Sparked by Lang’s own Octopus practise, “in order to think like an octopus,” she twists her arm to the side, emulating the idea of an octopus changing their camouflage from textured, sandy seabed to vivid orange lobster pincer, in both colour and shape. One organism suddenly becomes another, just as different species in the same environment will “have different umwelten,” and experience their world in their own unique way. As such, McCartney’s hands in boxing gloves are not really hands in gloves, just as Hancock in heels was not really about the type of heel upon his feet, but the new shapes and sounds they conjure. As McCartney’s two front limbs pad about the space, the soft sound they make, as each connects with the floor, feels like the emphasis. I imagine the gloves covered in rows of ciliated sensory receptors.[5] What information are they sending back to the brain, I wonder, as they scan the surface. Hancock bourrées en pointe, in delicious contrast, tall and loud; the loudness, too, a further contrast to the expected lightness of the pointe shoe and its weighted history. Later, from four limbs connected to the floor, as Hancock raises his leg straight up to the ceiling and slowly rotates his foot, there is the fleeting impression of an aquatic animal coming to the surface to draw breath. McCartney extends her arm and cups a padded hand over the pointe shoe, and the two shapes slot together to fill a rectangle, echoing an earlier moment when her hand had curled around Hancock’s topknot like a snug-fitting shell about a hermit crab.

Just as elsewhere Hancock lightly blows upon his forearm and it drifts upwards, weightless, the sense of the animal within these explorations is not overt. Renowned for their unique morphology and flexibility, the neighbouring, flexible arms of an octopus can perform different tasks simultaneously, and can move in a near unlimited range.[6] From elongated to shortened, they are capable of bending at any point. The question Lang asks is not what can such a range of movement look like in human form, but, rather, what does it feel like. With 300 suckers on each of your arms, each served by their own mini brain (a “cluster of neurons called the sucker ganglion,”[7] navigating the watery world of the octopus is a choreographic dreamscape of its own infinite possibilities.

When you have the ability to call upon multiple sensory modalities to access your surroundings from photoreception to mechanorecptors that respond to water pressure, movement, and touch, when I can no more ‘pat your head and rub your belly’, what does that feel like? To find out more, I’ll have to wait until “Poesis” is in its finished form. Until then, I have the enchanting visual of Hancock and McCartney’s arms in first position connecting at the fingertips to form a ring, taking turns to both interlink rings, and independently scamper with their hands across the neck, shoulders, and extended arms of the other. Looking to burrow in somewhere porous? Wait and see.