Ingrid Schatz and Pony Photo: Jeffrey Anderson
HORSE
With him
here, now
skin to skin
warmth spilling
one into the other.
breaths
a lattice of
drawing in,
drawing out.
the heart is a
cave that holds our
boisterous blood
our twinned pulses
bound in this moment
after all, the only and
most precious.
Paula Josa-Jones
Photo: Jeffrey Anderson
I will say right from the start that it feels strange to post this picture. Even though I am a performer. Even though I was for a number of years, a model.
About ten years ago I stopped wanting my picture taken. Age? Probably. Something else in the mix as well, I am sure. Something to do with hiding. However, I am redoing my website, and it was suggested that new headshots were a good idea. So I trekked to Glen’s Falls and Jeffrey (with wife Laura and new baby Jeffrey in attendance) took some pictures. I am not shy with Jeffrey. So it felt ok to let myself be seen.
The reason that I bring this up is that I wrote yesterday about seeing the Wim Wenders film, Pina. What I was aware of as I watched the astonishing dancers of her company was the absence of mirror in their dancing. Their pure, wild absorption in the movement and the moment. From their words, I understood that Pina was their mirror and their witness. The big, allowing container for their movement that let them push themselves off precipice after precipice of their dancing and their fear.
As Shunryu Suzuki says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Today when I was in my studio, I turned my big mirror around, so that it was only the space and the music holding me. At first, this was disconcerting – we dancers are mirrored creatures, seeking reflection, affirmation, information. But then the movement began to tumble and spill. Almost as if Pina herself were in the room, urging me to dance my longing, my love.
I saw the film Pina yesterday. If you have not seen it you must. What came shining through for me is connected to what I am writing about for my class, Breaking into Blossom. In the words of Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art: “The noun of self becomes a verb.”
I do not see a lot of that in dance performance. I often feel too much self in the performance, as if a mirror is always there, reflecting the performer back at himself. Something a little too ironic or clever. Movement that is too opaque, too filled up with the performer.
What Wim Wenders’s film captures and what I saw time and time again in the theater with Bausch’s work, is the complete, exquisite surrender of the dancer to the dance. Movement and mover inseparable, incandescent.
I have been writing about the landscape of the body and its relationship to the body of the earth and the bodies of other creatures. About the sense of our own bodies as landscape, to be discovered, explored, savored.
These two paintings are by two of my most favorite painters. I met Laura Von Rosk many years ago during a residency at Yaddo. Her landscapes were the most sensuous I had ever seen. I bought one she had done in Minnesota. It had a perspective of gazing up the hilly thighs of a woman, across the fields of belly and breasts and into the sky beyond. I recently reconnected with her work at a show in Hudson at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.
Lempicka’s work invites us into the contours, the hills, valleys, the hidden caves of the body.
If you lie on the floor and roll very slowly from back to side to front, how do you feel the landscape of your own body? How effortless can you make that movement? Continue on, rolling to your side and then ending on your back.
Imagine this as a little meditation, a way of calling the earth of your body into awareness.
If you are a rider, can you feel a deepening harmony of your body and your horse’s body as you ride?
