In Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and even Turkic languages, tension is a polysemic term, wielded in different ways to describe the strains and scrapes of life. In the Gaddi tribal community of the Western Himalayas where I lived and worked for fifteen months, tension was used by people without noticing, an ordinary expression that one heard so often that it lost particular poignancy. “No tension madam,” a taxi driver would reassure me after a near-miss on the road; “she gives me so much tension,” a mother would laugh off her daughter when she spilled tea that she was meant to place daintily on the table before her guest. Yet, as I came to be enfolded into the stresses of life, a more visceral form of tension began to emerge. In this form, tension was not just a word with communicative function; it was also a state of strain that was simultaneously manifest in imbalanced bodily humors, present in intimate relationships and atmospheric spaces like the home or landscape.  

I found tension again, however, when I returned from the field and into the diffuse fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. I watched as, across the UK, exhausted women absorbed care burdens in the same way, and divides of class allowed the virus, its deadly effects and discontents to endure in some places more than others. In Juhasz and Hebert's words, the relational capillaries of care that sustain our lives became strained. While conducting research on COVID-19 and inequality in the UK with Laura Bear, I found people expressing these forms of strain through back aches, headaches, exhaustion, weepiness, weariness, and fatigue. They did not go so far as to call this condition clinical depression or anxiety disorder. Their distress was bigger, more collective, almost contagious. When I told people—colleagues, friends, research participants—about my other research, conducted far away, and before the pandemic, something struck a chord. Perhaps we feel tension too, they would sigh. 

In tension, we see a state or condition, a bounded temporal and spatial pause, a moment between relaxation and snapping, a body that hums within an electromagnetic field, in Marina Peterson's words. The body in a state of anxiety feels its muscles constrict and stretch tight, inducing hydraulic changes in blood pressure, hormones, breath, and bowels. The relational, in Charles Briggs’s words "communicable," state of distrust, suspicion, and jealousy is felt in the ruminating mind, the inability to relax. The physical state of strain between structural forces, opposing tendencies pulling a rope taut, pressure points induce relational and bodily strain, threatening the system, a prelude to snapping. When people talk about tension, they might be referring to any one and all of these levels at the same time. 

Inspired by choreographer Cynthia Ling Lee’s syllabus of the body, I have found it helpful to experiment with another form of language, the notation of dance and movement scores, to convey different frequencies. As Lee has taught me, a score is a form of notation that shows a sequence of movements that a dancer might use. Here I build on a rich scholarship in dance and movement studies that seeks to find healing through bodily practice. Some of these are set to sound, but most of them are short choreographies that act as provocations for you to move your body in particular ways that may be symbolic, imaginative, or sensory. These notations mirror particular experiences that I had. Perhaps in engaging with them you will come to follow a frequency of tension. Consider, and perhaps try, the following example:

Score 1: Tense.

Put down this book and sit up straight.

Release your shoulder blades down your back.

Ground your feet to the floor and feel your soles pushing up into your hips.

Set your gaze straight and close your eyes.

Now pull your jaw back and constrict the muscles in the back of your neck.

Feel the constriction at the base of your skull.

Release.

Do it again.

Notice how the heat pools in the back of your head.

Notice how the frequency resonates in other parts of your body.