This too is in formulation. I don’t know what will be evidenced in the dance - the performed work - but what is budding through the process of making is quite soothing to me.
The pace and imagery of the walking forests is still with me. (previous post)
Nervous & Vestibular
Cyan this color that, to me, resonates in the nervous and vestibular systems. Systems of (re)orientation, water and mechanics turning into electrical energy thru a tiny three-circle (ish) boney process - introduced to me years before by Vanessa Justice - a woman whose work I was in for 13? 14? years. A time that spanned from undergraduate to graduate studies, with NYC life, my 20s and most of my 30s.
And the nervous system - sensation of the environment, intelligence, recon. I return to my theory that all energy, all emotion, functions like frequencies belonging to the electromagnetic spectrum - the same range of energy that frames the visible spectrum - Color. I return to the tiny hairs that forest our skin as responsive antennae attuned to heat, empathy, proximity, and anxiety, etc. Information about the present environment sensed…
[Sensate - Kathleen Hermesdorf… naming the sensation, responding, integrating, going-in. I’m grateful to you, KK. It hurts loosing you. You were a seismic shift in teaching, energy, craft. Delaney shared your saying “shoot sunlight out of your heart.” And I will.]
Geology
These ideas began cyan movement investigations and are now resurfacing. The time between these crests quarantine began, summer happened, and communing virtually has normalized. During this time, I felt a disdain for cyan, maybe that is harsh, a general uninterest. I found myself craving vivid lush greens, time outside under the canopy of trees, finally noticing all these amazing green velvets of mosses. I want emeralds. This too paralleled a project I was dancing in - Betsy Miller’s American Woman - her prompts sounding oddly psychic to my cravings and unshared/unvoiced solo studies.
I imagine the interior of my body, the caverns of my hips, the hallowed hollows of ribs, spine, and thighs lined with luscious mosses. I imagine my bones as sands and earth temporarily organized, as branches slowly spiraling, floating in water, moved bay breezes. Sparkling geodes. My blood, guts. Fluids like the oceans, rivers, streams. I imagine my skin as the sky - from the brightest sun-drenched to the deepest velvety darkness freckled with stars.
My sister is a geologist.
Time
So, the walking forests. Time. Time extended to its fullest concept. If I think of time as a linear, horizon-like expanse, a sense of past, present, and future, I am soothed by the insignificance of the present moment. My own lineage extending through my mom - Detroit, far north, France… through my dad - Jakarta, Dutch-Indonesian. Their lineage extending beyond them, and beyond them, going out farther and farther, until we are reunited with octopi, we are back in the ocean… all of us. Every human - all of our mother, the tidal expanse of the ocean. Maybe this is faith. Maybe this is a refusal of the divisiveness, hypocrisy, inhumanity, anti-Love, anti-respect that is shouted from [U.S.] leadership. Maybe this is the wisdom of the (collective) body speaking in ways I can hear.
Chris Brusberg (lighting collaborator) and I were talking about all this - and glaciers calving and the environment, he offered (paraphrase) … in a sense, the glacier is one’s marrow… breaking… a relationship to cosmic time…
Path: cyan meeting greens
Cyan and green. Walking along a path at the beginning of this semester, I witnessed a serrated meeting of cyan and greens. The trees lining the wide, straight path I walked on, converged at a distant point ahead of me while the bright blue sky filled the space between each tree-line, a triangle of blue pointed down to what I thought would be the end of my walk. This porous moving meeting of cyan and green, earth and sky.