Icaros

If I were to distill the last year and a half into one thought, one waveform which is shaping me, moulding the soles of my feet, it is this: Rhythm is Everything.  

There is a resonance which underlies the breath of life.  It is form and formless, cohering into nexuses of energy which then generate movement, or sound.  There is pattern to the coherence which expresses itself through all life.  

The ways in which we observe the pattern occur through the lenses available to each of our brain-bodies, resulting in the 10,000 things of zen philosophies or the multitude of manifest forms in Western esoteric traditions.  Some paint, some sing, some dance - some speak, some play, some teach - some _____.  The main point is that observation-expression is always undeniably creative.  This is what is called living the creative life, and it is available to all of us.  

Harmonic Resonance by Farb

Each nexus of waveforms that is every living thing draws initial resonance into itself, where it meets and is shaped by the histories and pathways of the life.  The resulting interference results in geometries of sound movement which are at once universal, in their impulse and connectivity, and unique, in their blueprinting and expression.  Levels of density express at differentiated frequencies, creating magnetism.  This magnetism draws likeness unto itself, forming groups.  Exchange within the groups further shapes and evolves frequencies and fields emerge.  Fields are stable over time yet continually evolving, allowing each living thing to rest within the shared patterns of the earth while continuing to individually draw down resonance.  Thus shared paths emerge.  In time, we view these as linear progression.  In space, as place.  In the mind, as thought trains or loops.  In the heart, as emotion.  Tides, flows, spirals, skate back over themselves deepening grooves which at once densify into codeable transmissible energies while always and constantly continuing to shift at subtle interfaces.  The basis of all expression is rhythm.  Rhythm is the horse upon which resonance comes to life.  

Untitled by Justin Totemical

When I was in Ecuador sound opened to me!  I have always been a dancer, sensing, feeling, moving rhythms through my bones.  I became big ears in Ecuador.  I learned to sing.

One night in ceremony my ears extended, they opened and spiralled out, and every sound was available overlapping in harmony.  Insect, upward thrust of plants, gentle mist, breeze, clods of dirt, logs heating and waiting to be burned, rise and fall of bodies breath, huff and heave of animal, hair follicles growing, spheres and angels.  A burning desire opened in me - to know the frequency which is this Hannah with fewer and fewer lenses - to observe in simplicity and detail the tone and lenses of all living things.  

Mevlevi Taksim by Sinan Dogan

The fire of our heart is fanned by the rhythm of our movement.  As its resonance becomes clear the flames grow high.  The songs of the shaman clear the fields, open the lenses of our histories.  As they sing the flames of the fire brighten.  The flames lick the frequency.  Hearts blend.  

Guacamayito by Mira Jempe and Janicka

There, as we built the lodge, hard work, we listened to alot of music!  Pure joy! Beautiful sharing of forms.  And the music provided a thrust which offset the silence, thus making the peace recognisable.  

We Have Arrived by Matt Kirk

Do you hear/see/sense rhythm in your dreams?  Whose dreams are these anyway? 

                                                                                                                          

"Forget everything which did not teach you how to dance." Rumi                   

"Tie yourself to herds of mating camels." Hafiz                                                 

Ayahuasca Vision by Skyer

"Pick up a musical instrument." Rumi                                         

Films

When spirit moves our lives change.  Ultimately, spirit is us.  For several thousand years the church and organised religion have taught us that spirit is something far away, in an imagined heaven, that we cannot reach ourselves, an other.  The esoteric teachings from which religion copied teach us that we are ourselves the great spirit.  Manifestation is thus the heart throb of all that is, and this is the secret of surrender.


As I surrender to the unfolding of my hearts desires, in alignment with the speed and streaming quality of the 2012 calendar cycle, I observe with humble amazement all that springs forth.


In Berlin, as a spontaneous addition to the Traces Collective Project, we created a music video :)  Our filmmaker, Natasha Todd, had this project to complete, and chose us to be the dancers for her video.  The result was a directorship of our natural energies toward another side of the diamond, similar in quality, different in reflection... Connecting to my growing interest in electronic music and the beats that are its grounding, the video is truly something beautiful!  Christian Loffler's 'Blind' 


Then as the weeks continued, further videos emerged.  Ines Bermejo Larranaga, a gorgeous dancer in residence with us at Gloguair, created a short dance film from our intersecting qualities :) 'Slow Are My Shoes' It will be screened at film festivals this summer.


And finally, a film emerged from the depth of the internet today which foreshadows all that is happening this year :)  Directed and produced by the young and talented Bethan Lloyd, 'Let Yourself Go' depicts Bethan's journey into dance and ecstatic movement.  The end of the film highlights the work of my good friend Shanti Scott (check out his most recent collaborations 'The Road to Peace' and 'Sex to Spirit') who opened the doors to me where dance and trance are one.  That was but a wee year ago ...  my how the speed increases at some phases of the spiral!! 


To check out these talented filmmakers please contact them/visit their sites :)
Natasha Todd, Ines Bermejo Larrangara, Bethan Lloyd, Shanti Scott

Pure Creativity

Here in Berlin we are working night and day.  For months now we were videotaping and emailing and creating sound from across the globe, and now we are together, in physicality, and the fire between us is electrifying!  Echoes and echolocation of so many mothers and fathers sensitise us to levels of silence.

There is definitely an element of ritual involved.  Theatre is ritualistic anyway, and when you add the dimensions of creating an environment and becoming one with it, a part of it, the female animus comes largely into view.  We are creaturely, we are butoh, we are feminine, we are listening, we are responsive to the contours of dust.

Sound, as the crux of our spine here not here simple and stripped down, catalyses the most subtle feedback loops across dimensions.  Mirroring loops within neural activity and the sensory motor nervous system, physical feedback loops in speaker cones vibrate to the frequency of our breath.  Time vanishes, gaps emerge fluid wholeness, morehuman and otherworldly waves exhibit, and our quiet surprise tinges with amazed restraint.  

"It was a crazy and magical place, and the electricity of all the people seemed to make for a wonderfully charged atmosphere, so that one woke up in the mornings excited and a little anxious, as though a thunderstorm were sweeping in." - Lyle Bonge

"What is art to others is not necessarily art to me..  What was art to me or was not some time ago might have lost that value or gained it in the meantime..  Art is not an object but experience.  To be able to perceive it we need to be receptive." - Josef Albers

"I'm convinced that a pre-made dance, a dance made to be shown is of no interest. The dance should be caressed and fondled; here I'm not talking about a humorous dance but rather an absurd dance. It must be absurd. It is a mirror which thaws fear.. it is the unveiling of the inner life." Tatsumi Hijikata 

What I have to share about being here, to serve you most, is the complete and utter beauty of flowing in tides of pure creative energy.  Creativity is a vortex of inspiration, dedication, pushing through, riding on the breakers of those pushing waves, finding the sun anew as we are rocked on the shores and backwashes of salt, bathed again in inspiration.  


Every journey is a creative endeavour.  In following the flows of each creative vortex through its own unique absences, presences, pathways, and logic we become alive outside of bounds.  We are travellers, we are artists, we are stardust swirling (often painfully, always ecstatically) into form and out again.  Everything, nothing, empty, full.  Aho.

photos by Francesca Woodman

Means Without End

Project Berlin is taking shape, and fast.  The concept is amazing: 3 women, 2 musicians, 4 different home countries, 3 journeys abroad, video capture of individual rehearsal processes in our own homes, sent online, developed over the past 2 months, feedback to the musicians who warp our words and artefact their sounds and send us images of the music, feedback to each other in endless email dialogues, more rehearsals, more posting of video footage, and unbelievably, an incredible sensitivity has developed.  
It feels like that last sentence, very stream of consciousness, very embodied, very feminine and emotional and real, very keyed into technology, playing a lot with what is communicated through an online presence.  We feel each others bodies.  We hear each others breath.  We visit the spaces the others have been too and pick up on the traces they have left.  Our own traces re-emerge and shape us in the now.  Trading materiality, pixels, soundbites, and waveforms, we pass traces of the jungle, the desert, and island mountains back and forth.  We will meet for the first time on the performance day.   

early workshopping photo 

The concept began when Rosa contacted me and said, we have both been on huge journeys this year, myself to Japan and you to Ecuador, and we could create something about temporality and traces and do it online.  Do you know of a third person who would be good to include?  And I said, ooooh I would love to be a part of this project and Shaleigh, a phenomenal dancer in the states, has just been to Israel, also for an extended period.  Can we get funding to bring her over, to bring us together?  And Rosa said yes, and she wrote up the workshops, and wrote for the funding, and piece by piece, trusting the outcome would indeed  manifest, it is here, and it is lovely indeed.  

As women, we enter the process fully.  When the musicians began to work with us as well they brought male energy into the mix.  We are fully ourselves and yet, common threads, in sound and movement and image, have clearly emerged.  We have tracked and witnessed each others journeys, and it has been touching beyond belief.  
The night before my first rehearsal I cried.  I tried to rehearse, but I laid on the floor and cried, and so I emailed Shaleigh, and she emailed me back, and we went back and forth, and the next day, boom, an amazing rehearsal happened.  And so it has been.  We are busy, lots of projects each of us, and there is really no time, and then boom, we all upload rehearsals in some sort of distance keyed rhythm and shazam, an incredibly rich montage is before us.  Here is a link to a cut up of some of our workshopping from the last two weeks. Workshop III

And here is some of the text directive for workshop three.  If you are up for it, read it aloud, record it, play it back to yourself, and move/dance.  It is cathartic, freeing, binding, elusive, embodied, full of friction, cascading with release.  The full workshop runs to nearly 40 minutes, however this should give you a taste...

"There is no earth, only water. The world has been flooded over many millennia. The water has solidified over millennia. The world is a shining orb of solid water. The tiny articulate outlines of creatures and plant life are locked beneath you. The world is a spherical egg of solid water patterned with a memory of life. There is solid water under your feet.  Extending in all directions from under your feet, which are not feet but the apex of an egg. You are an egg poised on an egg of solid water. Poised in unpredictability.

Dance as a spine extending wires into the surface of a melting earth. Really see with those wires the precise details of creatures and plant life. Bring to mind a recollection of a creature or plant you have seen. Bring it into the now moment with precision.  Sketch with the wires the contours of this plant or animal being. Sketch its surface image with your whole body, and deeper sketch its inner form. Take a journey with your body into this other being.
You are moving through bodies and no longer water. The water is draining. The bodies are moving and generating dry land. The bodies are breathing and drying the liquid collected around them. Individuals peel from the mass.
A hand is twisting in your core. A face in the distance emerges. Another face you have seen yourself wear. It is floating light in a sea of heavy heads.

Another voice arises and effaces the previous one. Your body adopts the new set of expected postures and motions. You go through the many shapes and actions. Your body moves faster through the descriptions, moves faster through the expected actions. Break each expected action in its moment of formation.  Each movement acknowledges its alternatives, and the chosen movement expands with the power of possibility. There is power in reserve. Stasis as the neatest analogy to light’s speed." by Rosa  

The final piece will make use of multiple projectors working live time, still shots which accumulate, two movable screens, use of the entire gallery space-including the ceilings and corners, mirrors, paper, implicit/explicit audience invitation, prepared piano, laptop synthesising of sounds live time, spoken text, bodies, breath, touch, and awareness.  It is crafted in the most detailed way, and left open in the most streaming way.  We are in situ, however it expresses, with a rich tapestry of traces to guide our path.  

Performances are at Serendipity Gallery, The Berlin Occupy Biennial, and the park, Berlin.  Residencies at K77 and Glogulair, Berlin and then residency and performance again at Cambridge University, UK.  Full details of times and events, as well as more in depth writing on the process, can be found on our blog: Traces Collective  and like us on Facebook: Traces Collective

Robust Delicate Braids

Well here I sit, reading and writing for my PhD.  It is endless, tedious, and fulfilling.  I am at the point now where I really have to think on what it is I am doing, where has the journey taken me so far, where is it wanting to go from here, what points need to be made in this particular effort and project?  


The PhD is many things...a deepening of understanding in the history and approaches of my interdisciplinary fields (anthropology, dance studies, performance studies, narrative research, practice based research, and consciousness inquiries)...a creative journey into the heart of a spiritual tradition (whirling) and a creative practice (dance) which influence and overlap each other in ever more intwining ways...a degree which bestows personal merit upon the one who can finish it...an autobiography.  

Braids in "Circles" V. 1-Stratford Circus Theatre 2010

My theoretical strands are finding themselves taking root in three distinct whirlpools: Embodiment, Ritual Performance, and Intercultural Hybridity.  These whirlpools form a braid which allows me to connect my three main practices for this research: dance creation, spiritual practice, and writing.  Questions of embodiment tend to relate to the braid of practice in dance, those of ritual theatre and performance to the braids of dance and spiritual practices in general, interculturalism and hybridity to weaves of dance and whirling.  I am looking at how my background in dance and somatic practices led me to track my journey through a sensory perceptive lens, how totally Western this approach is, and when and where my ego dissolved in the process - leading to a new vantage point in creative process.  I am looking hard at this new vantage point, considering how I train my dancers, how I shape an event, the outcomes I tend to expect from process and performance, and the role of presence or Being in the context of the theatre.  
As is often the case in PhD studies, I think that I am on to something radically new.  Reading case studies and theoretical trajectories I find that nothing that has been done is quite nearly what I am doing, so I coin a new term to fit the blend of theory and practice which is this moment through me.  I'm thinking of it as New Ritual Theatre. 
The concrete phenomena the study surrounds itself with are the parallel creations/events of Circles of Light, a multimedia dance performance event staged twice in the course of one year, and my training and initiation as a semazen.  

myself in a crazy moment in "Circles" V. 1-Stratofrd Circus Theatre 2010

If I get brave enough and have enough time I'll create a site where I post the papers I've written. This should help me to get some of the ideas moving around on the thought trains I'm riding out there, and to get some feedback on how those are received, by whom, and how they get applied apart from my own uses.    I should also like to finally make my performance web site.  After a few years of thinking I was giving up performance, I seem to be more deeply involved in it than I ever was, so it is time to embrace this life direction in totality and create a densely woven online presence for it.  I don't know when these will develop, maybe in the autumn when studiousness is at its peak, that would be fitting.  

A section of "Grief" from "Circles" V. 2-Cambridge University 2011

For now I must simply read and think, read and write, write and think, dancing through it all, be-bopping away in my seat as I type, getting up to jam when a really good song comes on my playlist, sometimes eat a bit.  I've made a wish list here of books that would be really helpful to me, which I could not afford on my own.  Hannah's PhD Necessities  The big readers, textbooks actually, which are over $100 each (what a quack!) are actually important.  They allow me to cross reference multiple theories at once without reading the full trajectory of thought in that theory, gleaning off the top so that I can draw useful but unladen parallels.  I welcome these as gifts at anytime in the next year or so, when they will be most helpful.  As you will see, they cross disciplinary lines and engulf the process as a whole.  Hopefully they will not bog it down, but instead give a shiny sheen to my tutors and examiners.  Thank you in advance for whichever of these comes to me!!

Mansions

I once saw a dance piece titled Many Rooms.  It was at The American Dance Festival 2001 or 2002, created and performed by a beautiful woman who has worked for Trisha Brown and many other beautiful downtown choreographers.  The piece had shafts of light coming from multiple directions in the grid above the stage.  She was dressed in simple blue pants and a blue long sleeve shirt.  Her blonde hair reflected in the shadowy light and her lines were intricately woven to precision between arm and leg flows.  She moved through the shafts of light as if they were the rooms themselves, stretching, turning back on herself, lengthening in multiple directional vectors at once.  That was it.  Stunning in its simplicity we felt the hollow labyrinth which is full of interior meanings.  

digital print by Anouk de Clerq

In Ecuador I had a vision of "our" mansion, the children and I and the multiple people who inhabit it...  The mansion is a large stone building, several floors, with windows stretching out along all floors on both sides.  Some of the windows are quirky and unique.  There is a gate into the estate and some mid size fields in front of the house which we use for installations and crystal sculptures.  

Behind the mansion to the left is a ceremonial field made of corn with a large circle in the middle of it and some tepees for sleeping and when we prefer to have a roof. Just behind the mansion is a large arts centre which we build ourselves, out of new technologies.  The centre is a circle once again and there are many artists studios surrounding the inner chamber, each with their own outer door.  The grid above the inner chamber is made of a fantastic new material which is resilient and lightweight, making it moveable and adjustable for total variety in use.  The panels of the space are oxogonal and the acoustics are amazing.  Behind and to the right of the mansion is a large kitchen garden where we grow an abundance of herbs and salads and exotic grains.  A small greenhouse rests down the hill to the right and is home to many tropical essentials such as lemons and coffee, guavas and avocados. We come in and out of town on our vegetable oil powered scooters, and our many friends there bring us fresh bread and rice and fruits because they love us.  

There is a river not too far off and there is an arrangement with the folks on the other side of the river for horse riding and possible stables.  Lots of people live there, there is a broad range of interests and the work is shared in a happy motivated energy.  Inside the mansion there are fabrics hanging at odd angels and sparkles dangling in odd corners and little detailed paintings can be found in the loos and elsewhere.  Broken coffee cups litter the counters and books and bean bags lounge about waiting for bottoms and minds which want a think and a rest.  There is a tutor who teaches the children in sacred geometry, astronomy, chemistry, calculus, theatrics, molecular biology, creative writing and other essential arts.  Eccentricity and the joyous harmonies of communal living are a part of the matrix and we manage it beautifully by living as our highest selves.  

I don't know how this mansion is coming to us.  In my current imagination I could see us squatting a place and buying it for about £1 in the divine deal of the century, or perhaps a large gift or lucrative work project affords the means to buy it outright, or one of us inherits it and is in love with sharing my dream, or there may yet be another way.  I don't know the timing of its materialisation, but it is walking toward us now even as I write.  The children saw this vision too, before I did even, and now I am putting it out there to the world so that in speaking it becomes one step denser and can find a place within the hearts of all who will live there.  Buyah!  May the angles send this post to those who are meant to see it :)

refrigerator art, my home

Yesterday in rehearsals Jeremy H and I walked onto an analogy of many boxes inside a large container, the likeness of many pathways connecting into pure potentiality for expression.  We talked and worked with a dance "box", the tempo and and flow and rhythm of release technique, its effortless effort, and the way this both frees the body for line and momentum and also inhibits theatrical qualities.  We worked with a comic "box", full of effort and fast rushing energy toward expression of one tiny point, which focuses attention on specificity of action and its subsequent absurdity.  We worked with theatrical "boxes" including text and voices, costumes and props, candles and lighting.  The space "box" is really cool...working with the consciousness of the space, whether that be a piece of land outside or the accumulation of psyche in a studio or the flow and history of a public space inhabited by people and the bustling world.  There are endless "boxes" and the container is fluid in its shape, accommodating whatever we choose to discover, play with.  Performances then develop their own unique crystallisation, whether that be planned or emergent in the moment, according to the rooms we choose to inhabit within that container, that mansion.

And what then, if the rooms are not boxes but emergent shapes within themselves?  

digital print by Endre Balogh

Christ said, "In my fathers mansion there are many rooms."  Mevlana Rumi said, "Let the beauty we love be what we do, there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground."  

Dreams

Since I've been back there are these moments, moments when I am for a breath once again in Ecuador, looking through my eyes onto the places and people there.  These moments disconcert me, for they help me to realise how fast we forget, how in-the-now we can be in the spaces we inhabit.  Looking at photographs, this does not bring me back viscerally to the teachings and the qualities and the senses of my being-as-it-was there.  The photographs of my trip, while beautiful, just don't capture the realness, the liveness of any of it.  It is smells and conversations and ruptures in space which take me away, only to wake up here again 15 seconds later in a state of shock.  I am finding that the integration is coming in waves of rhythm.  

dervish abstraction 1

My relationship to sound and music has completely changed, new music is finding its way into my home and coming into my dreams.  The musical patterns flow through my brain and my body differently, I can see them as well as feel them, and I cannot stop dancing.  Music is all the time!  It is everything, the birds, the wind, voices, chimes, bells, bass lines, these are my favourite musics.  Party music too, funk and soul and swing and jazz and so much great techno too.  The rhythms of my life as well....quiet grounding pure high energy at my home in Cambridge and then I go into London and experience the waves of the city in ever expanding and sometimes harsh bursts.  
Last week as I was sitting in a cafe studying, wave upon wave of emotion swept through me.  Another girl was studying at the table with me, a drama student, and we were just angels for each other, talking about our fields and life in London and sharing amazement at the activities of the space....people suffering and needing help, like passing out on the floor and coming in with blood running down their face and stuff, and beautiful people there sharing intimate conversation and being real and heavenly.  

dervish abstraction 2

I've painted and done charcoal drawings and spent days in the library since I've been back in the Uk, and there is lots of artistic drive present.  I'm also just now getting tired a bit.  The beauty of being back, of having good public transportation and public swimming pools and food from every corner of the planet, of finding home and friends again, it is unravelling at the edges now and I am faced once again with myself, a little star in the midst of all that is.  
I begin to wonder things like, where do we find meaning in our lives, which moments are the ones which imprint and stick with us the most, who am I resonating toward and how best to navigate these new rivers of relationships, what do I ever really have to do, where is the most powerful witness?  I don't feel like dividing into paragraphs, laying out thoughts classified and organised by topic, or getting anywhere particularly fast.  I do feel like running joyfully for the hell of it, streaming thought and inspiration through any artistic formats available to me, loving deeply freely and abundantly.  I know the intimacy of myself as a woman now too.  Ayahuasca has that effect.  It is not my biology, it is the way I perceive and sense and respond to the world within me.  It is just womanly.  

dervish abstraction 3

I titled this post dreams, because I've been trying to write about dreaming for two weeks now.  I have several draft posts, and they just don't come out right.  So, I'm leaving the title, knowing all of this reality is a beautiful dream, and that somehow tonight I must have communicated something.  If it helps you or inspires you or causes you to reflect in any way then it is a worthwhile post.  I leave you in peace dear brothers and sisters, and go off to the kitchen to make some yummy cheese toast now.  Selam!

dervish abstraction 1...

Collaboration

Oh I am so lucky to have so many intense and beatific collaborators at the moment!  Just allow me to share the thrill of it all with you....

There is The Berlin Project.  Rosa, a former student of mine from Cambridge who is now living in Berlin, is organising and developing this one.  Rosa studied with me, taking everything I taught, for two years in Cambridge.  She performed with me in Circles of Light and was key in developing the Grief section. After she graduated she went on to study Butoh in South America and Japan, and is now working as a freelance artist and writer in the bohemian capital of Berlin.  Shaleigh, a phenomenal artist who worked and performed with me in "Body Stories", anchoring an authenticity to energetic and spiritual components within the piece, is joining us from North Carolina.  We are each rehearsing on our own, in studios and in our living rooms, and sending the footage to each other.  Rosa is guiding the explorations, giving us tasks, pushing our boundaries.  Our personal selves are embedded deeply in the rehearsal process and we are simply honest and real with each other and the material.  Our material derives from our recent journeys: Shaleigh to Israel, myself to Ecuador, and Rosa to Japan.  We are taking photographs and writings and embodied memories as beginning points from which to locate distance, temporality, and memory within ourselves.  We will use paper, photographic paper, ink, light, and nakedness to expand develop and disrupt the frames caused by photographs.  As bodies, we will re-inhabit the spaces we have been to, discovering the traces we have left there, and locating the traces these spaces have left within us.  We are all academic and articulate, and our process and performances promise to be rich sacred and deep.  Wouhaha!

at home

Then there is The Festival Piece.  Matt, a wonderful bright DJ and Musician in London, and James, a delightful Music Maker and Promoter also in London, are co-creating an event based in the fusion of technology and the sacred.  Matt and James are just opening up Abstract Studios for digital mixing and mastering in London, and it is so exciting for me to share the joyous clumsy flapping of my own takeoff with the beginnings of their adventures!  Inspired by and brining all of my most beloved forms of dance and play: whirling, belly, ecstatic, and performative, I am living integration and fusion through this piece.  I will have 10 dancers to work with, and we will just move and flow and flock together within the event space.  We will not be set apart on a stage, but will inhabit the masses of moving bodies around us, streaming with them and through them and they through us.  There will be moments of coordinated dance which are highly unified, and moments of free love in motion.  The event space here is reconceptualised as a space where we can all soar into the depths of ourselves side by side, practising ascension, embodying it, if only for a few hours.  What makes it different from other festival events is the intervention of the sacred.  Using traditional sacred music as a base and a frame, Matt and James will sample many other musics over under and top of these powerful sounds.  Techno beats and a pull toward the sublime will thread the moments of fusion together.  Spoken word and poetry will be looped as well, in part to educate concerning the traditions at hand and the sacred nature of them, and in part just for beauty.  We are working with chance and are developing story boards.  The stories which will develop on the night/s of the event are ever-changing, nonlinear, and spontaneous.  Following the crowd and the dance and the feeling of the moment, the boys will mix and play live, and who knows what can happen?  It is infinite, it is up to the sacredness of life to direct, and us to follow.  mmmmmmmmm.  

And then there is The Central St. Martins Project, which I am deeply implicated in.  According to Robin, the organiser and conceiver of the the project, I am the inspiration of the whole thing, and that's sort of a big weight to bear.  Yet I am bearing it joyfully, because it is so damn fun!  Robin is a professor at Cambridge whom I have been connected to for over a year now.  We met at a conference in Cambridge and found we had so much to talk about and so many intersections in our work, and events just seemed to pour out.  First Robin staged a night with dancers from across South England at Robinson College, and I shared an evening with a Kathak dancer from Oxford.  I whirled and spoke on Sufism and she danced from the Sufi tradition in India.  Then I organised and staged a symposium event centred on the performative last June, and Circles of Light was shown in its wonderfully re-concieved format in The Judith E Wilson Studios.  From this The Central St Martins Project has sprung.  Bringing together faculty and students from across the schools of drama and design at Central St Martins and the schools of Italian and English at Cambridge, we are all busy bees with lots and lots of small collaborations going on inside of the larger project umbrella.  We are all working with mystical experience in some form or another, seeking to push the boundaries of performance in every way we can, and drawing much inspiration from resulting discourse and rehearsal practices.  And Robin, taking flight in his own beautiful way, is travelling all over America right now lecturing on the  importance of performance and the performative for any depth of research in the humanities to come to fruition.  We will collectively stage a symposia in July and again in October, coordinating with The Festival of Ideas in London.  We will perform and present at both locations, Cambridge and London, in a variety of ways.
There are 3 major and other unforeseen minor collaborations within this project which are nurturing the process of my soul.  One is with Caroline B, head of textiles at CSM, and is the start of a much longer and far reaching collaboration that this project can contain.  We are making an enormous skirt meters and meters wide with many layers and methods of fastening and unfastening which is itself the performance.  I will "whirl" and we will play with light, directed focused light, and with what is not lit, and flutter and flight and weight and balance and proportion.  Caroline is a real diva, a total expert in her field, and I am humbled and delighted beyond belief to be collaborating with her!  Another one is with Jeremiah H, wacky and wonderful curator for The Judith E Wilson Studios at Cambridge.  Jeremy and I first worked together in the restaging of Circles of Light last year and found that we had a resonant and immediate understanding of each others working methods.  We are playing now with Butoh and text and multimedia/multidimensional performance processes in order to coalesce "the infinite" into some sort of shareable form.  We are honest and real with our bodies and ourselves and each other, and I feel that there is nothing we cannot do or explore or share within performance.  Like the project with Caroline, this collaboration will have ripples and waves and a life extending further from the presentation with CSM.  And finally there is my work with Jeremy T, a composer and musician here in Cambridge.  Jeremy is an exemplary musician of great skill and thought.  In his quiet way he is very open to radicalising processes, and we have begun working through skeleton structures.  We give ourselves a few parameters, put on some recording instruments, and play.  We talk to each other through the music and the dance, and it all gets recorded, and we return to it again and again, and never look at the tapes or listen to them either.  We have no idea what will be shaped, except that some portion of it will be shared with The CSM Project and a further development will be staged on its own in an evening replete with brilliant costumes, breakage of the fourth wall, fascinating acoustics and true mastery/breakage of our forms.

Beyond this there is even more....whirling for a Sufi musician from Turkey for a couple of concerts this summer, writing a children's book with my sister, reading and developing theoretical thought and an argument for my Phd, steady practices and ceremonies with the lovely lovely London dervishes, cycling forever in a week to get the kids to school and swimming lessons and play dates, and sleep.  The main discovery of the past week for me is that not only do I need sleep, I actually desire it.  I have never desired sleep before, but dreams are swiftly becoming a major part of my waking life.  I must needs dream, or I cease to be, and somehow, somehow, my dreams this year are intricately linked to my creative process...and this desire for sleep/dreams is intricately linked to the ayahuasca journey...it spirals together in a lucid state.  

I hope that this post is an inspiration and a joy to you, and that it does not come off in any way as gloating or self congratulatory.  Inspiration is divine!  All that fighting, sorrow, giddiness, newness, glory, expansion, cramps, pain, the leaving and the coming into, I desire to share it!  May that sweetness come through and through now, in writing, and also in the performative act of living the life which the universe has so thoughtfully and beautifully gifted to me in this breath.  

with fabric for The Festival Piece

To paraphrase one of my favourite quotes from Mevlana Rumi: "Dance when you are broken open, dance when you are in pain, dance with blood on your feet, dance when your bones have crumbled to the floor, dance, my darling dance, when you are perfectly free!"      ~In Endless Gratitude~

Bohemia

Jan 30th

We are back at Miras now.  There is a whole group of us visiting him at this moment!  We are from London, Prague, Bulgaria, Spain.  We are here for the medicine.  And the medicine, it is strong and sweet and powerful at once.  What a community!  We spend our days working on the house, managing laundry and children and cooking, and being in stillness.  We often take time for our practices.  For me, that is the mix of chi kung, deep stretch, ballet, hip hop, and contemporary I am currently enthralled with.  This week I hope to start whirling again, generating currents that will help bridge the space and peace of this place into my life in the UK.  We sometimes draw pictures, do beading, drink mate, dance silliness, or watch films screened on a canvas drawn tight between bamboo poles.  The men hike way up into the forest to gather baca (palm leaves) for the roof.  A couple of times the children and I have hiked part way, enjoying the canopy, and then come back when they are tired.  There is a waterfall I can see as I sit here and write, a beautiful cascade cutting through the hillside with curvilinear simplicity.  Here are some photos of the life.

Finji practising Tai Chi

Dushar tying up baca leaves

Hannah flowing with her Padmapani dance

Roman practising Sacred Geometry

Here we dream the visions for our lives.  Staying anywhere from  one to three months, we return with new dreams, dreams free of the ego.  We return as servants to divinity, to live our lives alongside jaguar, serpent, eagle, and condor.  Roman and Snowflake have decided to move here and are looking for land.  Centres and more centres of peace and love and fire, connected internationally, in a family kind of way. 

life is beautiful!

Friendship is a beautiful thing, may it grow in beauty for all time.  *love*

Changing Woman

Changing Woman appears in many of the North American Tribal Pantheons but most prominently in the Navajo and Apache.  In the Navajo she created the four original clans of the Dine Nation and taught the people how to live in harmony and beauty.  She is born of the meeting of dark and dawn, is impregnated by water and sunlight, and gives birth to the warrior twins.  She does not need a husband and creates the people by simply rubbing her skin into little balls which are mixed with white shell. She lives in halls made of turquoise in the west and the east, and is akin to Amaterasu, who lives in a palace of jade.  In Apache lore she is honoured through extensive puberty rites lasting up to four days, and can be seen as the sacramental keeper of hormonal stages and birthing mysteries.  

I have walked with her myself on many occasions, and I love her dearly. In my experience of her she is a young woman in her first feathers and earrings in the east, moves into maturity and encounters her transformative powers in the south, bears fruit and then becomes old in the west, and dissolves into wind in the north.  She sometimes has a white dog at her side who walks with me and her songs blow softly past my ears with the lilt of pollen in the wind.  In 1999 I co-created a dance for her with my dear friend Lawrence.  An apron of turquoise draped across my body and a sash of gold hung across the top of the stage.  I walked with tiny graceful steps a path of spirals, I met my animal helpers through her, and I was simply vulnerable and real on the stage set, giving birth, struggling, encountering the duality of humanity in my twins. Because of her connection to white shell and the seas of the east and west I used an abalone shell for burning sage.

Many women love and venerate her, paintings, sculptures, and songs abound in her honour, and my daughter is named after her: Aurora, goddess of the dawn.

"After some period of time a child was heard crying for four days. First Man succeeded in finding a mysterious baby girl.  Below her stretched a Dawn Cord from the east and from the south a Sky Blue Cord, from the west a Twilight Cord and from the north a Cord of Turquoise.  The child was rocking on Dawn and Turquoise Rainbows, supported by these cords. First Man recognized that Darkness was her mother and Dawn her father, and when he took her in his arms he found a small White Wind in her right and a small Dark Wind in her left ear, placed there by her parents.  She was Changing Woman." From Changing Woman and Her Sisters by Sheila Moon, 1984.  

I love her.

Natural Art

"All art is but imitation of nature." Lucius Annaeus Seneca

sand formations: Andy Goldsworthy

The spontaneous organizations of nature are powerful and emotive, far more emotive to the human soul than the finest products from any culture house.  I believe this.  The true elegance of nature is something I know and observe within my bones, however, I would like to challenge its relationship to art. The above quote, from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, true to a large extent, is also simplified, and I would like to raise two important points which open his perspective.

Firstly we as humans are obsessed with our own humanity (myself included). Blogs and personal pages proliferate on the web, and the personal memior has become a rite of passage. We are the generations of extreme navel gazing, and yet, I do not view this in itself as a bad thing.  Carl Rogers, psychologist, explains this natural drive toward wholeness as an actualizing tendency.  Mevlana Rumi writes, “without your even knowing Allah put this longing in your heart.”  Maude, in the wonderful film Harold and Maude, speaks of a playful yet constant interest in “my species”.  And - the main commandment of the Delphic Oracle stands eternally as “know thyself”.  We have, however, used this interest for centuries to place ourselves at the top eschalon of an otherwise symbiotic earth, and to confine oursevles within ever tightening layers of stratification and hierarchy.  Our collective self knowledge has been turned to baseless purposes which degrade us, and now our earth, and her natural elegant arts, are in peril.

In my opinion, one of the main reasons for artistic presentation and re-presentation to have a place within humanity is to provide a way of looking at, questioning, and relieving tension from social structures which seek to train our longing, our drive toward wholeness, our innate self-interest into conformist images and agendas.  The power of art to question and disrupt authority has been known and used throught our dark ages, (Shakespear was a prime example, the forest theatres of the soviet republic, and the butoh movement of the 1960's-just to mention a few) and it is vital that we contine to utilize performative power towards evolutionary purposes.  At this moment in our human story, to open ourselves beyond elegeant imitation of nature is also to open ourselves beyond imitation of what we have come to call normal, or civilized life.  The arts are fundamentally important to our future, for they open our internal creative pathways, they are our way back to our wilderness.

fragments create a new spiral: Andy Goldsworthy

Secondly, the semantics of imitation vs. working with are vital to the discussion.  If we, as artists, seek only to reflect and to imitate, whether nature or social structures, then we are foregoing our abilities for creation, we are dampening the spirit of sharing which is a spark of life within us. Further, while we learn vital information from imitating nature, such as which plants to eat and how to shelter ourselves in winter, we are also responsible for bringing the human element which is us to natures doorstep in sharing. The responsible artist and the responsible gardener are not so different!  I would call responsible sharing stewardship, and it is a call to stewardship which presses me to write these thoughts today.  

There is no wilderness which living beings have not touched.  For all of our efforts at creating national parks or saving the amazon, we will leave a trace,  we will make an impact.  So let our trace be one of conscious co-creation.  I would one day like to see the slogan, All art is but a service of stewardship to the nature within and around us, painted on a banner, pasted on a bumper sticker, written into the lines of policy makers and funding bodies whom artists (and the public) rely on. 

stick reflections: Andy Goldsworthy

In our times of transition the arts provide a powerful tool for opening us to the true nature of ourselves, the land which nourishes us, and each other. Through questioning, performance, sharing, and honouring, we can create new establishments more in line with the co-creative tendencies now ever emergent.