Dec24
Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling
Dec23
dark sea
I took this while on the Vineyard earlier this month. I liked the dazzling way that the sun silvered the surface of the waves and the sand without penetrating the depths. Looking at the icy water, feeling the inscrutability, the inhospitable heart of the sea, I thought about a life lived at the surface, and how I long for the deepest dive,
Here is my favorite Mary Oliver poem. What I love is that she is never just looking at or even observing. She is the fully embodied witness to the authentic movement of life. She takes us down to the depths and then flings us upward, outward, into breathlessness. Thank you Mary.
The Swan
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
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Dec9
solar system
I am again on Martha’s Vineyard with Jacob, my autistic godson and his family. The story of this family is a series of miracles unfolding over the past fourteen years. Besides Jacob and his parents Jo-Ann and Derrill, the house now holds Charlie, Jo-Ann’s 92 year-old father, and Mary Helen, her sister.
The sun around which we all orbit is Jo-Ann. She is the lodestar, the gravitational force, the heat and the center of this system. The choreography of this complicated and extraordinary family is a little like what Twyla Tharp said about Bach: “”Everyone understands that there’s Bach, and then there’s most everybody else,” citing the composer’s “architecture, righteousness, justice, control, possibilities — the richness and variety of his imagination. He encompasses all. I call his work ecumenical. No one has more range.”‘ Bach and Jo-Ann. Music and mothering.
What I would add to this list is devotion. To an unendingly curious, determined, loving search for anything that will make Jacob’s life and his connection to his world as rich, varied and beautiful as it can possibly be.
Seeing this requires being with Jo-Ann, Jacob and Derrill long enough to move past the sheer overwhelming enormity of what she and they are doing daily, hourly. It is too much. We don’t want to let in how big the task is, how the entirety of a life can be taken up by this rigorous caring care. To witness this without looking away requires its own kind of bravery.
I don’t look away. I want to see and feel it all. Maybe that is the best thing I can offer here. A steady loving witness. A willingness to keep looking and to be curious and soft. To see things anew each day, each moment.
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Nov30
mammal (save the date)
Costume for Mammal by Christine Joly de Lotbinniere
Last year I wrote this about the new dance I am building, called The Traveler (terra incognita), part of my new solo work, Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs, which will premiere in Cambridge at the Dance Complex in June 2016.
“It is a dance that is chewing me up. It is so hard, physically and emotionally, that I am often afraid to rehearse it. Tom Waits’s music is like the mule driver and the light in the dark. Working on this dance, I enter through a door that I hope won’t explode and find myself sometimes in a mine field, other times in a field of flowers. It is the music, but mostly what comes slithering and snapping out of my body.”
This year I have been opening another door to a new work called Mammal. Initially called it Beast, but felt that Mammal was a roomier title, one that had space for the ferocious and the tender. The dance is still downloading, but the essence is there.
I will be performing an excerpt of Mammal January 17 at the Booking Dance Festival in New York City. Here are the details. I will post times and ticket information shortly. Please save the date. Please come!
January 17
5:30-11:30 pm
5:30-11:30 pm
The Allen Room
Frederick P. Rose Hall
Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center
Located in the Time Warner Building at Central Park’s Columbus Circle
Broadway & West 60th St.
New York City