Tools are whirling, Ivan is lunging in the hallway, and a neon green tent is pitched centre stage. A minor indication that the performance is already happening as I wait in the budding queue to get inside. Ivan Lupi is taking the form of a guardian to the performance room, charging forward without awareness for others, taking one big swiping arc toward me as I slip past - before continuing, as if I was always part of it, as if the room had absorbed yet another body into its continuing negotiation.

UNTIMELY: A Somatic Archaeology of Displacement never really begins or ends. It increasingly accumulates. Bagpipes being absorbed hinting to something Scottish, a YouTube tutorial for making margarita pizza followed in a religious manner. I peer back into the hallway periodically, and notice a seamless costume change. An Uber Eats driver is handing about 5 boxes of Base pizza to a figure now in woolen attire and a masquerade-esque mask with an enormous beak-like nose. He accepts the pizza, flops one on the floor, perhaps for himself and then begins to migrate to the room full of hungry attendees. Slipping and slapping pizza onto any willing hands he fuelled the concrete room with laughter and indulgence. Some time later, it seems Lupi has another way of enjoying his pizza, now crushed and spread along his face and arms as if an alien encountered the food for the first time. Bagpipes still ring in and out as the situation unfolds. Lupi is kneeling, nearly praying over a scooped up ball of pizza mush, this doesn't feel like a joking manner. He continues forever on. The other performances begin and end around him. He keeps going.

I notice the security guard for the night curiously peering in during the performances. He’s more concerned about the brownie on the entrance table, as if looking out for the security guard of the brownie before taking some. The evening has well become ungovernable.

From inside the tent, two voices speak with Brazil on the phone. O Que Estamos Fazendo / What We Are Doing. Josiah Morgan & Dominic Hamilton speak with Dispendio Grupo (BR)

This is a performance built on the distance between here and there. Josiah confidently navigates in his limited Português. The tent moves, breaks, and repitches itself. It grows feet and all.

An earthquake is called for from the other line. The tent stops, drops, and rolls, though slightly more dramatic than it sounds with Josiah’s clothes shedding in the process. He is then asked to whisper through Dominic’s ear telling of his experiences in Brazil, his life, and the Chch earthquake which just played out in the fabric. The stories travel from mouth to ear to mouth, where Dom announces them on the other side increasingly changed, funnier, wronger. Português-English whispers in a sense. Sometimes the audience catches on later, or not at all - an indicator is the couple Portuguese speakers in the room laughing at things the rest of us are yet to receive.

The tent embarks on its reinstallation. This is a valiant, messy process, with legs appearing, fabric stretching, before the formless structure takes its shape through sheer willpower and laughter. The audience's disbelief and giggles become an inseparable detail of this work, we are merely additions to the video call.

Pieces of the Ōtākaro are handed throughout the audience. Nature's own fidget toy for the evening.

Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann flows through Tērā like something from outside that hasn’t quite arrived into the concrete block. She enters carrying thick wooden sticks on her back - materials from the Ōtākaro brought into this unfamiliar environment - she balances with such grace and stillness that is not entirely human. She peers out to the audience from between her legs, twisted, upside down, the watching feels reciprocal. She is a bird of the awa gathering for its nest, and this room is not her residence.

She turns to us, for a number. Each corresponding to a body part she puts between the gaps of the river, One! Four! Three! And then Five?! She manages to complete using her head; a take on twister. She turns to giant pick-up sticks, back upstream. Audience members scaffold the wood around her, returning her to where this began.

She relaxes. An audio meditation settled over the room, sending my own eyes closed. As the energy ascends, the wood structure collapses.

The body expressed the estuary as porous, patient, and responsive. Everything expressed were the vibrations of the environment, reverberated back through the body -
something we could only partially hear.

Surprise!

Moving outside the tent is handcuffed to a pipe.

In the North Quad, a wedding is happening - now sending waves of distant pop music into the improvised arena. Two gatherings, two rituals of body and sound sharing the night, one completely unaware of the other's antics.

Someone picks up a pizza box. Textures rub. Someone else joins, moving to the noise.
Cues are passed to involve audience members like a secret. Water bottles, the lights surrounding the buildings, a construction fence, anything that is left.

There are moments where all you can do is laugh. It’s like the back of the bus, I’m wondering if, or rather when someone is gonna tell us off for the racket. Everyone is performing in their own way. A small group hum to a song everyone knows the lyrics to. Here, there are no rules.

Actions and sounds keep reverberating, before everyone just kind of knows when to stop. Applause ripples throughout the group, smiles are shared, bags are packed.

Only we know what happened, what was experienced. You had to be there.