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Collective Love Manual 
June 2023

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Collective Love Manual

The Island, Bristol, UK
June 2023
Concept & Choreography: Delicia Sefiha
Perfromance: Ilektra Arsenidou, Sarah Gottlieb, Delicia Sefiha 
Production: Callum Holt

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AXIOM 1
 

Love is jittery.

It builds & grows like children on a playground learning how to exist. 

 

Start with the edges of you. Check they are all there. Slowly with flattening throat, heart and hands. Let yourself swoop and fall, feel the edges, pull away and be terrified. 

Bold. Delirious. Dash & dare and don’t try to catch yourself. 

Make sure you’re still all there. Start to know yourself. Enjoy yourself. 

Continue to discover yourself. 

 

Love is shared. An exchange.

Our hearts are playful. Our hearts are soft.

Fall in love. Stand up.

 

Meeting each other.

In contact – In between – In touch.

Butterflies flying around my body. Breeze that makes me fly, laugh. Warm fresh air. 

You make me float and flow.

 

The tap of the body is playful as the drum tap, tap the drum of the heart as one Body in movement, body ever still.

Experiencing tap of heart, experiencing the real.

 

Me and me and happy and young! 

Me, Me, Me! Attention. Interactions. 

Uncertain, not quite confident enough to leap, or get scraped knees, but courageous enough to just be. 

You consider me or you don’t? I will ignore you or I will try, try to kiss you, or maybe No! 

 

Don’t change your rhythm for someone if it is draining – only if it is enriching and makes you more alive. Trying to match other people’e energy can be overwhelming. It can also be exciting. Connections build up over time.

 

Love should make your heart go faster and make you fragile. 

When we love we are hummingbirds.

Wake up love! Love is life! Love like a child! Pure love! 

Love can be silent. Invisible. 

Love in the present. Ghosts.

 

Love is lost and wants to find you. 

You are its mother, its been stripped from the womb.

 

The silence of memories! Blending emotions in a suspended imagination.

Thoughts. No thoughts. Everything and Nothing.

The solitude vertigo.

 

Stillness. Feeling dark. 

The bird of death waiting in the nest. Comfortable, aware, sure of itself.

Love and death as Ebo Taylor once sung about.

Vinyls are the records of memories payed loud.

 

 

AXIOM 2

Love twists death to the crowd. 

Death is love cycling around around. 

 

Trying to understand my feelings.

Touching the substance of your presence. Not present. Like dust in the air. 

 

When I am alone, I imagine love;

 A future love not yet experienced, or a past love now faded. 

I hold myself. Always searching. 

 

Don’t chase after your ideas of love, let it find you. Focus on loving yourself first.

Don’t give up. It takes strength and courage. Love can be hard but always beautiful.

 

Just at the point where you become something warped and peculiar. When your kidneys ache and you’re trying to grasp the last echo of what was there before. You find that you can stack your bones one on top of the other and hold. There. Hold. Believing that the pain between your shoulder blades will fade. That you can regather yourself. Hold.

                                    

                                                                    Searching for…

 

 

AXIOM 3
 

Movement, dance away.

Can never let go, or be the same.

Off beat, cannot leave.

No scheme, just be free.

 

The rhythms between us. 

We go together. 

We share. 

We dance together.

 

Explosions of emotions.

Juice.

A fighting research of bodies. Repeat and repeat and repeat.


Please stop! Please.. everything will be fine.

Don’t be scared.
 

Love is repetition without boredom but with deep cause.

Animalistic desires are sometimes not a strong enough foundation for love.

Don’t fight each other. Fight for love.

 

If your heart leapt from your body what would it look like? A face? A place?

 

When there is tension, you should comfort one another afterwards.

Have the desire to express your feelings.

 

I want to escape. To fuck everything!

 

 

AXIOM 4
 

Those who lean first, fall last.
 

We have this tension pulling us against each other no matter what we do. 

We can’t escape the image of each other. 
 

You come to me… No! 

You come to me …. While the other will be alone.

Relation. Broken. Tension. 

Connected with tension but still so disconnected, so in our own world.

 

Yo, we are all chained up into bondage, the way it just is, be honest. 

What would life be without this anyway? There are no better days. Just today.

 

Love is interdependent.

Trust and balance.

Hold and let yourself be held equally.

Emotional ties.

A bound you can’t cut. 

Karmic relationships. 

Twins.

 

My twin sister. We move though life together. It is a relationship I have always been in and one I will never leave. It is like having another relationship with myself. 

 

Love is the sweetest jail. When it ends you just untangle yourself, someone quicker, someone slower. Why do we want to love? Do we chose it?

 

Love is not to keep someone tight to you. Let them be free. Be free. Love is freedom.

Freedom enables love to grow.

​

Saddle up. We’re in it for the long run. Just want to make sure we’re nice and secure. Make sure you’ve got me 100%. Take the slack on the tough days and eventually be entirely sure that we stay at this distance. 

Knowing we’ve got each other and not really knowing each other at all. 
 

Who are we without each other? Who are we together?

 


AXIOM 5

​

Try something different. Try different directions.

Should I stay or should I go?

​

You need to get lost on your own. Lost to be found, to look for...someone that….can keep you.

 

We share a frequency without knowing each other. 

Our energies meet. Our bodies encounter. We dance. We have wild sex. 

We have a great time together. 

 

Have fun. Be curious. Play with each other. 

Find ways to spice up the routine.

-Golden beat. Golden fight-

Leave breathing space. Make your relationship breath regularly.

 

Love is choosing not to run/dance away. Keep your instincts & personalities under control in the midst of today’s society increasing stimuli. When you dance together, at the same rhythm, it’s perfect, but it is very difficult. You can also decide to jointly speed around in the middle of such stimuli. 

 

“Keep plodding along ma’am; squeaky clean, no misery, see you tomorrow morning as always”. *Thoughts inside the head* Little does he know, when the weekend comes… we party hard! I need some smashes this Friday, right?

 

Love when it’s forced. When I want it to be there and it’s not. Driven by a desire for sex, to be wanted. The age of dating apps. Searching for connections in a distant world.

 

Sometimes you can show love by letting someone go.

 

Wear matching tops. Never let her borrow your make up or you’ll never see it again.

Don’t tell mum and dad that she snuck in past 11. Never forget the routine from your cousin’s 7th birthday party. Never admit that she’s your best friend but never forget the way she plaits her hair or wrinkles her nose when she concentrates. Never let her go.

Never ever. 

 

Through break ups, tears, ‘borrowed’ make up, I love you all the same.

 

 

AXIOM 6
 

We find each other with our special noises, like insects. We connect our souls, We don’t always work well together even if we try. We get sad and lonely again. 

 

Follow sounds. Have patience. Find each other.

Loving is listening to stay in connection with each other.

 

Try to: recognise each other   test each other 

                 connect with each other 

                                                                   trust each other (trust needs to be nurtured constantly)

 

Love is trying but until some point; after that it is just fear of being alone. 

 

I don’t remember what it looks like, but I feel it. I know its shape, I’ve memorised the curves, the spine and the jagged edges. Love can be hard complicated. You might need to try a lot. 

It takes effort. But don’t be disappointed. Try together as a team. Communicate. Talk.  Don’t fall in love. Stand in Love.

 

I’m pregnant… Are you sure? 

Yes, I think…

Let’s try. Can we?

Not sure, maybe not now, maybe one day….

You can’t be pregnant …. Sure?….

 

Patience. Especially when you’re both at a loss as to how to start again. Still your breath.

Listen for the taps, or the murmurs. I want to try, can we try, what do you need. This is the difficult. I need a little less, a little more, patience. 

 

I don’t have the courage to continue.

A tired break up. When love loses its life. A disappointment. Was it ever there?

 

Head over heels 
Love is blind 

-Personal-Take your blinkers off 

-Personal- Don’t fuck this one up



AXIOM 7
 

Love is not possessive. 
 

We share our love of three. We have moments all together, alone or by two. 

It works well, we share and liberate the burden because we are more. 

We keep the fire on.

 

Love is to be shared. Show your love. Show your emotions, your affection. 

Love means life.

 

There are so many wonderful ways to support each other. 

There are no limits to the combinations in which we will discover love. 

Look at the stars. We are the stars. It’s a game and we have fun.

 

Past and present in a continuous miscellaneous. 

Shall we try to go forward?


Looking at the same direction, trying to find balance. We can find balance. We need more… We might get dizzy, doesn’t everyone?

 

A grandmother. Her daughter. Her daughter’s daughter. 

Pivoting and sliding the way they have been shown. 

Each with a definition of healthy, of strong, that echoes back through time. 

When can she rest? How should she rest? If love is struggle. How could she rest?

 

Ancestral guidance from the Motherland, from Earth itself. 

No right or wrong, just look for the signs. 

DNA. Dance, live, love, listen, lead, dream, be. Nourish, needs, day, night. 

 

Nine months, nine axioms, nine planets, nine wonders, nine lives. Breath. 

 

 

AXIOM 8
 

Don’t look down. 

The fall is bigger than you realise.

 

I can find It on my own… I don’t need anybody!
 

Burdens and boundaries. People in love can forget to love themselves. 

 

Self love. Learn to love yourself and enjoy your own company.

Self-awareness. Have a clear idea of how you want to be loved. 

Treat yourself in that way.

 

Make your own path. Relax. Know yourself.

Love is being capable of doing the things that you like better. 


Like in the countryside, take your time and do the siesta.

 

The evolution of how I relate to myself and the world is a constant source of curiosity.

 

Often I am reminded that a loved one’s death is not the end of a life. Not the end of a

relationship. We carry them with us as we continue to unravel the plot line of our life.

Sometimes they are heavy, a piece of shrapnel in the shoulders that catches other times light. The tune we hum to ourselves as we weed the garden. 

 

I leave a trail of myself waiting to be found. 

Hopefully someone will see it and the see me. 

Atonement.

​

Love is deep calm.

 

 

AXIOM 9
 

Be confidently unapologetically your authentic self. 

Allow others to be too.

 

Don’t let them look you in the eye. Flash a bit of thigh. A bum cheek. An alluring crease or fold of flesh. Twist your hips a certain way. It’s not about you darling, I would just rather be literally anywhere else. Even the dentist. I think I left the front door open. 

Sorry to be crude. 

 

Love is a pool of honey, you might drown in it, or it might be pretty sweet. 

I show my body, I want someone to eat it, hunt it. I hope I can find someone now.

 
Fame. Hollow. Soulless. Obsessing with image. 

​

Showing too much kills poetry.

A society looking just on what you appear and not in who you really are.

The unfortunate truth of capitalism. Ain’t much love there. 

 

In love, as in life, you can do what you want, if you do not hurt other people’s feelings.

In love, the most important thing, is to learn how to love yourself first. 

 

Wild/Pride Sensuality… This is us! 
We should love all of our body.

Be your unique sexy self. Embrace your idiosyncrasies. 

 

Love is movement.

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