come back and then everyone divides up and it somehow feels more crowded again.
This is cool. It goes against my intuitive sense that self organising often leads to reinforcement of access barriers or hierarchies and that lanes do something towards trying to give everyone equal space.
I think that consideration gets louder in those transition times because we are all a bit more watchful and a bit less passive.
That makes a lot of sense.. People aren’t absolved of responsibility by the lane markers. Back to splashyness. I do wonder why people are so damn splashy.
I could make all kinds of judgments. Sometimes it is aggressive and then splashyness feels like taking space, announcing, perhaps in the same way that some people seem to take up space in a conversation that means other people sharing that space have to get out of the way, or get out of the water.
Yes, I do find it funny / strange also how people often won’t make eye contact with me or directly communicate when we share lanes.. Even though a negotiation of space and pace is so central to us all. It is usually (sweeping generalisation coming through) the older people who are most willing to speak and verbalise. There are these two elderly men who always seem to be in the water (very slowly doing their exercises) when I’m there and they’re always cheering me on when I practise my tumble turns. Inter-lanal cheering that is.
Image: Yasmin Centeno
Shivaangee Agrawal (she/they)
Shivaangee Agrawal is a dance artist with a practice that concerns choreography, writing and advocacy. Having trained in Bharatanatyam in both London and Bangalore, Shivaangee has worked with a range of choreographers including Shane Shambhu, Nina Rajarani, Rosie Kay, Sonia Sabri, Seeta Patel, Jo Tyabji and Suba Subramaniam. Shivaangee makes work that is informed by collectivity, rhythmic structures and disorientation. She is supported by Arts Council England, Siobhan Davies Dance, Akademi, Kala Sangam, Blue Elephant Theatre and Streatham Space Project. This year she is a Choreodrome artist at The Place.
Katye Coe (she/her)
Katye is a performer, dancer, rehearsal director, facilitator, writer and teacher based in the UK. She has more than 2 decades of experience in dancing and is currently also developing her practices through a 3 year study programme in Somatic Experiencing. Prior to returning to a full time freelance dancer practice in 2016, Katye was course director for Dance at Coventry University and the Artistic Director of Summer Dancing festival and Decoda.
As a dancer, Katye has worked and continues to work closely with the following choreographers/ companies: Jonathan Burrows and Matthias Fargion; Joe Moran; Florence Peake; Station House Opera (Julian. Maynard Smith); Stefan Jovanovic; Sirens Crossing (Carolyn Deby); Matthias Sperling; Roberta Jean; Charlie Morrissey; Amy Voris; Keira Greene; Frank Bock; Laura Van Hulle; J N Harrington. Her own creative work, with a particular focus on the specific information that a dancer performer accesses, has been recently supported by Dance4, Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, Burrows and Fargion, Wainsgate Dances and Sadlers Wells Theatre.