our breaths in partnered sleep

the setting:

This piece for multi-tracked violin was written for Camilla Caldwell for “SICPP 2021: The State of Now”. This was our second collaboration, stemming from a 2am idea I had lying in bed.

the story:

“…Our breaths in partnered sleep are a subconscious symphony on the spot

And I keep awake to savor its sound in my memory bank

But some things are meant to be live(d)…”

- Annie Nikunen

These lines extracted from a poem I wrote during the pandemic were the conceptual origination connecting the piece and dance film, based on the idea of two spaces people can fill in sleep, shifting between presence and absence. As a composer and choreographer, I envisioned this movement with the sounds. Camilla and I are the moving subjects of this film as the two halves of the sounds filling it, representing two different people’s experience with this notion. The “our” in the title is both collective and coupled; it represents both everyone’s breaths from the present side searching for the absent, as well as breaths of you and another that may fill the two spaces. The piece explores what tends to happen when two connected people sleep beside each other, where their breathing patterns find each other. I think of this as a form of “partnering”, breathing together in “partnered sleep;” threading in and out of each other, drifting and coming back, feeling another human’s need to breathe in practically permeable proximity, so much so that your skin could meld. It is a uniquely deep level of intimacy, with a mutual vulnerability allowing each other to slip into dormancy as one; mentally letting go of consciousness while physically holding onto one another. Both the piece and dance film are colored with the lens of experiencing senses and emotions in an intensely hyper-aware way, in both body and mind. There is this conflict of being two souls in two separate bodies, yet fiercely connected in every other way up to the point of melding molecules. Straining to keep awake to savor the moment, but realizing the moment is slipping away as it’s happening, as unconsciousness seeps in. Fighting the strange fast-forward sensation sleep ensues, and instead seeking sentience in real time. But if the other side becomes absent, the passage of time dissipating the figure who once filled the space adjacent - briefly or forever - comatose can’t come fast enough.