a wave that could straddle a galaxy

stream of consciousness response to 'untitled work for voice' at danspace projects 2/24/18




pace rhythm cadence implies something sacred
sheets of metal shaken to make thunder,
leaving a newborn thing in the middle of the floor, alone

uncomfortable swallow of old man next to me as the singular performer in front of us rippled and unfolded slowly

watching someone caress the floor with such reverence makes me want to do the same
voice as resonant as her body is subtle
I notice the desire for purpose, meaning, intentions, to be illuminated
maybe because I am watching bodies make shapes and images and words, rather than purely instrumental music
maybe that is what I am witnessing exactly, how the body is an instrument

sounds eventually string together to form words
to be like a chant, an incantation, a skipping record
a confusion between spiritual and mundane/broken
like a flash of potential light words layer together into recognizable fragments
I can feel more specific feelings about
playing with reach/texture/shape of sounds-that-become-words

how are the performers supported/nourished by each other's movements, focus, sounds?
words and movements seem unrelated - what is made available
by breaking them free from each other?
words become a series of absurd sounds, same as the movements they make with their bodies
performed with ritual focus, solemn

what is the relationship between force and meaning?
are the sounds and movements trapped by something? struggling to get out of their bodies?
Pathological?
Stripped of their original meaning?
Given new ones?
How are their movements helping generate the sounds they make?
what happens when you explore that relationship?

Why is synchronized movement so moving, impactful?
slow motion dagger dance
like samurai, a dance of paranoia, precision, protection, threatening

A dancer flails and shakes like she is filled with rage, pain
while someone tries to dress her patiently

as she struggles to communicate, she lets it wrack her body violently
equal parts traumatic and cathartic it feels to me
both powerful and exhausting to feel so much
her movements shape the song fragment she sings
sharp intakes of breath, her feet on the floor like a drum
punctuating the spaces between wordsounds

she didn't remove her engagement ring for this performance
its sparkle distracts me in her sudden stillness
winking

they are silhouetted suddenly
every intimate detail of the outskirts of the performer's bodies
nuances of their individual forms highlighted

moving in and out of tandem shapes and gestures is oddly breathtaking
why does it move me so much
especially when chaos seamlessly becomes a rhythm
the moment when formlessness becomes organized into form
alchemized
the individuality of their bodies is sharply highlighted
but through the mirror of similar movements now

the old man next to me watches offstage
the female performer he swallowed hard at in the beginning

What is it about something with the patina of pathology
touches a weird emotional spot in me for some reason
I notice discomfort sometimes, space for the expression to take the path it takes at other points
is that called patience?
benevolence?
maybe it reminds me of a man I love dearly with a stutter that strangles his whole body
almost constantly

humming in short bursts like a clock
metronomic
the rhythm changes, becomes subtly erratic
it feels like she is bending time
time emanates from her body
is subject to her whims
and when she eventually runs out of breath

Shapes from earlier reappear
foreshadowing vs laying a foundation - are they different?
drawing a line through time like a bread crumb trail in our memory
to make something familiar that wasn't before

Are the sentences from old movies?
is there some recently forgotten memory being excavated?
layers of familiar, pulled a part
stacked up again in a different way

unafraid to make ugly or uncomfortable sounds
exploring the shapes of syllables that form words with meanings attached
that live outside, beyond the performers as they chew and choke and push them out
with their entire bodies

this one sounds like play
like exploring the sound and volume and physical shapes
of this particular performer's potential to fill the room
it feels liberating
it feels like joy

I wish someone would look at me the way she looked at the bottom of her foot
piercing
fleeting
its already the distant past by now but I will remember it for a long time

wordsounds ring through the church like a choir
childish chaps swirl around a performer's legs like the religious dress of a whirling dervish
sound of footsteps like a drumbeat slowly recedes in the sudden symbolic darkness
that lives at the end

bits of light from outside catching the stained glass windows all around us
the building's final statement

Time has been expanding lately

Watching the guy across from me on the subway as he watches everyone around us, considering small details and interactions, I can't help but wonder if he isn't some invisible celebrity, like a renowned particle physicist who's face we are unfamiliar with. His innocuous clothing, smart hiking shoes and full, clean backpack with a little bottle of antibacterial soap hanging from its pocket made me think of an adjunct professor, maybe attached to Columbia or something. I notice this idea in my head of how a physicist behaves, constantly observing the world around them, seeing quantum mechanics manifesting in the inane conversations going on around us, in the contents and rustling of grocery bags, the timing of laughter and the ratios of bodies sitting to standing and how they inherently affect each other by the vacuums they create. I imagine my movement teacher as seeing the world in similar all encompassing refractions of information, the sway of someone's hips, small axis' of everyone's movements, forces rippling up through spines from one footfall to the next, information like a flood.

All of a sudden I wonder what I notice. I had a teacher in college who had us draw from memory regularly, to remind us that we think we know what everything looks like, until you actually pause and look at it. What an interesting thing to know about myself, that I've never considered - what do I notice as I move through the world?

The physicist across from me looks to see what I am looking at, I think we both know we are observing each other at this point. Being observed also makes me hyper aware of my physical expression, it's hard for me to know if I am performing a little as I take in the sense of what I am presenting. Dirt marks from work wrap around my legs and my big beat up jacket with the steel shop I used to work for embroidered on it communicate some kind of history, one that I imagine seems unrelated to my pale skin and heart shaped face with sharp librarian glasses and large blue eyes. I love being dirty on the subway, an unintentional dissonance, my desire to break all of the rules and prove everyone's ideas about the shape of the world wrong - I often watch people size me up, or glance at my face, then the steel shop name and my face again, trying to figure a story that makes sense to them.

I watch a red and blue pill roll around on the floor under his foot as he watches me.

Under the ice, the future stirred.

 

 

 

 

 



what could possibly be the evolutionary reasoning behind the subtlety and vastness of human emotions? It seems like a tide we are constantly helpless to be pulled into and rolled under.


In my anatomy class I have finally discovered the anatomical/emotional distance between my hands and my heart. There is a deep disconnect in my shoulders, pain I have always known and ignored for as long as I can remember - turns out the head of my humerus is struggling to stay in its socket, against all of the heavy things I ask it to do, ignoring its needs, disregarding its connection to my body completely.

I couldn't do certain things the other kids could on the playground, like the monkey bars, I remember the breathlessness of my frustration. After years of doing labor professionally, I stack an inhuman amount of weight on my shoulders, but can't manage a single pull up. In an emergency I could probably save everyone but myself. In a class on early developmental movement, we discussed what happens when a young child's hands are held over their heads as a way of teaching them how to walk, and something struck me about the question of agency, a child's ability to follow their desires or change their direction/level/methodology are mostly removed, a prop in a larger picture, possibly pulled up into more of an adult plane of existence than they may be quite ready for. Something about how fighting for agency often gets expressed by full body release we see children do to their parents reminds me deeply sharply of how I have responded to almost every sexual encounter I've had. When your hands are being held against your will, how can you catch yourself when you fall? How can you learn that your hands will support you when it is time to move through the world on your own?

I've run out of fingers and toes to count the generic, vacant men who have decided they wanted something that only lived inside of my body that I couldn't seem to communicate NO clearly to, no matter how specific my words, or cold and dry and still my body might have been. Why couldn't my hands rise up to protect me? I would put a man in the hospital for anyone else over less then what I have watched myself submit to, and like everyone else in my life who has failed me, so too have my own hands.

No wonder I struggled with feeling paralyzed after I graduated from art school. All I have ever known was how to give other people what they want. In the overwhelming deluge of life outside of school and its rules, homework assignments and seasons, I didn't know how to trust or rely on the power and skill residing in my hands. And since my hands have never been connected to my heart, the idea of moving from a place of love or desire is like hearing a foreign language that my hands can't speak, because they are dumb and blind to it.

I am dumb and blind to it.

I am not blameless in my sexual encounters. Something about the intensity of these individuals and their desire for something that momentarily wears my face, I find incredibly curious. When I witness a certain kind of glance, a heat, a catch in someone's throat, a flush, I become fiercely attuned to it, laying a magnifying glass onto the poor creature caught in my gaze, slowly setting them on fire. I have torn through labor crews, been inappropriately accosted by aging men who were my employers, I have had more than one loaded teacher student relationship, and my mentor in college, well, I crushed him. The only relationships I've been in, one with a man who was exactly twice my age (my 19 to his 38), and the other with a girl my age, and more destructive than I - were born out of this curious distraction, a way to get close to this feeling of wanting and pull it apart to see what it had to do with me. Having never had a sense of really being turned on or attracted to someone, age and gender didn't seem like adequate reasons to say no to someone's passionate interest, so I let the current draw me along as I studied them.

I have pulled the legs off so many bugs/people in my scientific investigation of the human heart. Nothing is colder then being in bed with me, or the lack of texts you will receive after I've locked the door behind you. My friend mentioned to me earlier that she isn't feeling a sense of need or longing for the person she is currently dating, and I am completely confused by ever wanting to feel those things for another human being. How exhausting and lonely it seems.

I don't understand desire, because I don't know if it is something I've ever felt. I don't think I've ever felt safe enough to have strong feelings about almost anything in my life. Maybe that's why I am so habit forming, so responsive to being inside of a Role or a Shape. It is defined by something outside of myself, and if I didn't have that to rely on, I'd be paralyzed. At least I can feel myself inside of the current. I went to art school because I spoke the language, riding on something that came naturally just like I rely on the connective tissue to hold my shoulder together. But language is useless with out something to say. Are hands useless without something to reach for?

I've noticed recently as I go through my daily motions, that there will be moments where the spaces around me suddenly seem intensely dimensional. Walking to the train the other day, it felt like my clothes were distinctly sitting on top of my skin, and my skin was sitting on top of the thing perceiving and thinking about it. In an exercise involving our hands exploring the ground around us, eyes closed, I had an experience I am still struggling to describe - an intelligence living in my hands took over for my eyes, and I felt/saw/perceived the edges of my sketchbook, its pages, the grain of the wood floor underneath me in a way that felt like I was seeing aspects of it that couldn't be witnessed through my eyes, a selfness that I hadn't been previously aware of. Everything feels different about being in my own body, and as the Roles I've been playing continue to be stripped away, and as I consciously give some of them up because they are no longer true... maybe I am able to see more of what I'm looking at, outside of what I need to survive within it. I am turning the magnifying glass inward, to set myself on fire - since no one else can do it for me. I wish I had understood that sooner, how much simpler that would have been, how much less bloody and frustrating.

It was a TV show about the Devil that helped me clarify the question I've been seeking the answer to. I stayed up all night to finish the entire season, I was transfixed - and I hate watching TV. The Lucifer character draws out everyone's deepest desires, his world circles around what lies underneath our intentions and how they drive our reaction to different circumstances.


If the Devil asked me what my deepest darkest desires are, I am afraid I would have no answer for him.





'You were born out of greatness and you will go back to it. In between those two events try to remember it.'