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I find myself in bed. I spend a lot of time in bed. I read in bed, work in bed, eat and write in bed, fantasise about myself and others, and dream in bed. I take myself away from the world when I close the door and jump or fall into bed. My bed has always been on the floor — at least since I was old enough to decide how I wanted to sleep, or how I had to sleep. Sleeping rough on floors or borrowed mattresses, being homeless and going wherever I could find a roof and locked door. Beds in refuge shelters with one family per room; beds in public housing; beds on sofas or the back seat of a bus, beds I had to share to have one. Beds provided by friends who keep me off the street.

I found myself in bed, when I was 11 or 12, reading stories clipped from newspapers my father had used to wrap gifts he sent, stories of girls like me, reading them under the covers with a flashlight. I read in bed and drift off in fantasies of self. Fantasies that I pushed into the world until they became at least partly real. All the things I’ve done and thought and dreamed and wished for in bed, all the people I’ve been, all the people I’ve shared a bed with, my own, theirs, someone else’s, whether for money or desire or need, this is Bed Time.

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Bed Time is a hypothetical work in the future, in which I celebrate all the ways in which being in bed has been good for me. Even the nightmares.

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My father was a mechanic. Until it blew his back out. Then he drove trucks and ran a recycling factory. Heavy machinery, his red tool chest racked with wrench sockets, and him gas axe-ing underneath the rear axle of his truck on a side-street near Pape and Danforth in Toronto. Blood welling into a luscious red bulb on his huge grease-covered thumb knuckle while sitting at the kitchen table.

I wanted to be a mechanic. Or a race car driver. Sitting dead in front of the TV, heel-toeing and shifting along with the rally drivers on cockpit camera as they screamed through forests. I bought a wrecked motorbike, stripped it down rebuilt the engine, started first kick. It was never a life I was allowed to have.

Late Friday nights, splitting lanes down Chapel St, early-’00s Japanese import tuner scene engines and panel-rattling bass bins. Top Fuel drag racing on TV, 3.5 seconds of tearing the universe open. Another long pause, and I discover drifting. Le Mans, 24–hour endurance racing, GT3, GTE, sci-fi Prototype Classes, hybrid turbo engines downshift chittering on the Mulsanne Straight, “… hollow-eyed victims of some sort of weird abuse”, deep in the night of 24 Hours Nürburgring. Hoonage as art.

The North Loop is a 6-hour endurance performance. It is a lecture on technology and engineering, on design and aesthetics, on velocity and noise, on the smell of hot engines, scorched brakes, burnt tires, sweet fuel, sweat and exhaustion.

When I talk about my love of hoonage, people look at me strange. Why are you into cars? Chicks aren’t into cars, especially queer chicks. Or somehow this must be a male thing, You’re into it because you’re a … go on, say it. I know what they’re thinking. I say, “Yeah, my dad was a mechanic.” and I see them relax. I give them a way out. The North Loop is for everyone who was denied the pleasure of engineering and technology and the glorious, stupid euphoria of going fast, who weren’t allowed to participate in the baroque crazy of car culture. Wherever there’s cars, there’s people doing strange things to them and making communities. This is a drag race; not that kind of drag race.

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The North Loop is a hypothetical work in the future.

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My first bicycle I crashed into a lamppost learning how to ride, scraped my little toe along a concrete wall learning how to steer. I’ve almost always had a bike. My longest relationships have been with them. No matter how tired I’ve been, I could always do the ride home, half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour. No matter how drunk, my bike would always get me home.

My riding went from mountain biking to cyclocross to cobbles to endless laps of Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, like solo time trialing, and always my one and only form of transport. Without a bike, without my training, without the discipline and solitary routine, I fall apart. Cycling used to be my way to get to and from dance, to morning class, to rehearsals, the addition, the aerobic training on top of all that, ancillary. Then it became a respite from that, where I could go deeper and deeper into my own rhythm, endless repetition that becomes infinitely different. On my bike, alone, pushing out the laps and intervals, unseen by others, I can be me. I am shaped by a lifetime of this as much as by anything else.

As with my other training, climbing, swimming, and dancing, the limits of my selfhood are where a person like me is allowed to be seen, allowed to exist. My selfhood is reduced to a body, and that body is politicised, medicalised, invaded, excluded. In all this, I keep cycling, keep moving. I will not be denied my self.

Of all the races, it is the late-winter and early-spring ones I am drawn to, when the weather remains hostile, when snow, rain, wind and cold are part of the agreement. Of these, it is the Cobbled Classics in Belgium, and Paris–Roubaix, brutal days of bone-jarring suffering, leaving rider and bike haunted in the aftermath.

Embrace the Suffering.
Accept it and Suffer.
Make the pain your choice, and be happy about it.
Practice to ride like you care.
You have to really care about it, you have to really suffer. — Emma Pooley

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The Hell of the North is a hypothetical work in the future, in which I prepare for, and ride the 257 kilometres of the Paris-Roubaix race. Irregular documentation on my blog, supernaut.info.

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This is a work about preparing for dance. Which means preparing for the thing that saved me and shaped me, that I can’t (or won’t) let go, despite the disaffection I have around and for it. It is a solo, but it has at times many people. It is long, because it is not a summary, but in fact the real thing, or as close to real as possible when fitting it all onto a stage or into a performance.

Preparation is about what gets called ‘cross-training’. It’s more of a meditation though, occurring over years and decades, or habit, like brushing teeth. This is training for dancing, performing, choreographing, living, surviving. The attention to physical detail. An exact and literal look at the entirety of training.

While training full-time in dance, a flatmate gave me a book on psychology for rock climbers. One line stuck with me: If you want to do this seriously, you have to decide what you’re prepared to give up, because you will have to give something up. As I get older, past the age when most dancers have retired or moved over to more secure lives, I’m still here, still giving something up in return for a part of my self. Preparation is also about fear. Fear of getting old, fear of injury, fear of failure, of not being good enough. Fear of not having anything to defend myself with if I don’t have this. Fear of knowing how people like me are seen in the world, and what we lose in order to be true to ourselves.

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Preparation is a solo endurance work, hypothetically in the future, in which I work through all my standard training as a dancer, from core and strength training, yoga, ballet class, to climbing and cycling, alone and accompanied by coaches and teachers.

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Cie. OFEN is the creative base for dancers and choreographers Gala Moody and Michael Carter.

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I am Cie. OFENS’s production manager for The Vase, an “interpretation of Ariel Dorfman’s play “Purgatorio”, which in turn is a modern take on Eurypides’ ancient classic “Medea”.”

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Onyx Carmine / S.J Norman is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer, they are based in Berlin and Naarm (Melbourne).

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I am their production manager and performer for Stone Tape Theory, and Rest Area at Arts House, Naarm (Melbourne) for FOLA. Previously for Take This, For It Is My Body at Science Gallery London in Peckham, London; and for Rest Area at Die Fabrikanten, Linz.

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