This performance draws on  “舌読 / Zetsudoku,” a practice Shikichi encountered in their recent choreographic research. Zetsudoku is a technique developed by people with Hansen’s disease in Japan after World War II. After being confined to isolation wards and losing their sight and the sensation in their fingertips as the illness progressed, these people nonetheless learned to read Braille using the sensitivity that remained in their lips and tongue, in an effort to actively perceive the world through their own bodies.

Referencing this attempt to find light within darkness, in this performance the tongue, as a third hand, guides the bodies we take for granted toward a new, poetic and sensuous bodies—ones accompanied by pain.