Clouds drift inverted across the screen of a tidal rock pool, ancient cliffs unravelling down to the ocean like wrinkled grey skin, hard cracked and dark. Tremulous, the gull cry of a bamboo flute, snatched to be swallowed by wind. A body, face down submerged or curled as if died and reborn naked into still salt water; this is another skin, more vulnerable, bruised and split. Our ritual is in plain sight yet occluded, visible to a few indifferent walkers on this Cornish coastal path. Unpredictable to ourselves. This was how our duo Moreskinsound emerged.

Skin is the largest organ for entering reality, a physical outline of the body, inside and outside. Our landscape. Skin is a measure of experience, growing thinner, more expressive with age. Look at 1906 To The Skin, Ishiuchi Miyako’s photographs of butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno in his mid-eighties, skin mottled, scarred, wrinkled; a profound story book. The body is a measure. All things are visible in its map. All things are audible in the silence of its temporal stillness. “The world is not so much made of stones,” Carlo Rovelli writes in The Order Of Time, “as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.” But the looming granite of Cornwall’s edges also speaks of indecipherable time, for humans a register of duration too deep to perceive as anything other than a gravely threatened eternity.

DT We enter these spaces by listening (and listening is the ecological way of entering the space, expanding the space, then leaving without any trace). Not with dance; not with music. Why not dance?

AP Our consciousness is constantly busy with duplicating reality, creating distance between the self and lived experience using different languages. The issue is terminology. If we consider dance a language, mediating between us and our experience, then what I do is not dance. Moeno Wakamatsu said that our bodies may be greater than we are. This is a paradox. However, body as conductor and archive possesses more than we can instantly access or comprehend. Perhaps dance is an opening. I think of what I do as being closer to Balinese dances or shamanic rituals. Bodies become inhabited by spirits, transmitting experience through presence. There is no distance, symbolism, mediation or function. It brings out that part of us that we don't understand and never will.

Why not music, or even sound art?

DT Music (or even sound art) is a human cultural activity, with close ties to theatre, dance and commerce, but there are other sounding and listening events – human, non-human, extra-human, hybrid – that exist alongside music as a comparable but distinct form. We call them rituals, or behaviour or autonomous auditory phenomena but we can listen to them as (extra-) musical events. They can bring us closer to sound and to spaces articulated by sound; at the same time further away from human dominance of the phenomenal world.

AP Sound is a consequence of movement. Silence does not exist. We can’t escape vibrations from inside our body. Complete stillness is not possible, even at the sub-atomic level. However, aspiring to stillness and silence switches our senses to different modes. Similarly to superfluidity behaving in contradiction to laws of gravity, our perception absorbs new properties. Presence becomes more dense; bodies, objects and timespace open their stored memory, becoming osmotic twins. In this dimension, John Cage’s 4' 33" could be a movement piece.

DT Voices (birds, environmental sounds, human voices) constitute the flux of space, transform space, yet they leave the space unpolluted, without scars. Unsound instruments move against the grain by friction or turbulence.

AP Instruments inevitably gravitate towards music. How can they lead away from music, into silence?

DT Of the instruments we use – mask, garment, a cardboard box, leaves, simple flutes, paper, something foraged or found – they are skin or space, a thin barrier, flexible and enveloping, tiny rooms with apertures, disintegrating flat plane edges torn or abraded. The nature of these materials is their simplicity or non-existence. I don’t think of my instruments as separate entities. Through movement and other relationships like activation techniques, sounding qualities and common purpose they combine together as semi-autonomous parts of a bigger entity. They are like zooids, individual units that constitute the siphonophore colony known as a Portuguese man o’ war. In that sense they lend themselves to improvisation. They can jump direction, articulate different levels of time, respond to space at varied velocities.

AP In butoh the body also becomes a non-physical place. Space is the intention, action or inaction, where all objects are becoming one substance. When you move, you move the whole of this substance and sound emanates from this. A body encountering space is a bit like a baby playing with her own hands, not realising that her hands are part of her own body. Sometimes she surprises herself by crying out or laughing, amused or scared by the rapidity of her own movements. Maybe she hears this as a discovery, spontaneously turning to listening, echoing, playing with those sounds. Improvisation becomes a basic way of being, when everything is in a state of flow. Ecologies are created through constant adaptation, fluidity, curiosity and exchange.

DT When we first talked about collaboration we discovered a mutual fascination with lizards, their apparent stasis – like a dead thing, a stuffed thing – then suddenly, quicker than the human eye registers, standing in a different position. Watching lizards and their stillness at a formative stage of my life when I was independently studying the influence of animal sound on music and secret languages made me conscious of other possibilities in working with sound. Let’s say, disturbances of sound within the intensity of silence.

AP Observing non-human phenomena gives an incredible sense of inter-connectedness and empathy. Kazuo Ohno said, “Rain falls effortlessly. . . No matter how skillfully you imitate the rain, you’ll never succeed. It’s truly inimitable. The question is: why, then, should we practice?” I learned that stillness could be like a charging state that creates the impulse for external movement. The internal intention, a desire to move and the direction of desire runs inside the body, quietly boiling beneath the surface and never static. This is not a resting place but a site of presence.

DT/AP As modern rituals our performances search for ways of communicating with spaces by using aspects of the body to sense what intention the space has and how it affects the body. A space of interest speaks to us; we listen and respond, silently entering the space, not in order to create a spectacular action but simply in order to be. A transformation takes place, making the space into a memory that stays with the body, stays with the sound. The documentation of these events is distributed through contemporary channels such as social networks and yet in the moment of creation the total body is absorbed into this space. In human time these actions are ephemeral. Almost instantaneously they pass into invisibility and inaudibility, yet they leave some memory of what was possible in this strange, uneven conversation between human and extra-human, a rite dedicated to durations beyond human conception. As Ji Yun, the imperial librarian, wrote in the late 18th century, in A Note On Conjured Spirits: “And spirits can do nothing, say nothing on their own. They need a foreign agent. Yes, it is true that our ancestors tossed twigs and dried-out turtle shells in the dirt to peer through time. But such dim things had no magic on their own. It was only when they were touched with human hands and brushed with human intent that power flared in them.

Moreskinsound is a sound and movement collaboration between Ania Psenitsnikova and David Toop.