The Shapeshifters

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I haven’t slept since November and I am just landing from one of the most intense weeks of my life.

Where did it start?

There’s been Christmas. Brighton, seaside, friends’ house, gifts.

In Brighton, I caught up with Í, and this is where unbearable intensity begins. I have always loved him to pieces. We met 9 years ago at university. We were equally dissatisfied with the course and we rapidly clicked because we were both incarnated and hurt. And gay.

Back then, he once told me: “Your sexual energy terrifies me.” And he languorously kissed me in the middle of the pub.

We lost contact for 7 years when I dropped out of uni. He randomly reappared in my life on my birthday this year, at a 5 Rhythms dance workshop. I got in the studio, and there he was, beautiful and loveable as always.

We saw each other last week, right after Christmas, to go partying in the trashy gay bars of Brighton. Night of wildness. When we are together, the rest of the world doesn’t exist and I understand that people may find us outrageous. We encourage each other in our natural Eros: hyper dancy, hyper sexual, and hyper inappropriate. It is so liberating. We say obscene things, laugh our heads off and dance till exhaustion.

We went from one club to the other till 4 or 5am, pole danced with the bears, laughed at a woman who fell down, chatted everyone up, burned every single dance floor doing the 5 Rhythms. I even taught him some Martha Graham moves near a karaoke stage where an old Asian guy in duffle-coat was exclusively singing Christmas songs. We were doing diagonals of triplets across the space, not paying any attention to the weird looks we were triggering. That pretty much sums up our relationship.

We came back to London together the day after to do a 5 Rhythms dance workshop entitled “God, Sex & The Body“. He crashed my bed for a few nights.

The workshop was about the male and female archetypes: Father/Son/Holy Spirit and Madonna/Mother/Mistress. We explored the change of personae, we shifted from one rhythm to the other and from one archetype to the other. We embraced the shapeshifter in us. Everyone impersonates the male and female archetypes, it has nothing to do with our gender. A girl can live her life like a wild son. A man can have the intuition of a Madonna. Everyone is a shapeshifter and navigates between the archetypes. It is fascinating.

On Day 1, as a first exercice, the Master of Ceremony, Jonathan Horan, asked the 100+ people in the room to stand still. He then said: “If you are married, walk.”  Very few people – less than 10 – walked. “If you are single, walk.” Most people in the room started walking. “If you are in a relationship, walk.” Some people walked. “What situation is left?” asked Jonathan. A tall beautiful and very pale girl raised her hand and said: “Polyamourous.” And she walked alone amongst 100 people looking at her.

On Day 2, we worked on the Mistress archetype – needless to say it is my favorite. The 100 dancers gathered in a huge circle and Jonathan pumped up some Christina Aguilera and said: “Give me your stripper dance!” That was SO liberating. The group was a solid sample of the human kind – male female old young skinny obese white black gay straight – and we were all going as far as we wanted in our stripper talents with no apprehension of being judged or labeled or getting dirty looks or an unwanted hand on our bottom. 5 Rhythms is the place of extreme permission within safety.

On Day 3, a few women started getting rid of their bra in the dance. I was looking at them, dying to do the same but constrained by my big-boobed-girl self-consciousness. I mean, I have been naked in front of people in various contexts and I am not exactly modest – I just had never danced topless up to that point. When I saw that older ladies were doing it, I was like, yeah, if they do it, I’ll do it. It made me extremely happy to dare, especially knowing that my therapist was in the room (I know… it is weird. That’s the first therapist to ever see that much of me.)

So, that was my days this week. But there were the nights, too.

After the dance, Í and I were pursuing the shapeshifter exploration in the dark. In my bedroom, in my bathtub. 24 hour research.

We stand in a similar turn of our life, some kind of rejection/fascination for the opposite sex. I’ve had this growing curiosity for male energy in the last 6 months. There has been my desire for a man I’ve met which is gradually getting out of control. There has been a variety of men around me. I love men. I am a lesbian and I love men. No need to justify anything. This is just how things are.

Í has been forever gay and knows nothing about girls. He doesn’t even have a mum, cause she left when he was a kid. He’s terrified by female power.

So we worked on taming each other’s energy, body, and fears on the course of 5 nights. We didn’t even have sex. We explored. It was slow, sweet, pure, beautiful, almost innocent, like teenagers confronted to their first experience. When he was touching me, I was feeling like a whole new continent. I was 12 and he was 13, or the other way around. That was so insanely beautiful that it doesn’t translate in description. I want to be a sex beginner all my life.

My flatmates were laughing at us, because they didn’t understand my sudden male intimacy. They were calling my bedroom the “Straight School”.

We went to the New Year Eve drag ball included in the workshop. Everyone was dressed in one of the 6 archetypes. I came as a boy (but ended up as a whore) and Í was an extravagant Sacred Mistress. It was even more confusing when we were making out. The male/female boundaries were getting real captivating and playful. This lady at the ball was entirely painted in blue with a wig like Marie-Antoinette. I asked her: “Wow, are you the Smurfette?” -“No! I’m the Holy Spirit!” 

Ouch.

On the last day of the workshop, I danced in my knickers with another awesome girl in the middle of a circle. No one wanted to ever leave. I suddenly felt some arms embracing me from behind as Jonathan was doing the closing speech. It was this very pretty Middle East girl that I had been looking at since day 1. We started talking after the closing ceremony. Apparently, she had been looking at me too. I wish I remembered her exact words – the meaning was “I was looking at you and finding you beautiful on the dance floor.” She gave me her card. I want to dance with her again, I think I want to know her. I haven’t said that in a long while.

Sexual charges make the Holiday season so much more interesting.

Corporate Days, Movie Nights

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December has always been a month which levels up in intensity. I don’t know why. My heartbeat accelerates. All my desires manifest at the surface of my skin and fantasies come true. That makes me sleepless, like when you’ve just fallen in love and adrenaline rushes in your veins. It is the month of life-changing events. This is my own Christmas celebration: being shaken to the core to find more clues about my place on earth.

December 2013 was about fighting. Love drama. Yelling. Last Christmas Eve was indisputably the day of my life when I said “Fuck” and “Fuck you” the most. Cinematographic scenes. Now, I am smiling at these memories.

This year is about creativity and career shift. I barely slept over the last week. My days are full and my nights are equally full. My personality split – or less dramatically, my double life – has been at its paroxysm lately.

From 9 to 5.30, I am corporate – I’d rather say, I am as corporate as I can be, because I am an anti-corporate archetype. It is not because I don’t fit in that I don’t love it or I am not good at it. I work with extraordinary people for the most part. Behind the corporate varnish and a certain style of bubble-wrap communication, everyone has unusual life stories and there is genuine connection between us.

My Boston-based CEO was in town on Wednesday, just for a few hours. It was the first time I was ever getting to see him in real after almost three years working for him. I have an endless admiration for him, because he’s a visionary and he’s a business artist. He quit everything when he was 35 because he was frustrated working for others and he launched his company at 37. At the beginning, his company counted 5 people working above a depressing-looking pizza place, and 11 years later he got into the stock market. Successful creators and inventors just have me, whatever field they play in. I am equally fascinated by business genius as by painting or choreography genius. It is the fact of creating something out of nothing and pursuing a vision with tenacity that I admire. Some people are really touched by grace, they are so driven. I want to become one of those.

So, I was hanging out with big business people during the day.

But when dusk is coming, I am turning into the real me, the sensual and opiniated girl who also has a vision and irrepressible creative pulsions. Late at night, my movie life is starting. Filmmakers have been chasing me since last year, since H got into my life.

I now live with two of them – one director, and one special effect guy. They recently shot scenes of a webseries in our flat. I got hired at the last minute to play the barista in my own kitchen, and to be part of a crowd in a funeral scene. That was so much fun. I lent my black tights to the lead actress and I never got them back. Oh, cinema drama.

This week, I was working on two different projects with H. She asked our group of friends to submit her a Christmas video with marshmallows. We had entire freedom about the concept, as long as there were marshmallows featured. I did a parody of the rose petal scene of ‘American Beauty’ with marshmallows instead of flowers. I called it ‘European Funny’. I laughed my head off doing that. I had to shoot it alone with an iPhone and whatever props were in my room, and it was a great creativity challenge to get the result I had in mind with no equipment.

But above all, it is the real meaning of my life that kicks in when my movie night is starting. I am brainstorming a script with H for her short movie at the moment. She’s applying in January for the Directing Women Workshop in LA and I am co-writing the scenario. We have fabulous middle of the night (London time) creative sessions. Laughter and depth. We trigger each other’s creativity. We think the same things at the same time, only she describes them as a film director with technical visual terms and I do as a writer, with words and literary structure. Our brain and sensitivity are wired in the same way: we both have a mathematical way of thinking, as if writing a movie plot was solving an equation. We both get turned on by scientific theories, which is obviously not the first thing one would think when seeing us. We are driven by the same problematics and topics – the challenge of achieving your ambitions as a little pretty blonde girl in a male-deciding world. But we also are fucking funny. Yeah, my humour and my ambitions are ten times as big as my boobs. We decided that we are brain soul mates and that we are starting the revolution of the women in the film industry. Blonde brainy hurricane washing over Hollywood.

That’s strange when it finally happens – the mental relief of teaming up with someone in such a strong way and feeling understood, seen and heard after years of search.

This relationship is crazy.

Oh my beloved December effects.