Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Oct20

presence, absence

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Liam, our beautiful little Jack Russell died suddenly on Friday.  He was out on the path looping our big field walking with Pam and suddenly all the other dogs ran to him.  He had collapsed.  Our vet called it a “deadly arhythmia.”  He died minutes later.

For many years, Pam had wanted a Jack Russell.  I resisted what I thought would be a crazy, manic dog.  Then one day, visiting a friend at a barn, a litter of Jack’s were nestled in a stall, recently imported from Ireland.  Our youngest daughter, Chandrika, adopted from Nepal, came out cuddling a puppy and told us seriously, “This is my baby sister Laxmi who died.”  Clearly the decision about a Jack had been moved to a different realm, and that puppy came home with us that day.  We named him Liam.

Liam had a presence that was so strong, so steadfast, so self-possessed that he felt like the center of our human-animal family.  He was always there.  Not needy, not requiring anything except to be with us – to be present in our presence.  And that carves his sudden, irrevocable absence into us in the most painful of ways.  He was the small dog in a pack of greyhounds, so the rhythm of his feet, the quality of his movement, his color and nature were precise and unique.

All of us now are walking around the house a little lost, untethered and deeply sad.  I see him everywhere.  Pam hears his feet.  His absence is present.  We are present with his absence and with his presence, woven together like a möbius.

This summer at the Body-Mind Centering Conference, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen showed us how the heart is actually a möbius – a never ending cycling flow.  “The continuous flow of blood through the arterial system–which runs next to the venous system but in opposite directions–contains möbius coil properties. The circulation of blood throughout the body resembles the figure-eight shape of the möbius coil.”  (Scalar Heart Connection)

How perfect is it then that the heart, physically and metaphorically the center of us, should hold at the same time the shape of loss – this mystery of presence and absence wound round each other inextricably.  Like the breath – in then out with the little death of suspension between.  Each beat, each breath moving us forward and through.  Our dear friend Jo-Ann Eccher wrote on my Facebook page, “I just had a vision of Liam guiding Dr Masaru Emoto who passed into the next dimension yesterday into the bliss of the pure land filled with love and good intention.”

Thank you Liam, and thank you Tashi, Luna, Esme, Dae, below, all running in fields of gold with Liam now.

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Oct15

a body, a landscape

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Screen Shot 2014-10-14 at 9.29.04 AMEiko:  A Body in Fukushima; Photograph by William Johnston

Thirty years ago I took a Delicious Movement Workshop with Eiko and Koma at their home in the Catskills.  It was transformative, life changing.  I had just met them at a performance of Kazuo Ohno  at La Mama in New York.  That performance had blown open my ideas about movement, time, age and beauty.  Working with them for a week pushed me off any dancing vector I might have had into a world of possibility and poetry.  Eiko and Koma have threaded through my life since then, casually and profoundly.

Now Eiko is venturing into the wild waters of solo work at a time when I am doing the same. Her current collaboration  with the photographer William Johnston, “A Body in Fukushima”, is currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in Philadelphia.  At the same time, Eiko is performing “A Body in a Station” in the Philadelphia train station.  Her courage and devotion are  boundless.

Last summer, I performed in front of my collaborator Pam White’s  camera in Bogliasco and Venice, Italy.  One day, we shot in front of some wild grafitti near a church as a group of students sat with a priest.  They never glanced at me.  Oddly, that was both unsettling and reassuring.  Most days, we would set out – me in costume – and then find a spot that beckoned – a series of narrow passages, a garden, a courtyard, a landscape of doors fronting a church.  We let the opportunity shape the material.  I love to improvise to let the confluence of sound and sight and whatever is arising from my own body in that moment shape what happens.  I am interested in the intersection of the performative body in public spaces, and then weaving those narrative, imagistic threads into the work both in the theater and on the street.   And the thing that drives me, has driven me for the past thirty-five years, is a lust for movement, a hunger to channel that volcanic urgency from the body into something that I can share.

I will keep you posted on my upcoming performances.  In the meantime, get to Philadelphia if you can to see the beautiful work of Eiko and Mr. Johnston.

 

Oct13

the receptive body

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I am no longer swimming.  October, and the nights have dropped into the 30’s.  Lakes and pools are hovering around 60 — too cold for even a quick dip.  Besides, I swim to luxuriate, to open, to lengthen, to receive.  As best I can, I am cultivating a receptive body.

Yesterday in my studio, in my body, I was watching a DVD of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen exploring in movement the relationship among kidneys, uterus, bladder and ureters.  Each one of those organs has a quality of mind and movement that is unique, and the orchestration of those parts is a continually shifting and expanding improvisational dance.  As I moved with Bonnie, and then on my own, I thought about the time it takes to open, to sense and feel in this way, and how doing that nourishes and expands everything else.

What I mean is this:  the receptive body is also the vulnerable body.  The receptive body is also the relational body.  What is missing in a lot of the conversations about vulnerability and courage (Brene Brown) and living your dreams (Oprah) is the body.  The body in the sense of an ongoing, exploratory, improvisational, playful, listening relationship with oneself.

How do we discover that without being a dancer or a yogi?  What is a simple way of entering those waters?  My friend and colleague is the composer Pauline Oliveros.  Her life practice, Deep Listening, is listening to everything all of the time, and noticing when we are not doing that.  Deep feeling, or deep sensing is about attuning to the inner and outer landscapes of the body and its relationship to what surrounds us.

Begin here:  practice the intentional pause.  Whether you are eating breakfast, or diapering an active 21 month old child – pause.  Take 5 or more seconds to notice what you feel with all of your senses.  Do you feel the shape of the keyboard keys beneath your fingers?  The soft warmth of the baby’s skin?  The soft channel of breath entering your body?  The unseen space behind you, the rush of a truck passing by?  Just notice.  Let yourself take that in.  Then go on.  Pause often, throughout the day, an unexpected moments.  Catch yourself off-guard.  Pause mid-action.  As if you were a dry sponge, imagine your tissues – all of them – expanding and opening to the waters of that moment.  Receive.