Dancing Transcendence

I’m once again at one of those points in my life of re-evaluating my relationship to dance.  I’ve come to expect these mini-crises as I expect their existential counterparts, a periodic wrestling with growth and despair before lurching off once more in some vaguely unforeseen direction.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this has been a life-long tussle.  From the little girl who was told “you mustn’t dance; it will give you ugly feet and fat thighs”, to the teenager who was considered far too clever even to contemplate such an idiocy as dancing, to the adult who could never make ends meet doing it, not to mention all the assumptions of what a dancer is, what she looks like, how she moves (none of which I fulfil), I have yet to reconcile the pull dance exerts on me with the practical realities of survival.  This is ironic, because if I’m really honest, some part of me has always felt that if dance isn’t some part of my life, somewhere, I probably won’t survive at all.  More to the point, whenever in periodic despair I’ve made the attempt to give it up, to do something “sensible” instead, I’ve been inexorably drawn back to work, art, learning through the medium of my fragile, broken and infinitely resilient and wise body.

Even my dance training happened by default.  By the time I had completed my various degrees, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, I found myself at the Laban Centre (as it was then called), not to train as a dancer but, as I thought, to hone my physical skills so I could transfer them to my theatre practice.  I’d survived ritual humiliation in ballet classes as an adolescent, which had quite convinced me that, however much I longed to, mine was not a body to dance.  So physical theatre it was to be.   Plus, in the uber-competitive world of beautiful dancers, it was just easier, infinitely less painful, to take myself out of the running altogether.

Somehow, despite all this, while I was at Laban, I found that, like it or not, I am a dancer.  In the years since, I’ve realised that it’s a bit like having dark hair or hazel eyes – not something chosen but something that is.

I have often credited the fact that I kept dancing after further ritual humiliation at Laban (the dance world is full of this – for me, at any rate), to my encounter in my last term there with a very charismatic dancer called Laurie Booth.  He was teaching a class called “repertory”, which basically meant a choreographer came in and made a piece on the group in the allotted three hours a week, which we then performed at the end of term.  It was sheer luck I ended up in this class at all, initially certain I couldn’t possible be good enough even to contemplate “rep”.  A dear friend and classmate convinced me otherwise.

Her encouragement notwithstanding, I definitely felt like the poor relation during my first term of rep, the phalanx of technically adept, hyper-competitive German girls in the class looking on at me in a bemused combination of pity and contempt.  This shifted when Laurie came to work with us, and suddenly the martial arts that underpinned his dance were techniques that I assimilated more easily than many of my beautifully-arabesqued peers (to their visible shock).

I think there were two factors in Laurie’s work that convinced me that there was no point hiding from the fact that I’m a dancer.  The first was his insistence that we take responsibility for our work, as dance-artists, and just get on with it.  This was the first time I’d encountered genuine improvisation in performance, the first time I’d encountered improvisation that wasn’t a choreographic tool or an excuse for not doing any work.  There was no room to wonder whether I was good enough, whether I was really a dancer, whether I was just pretending; the work required me to be there and be there fully and if the undermining mental chatter was still dancing around my head, well let it.  It could dance all it liked; I was simply not to heed it.  In this way, I first discovered the relationship between dance and meditation practice. 

Such an attitude to dance practice feels second nature now.  I can’t emphasise enough that it was completely revolutionary to me at the time and shook up all my assumptions of my right to inadequacy.

 

The second factor was Laurie introducing us to Contact Improvisation.

I still find it virtually impossible to define Contact Improvisation (often abbreviated to CI) and usually end up tying myself in knots trying to do so.  Here’s a definition Curt Siddall gave in 1975:

Contact improvisation is a movement form, improvisational by nature, involving two bodies in contact, Impulses, weight and momentum are communicated through a point of physical contact that continually rolls across and around the bodies of the dancers…

Of course, that could mean virtually anything, and technically, CI can look like virtually anything. 

On safer ground, I can tell you quite easily that CI was created in 1972 by a dancer called Steve Paxton who had danced for Merce Cunningham and was influenced/inspired by the compositional techniques of the composer John Cage.  It played its part in the creation of what became know as postmodern dance and in its early days, someone called it an “art sport”, which I still rather like as a definition.

Laurie had been taught Contact by Steve (Paxton) at Dartington in the seventies, and although I’m sure he had his own take and preferences colouring what he taught us, what we learned felt very much in tune with what I then studied with Steve a few months later (Steve being my second experience of Contact Improvisation, lucky me).  We learned to cultivate the presence and awareness required by the “small dance” (an essentially meditative practice that demands absolute attention to the tiniest shifts of the body in all its subtlety of standing upright); we practised the various puzzles and rolls Steve has since developed into what he now teaches as “Material for the Spine”; we practised giving, taking, sharing weight and the task-based nature of this.  I particularly remember the admonishment not to “use your partner’s body as a vehicle for your own ego”.

I was struck, in those early days, by the inescapable fact (for me) that whatever was blocking me mentally, emotionally (spiritually?) would manifest as a physical reality in my dancing that demanded to be addressed.

This was roughly the same time I was beginning to develop a more sophisticated understanding of my yoga practice, though it would be a long time before I found a path for this.  Looking back, I now know that what I practised alone as a child in the living room when no one was about, was a sort of instinctive asana (yoga posture) exploration.  I had an intuitive understanding of the body connecting to and channelling something more subtle than its physical reality, if worked in certain ways.

The body is a device to calculate
the astronomy of the spirit.
Look through that astrolabe
and become oceanic.

wrote Rumi, that early Sufi, credited with instigating the danced spiritual practice of turning, whirling.

Somewhere, under all the rationalism of my academic attainments, I carried an instinctive sense that my body is my lived map to the “astronomy of the spirit”.  During my dance training, through the daily work on spinal alignment and the beginnings of an understanding of the relationship between this alignment and the inescapable force of gravity, profound shifts took place in me.  One friend at the time commented “your body has changed shape!” and by that she didn’t mean that I had become stockier or thinner or more toned.

But whatever I looked like, the real shift was not externally visible.  Quite inexplicably to my sense of rational logic of the time, I started to feel currents of energy, as clear and fresh as flowing water, moving through my spine, out the crown of my head, through what felt like glowing coins in the palms of my hands and soles of my feet, tangible and real as the sensation of my weight shifting over the bones of my spreading feet against the floor.  I’d never heard of “reiki” or energy healing before I experienced it as a tangible danced reality in a choreography class.  Call it “prana” or “chi” or “energy” or whatever you fancy, it was unquestionably real to me, as was the increase in so-called “intuitive” senses, which, under appropriately focussed circumstances, allow us to sense space and navigate unharmed through the speed and apparent chaos of bodies hurtling through it.

Of course, this is how it works on the good days, on the best days, and there were plenty of days in between where I struggled to find these connections and bumped and jarred myself and wondered what on earth I thought I was doing.  But what kept me coming back to Contact Improvisation in those early years was that I most often had these heightened experiences of connection when dancing Contact.  So over the last decade and a half (or so), it became the cornerstone of both my dance and teaching practice.

When I was about to depart on my travels in October 2009, I had reached one of those points where I thought it might be time to let the dancing go, no doubt brought about by the seemingly unbreakable relationship for me between the UK and the sensation of banging my head against a wall.  I would travel, meditate, study, do my marine conservation, and maybe, just maybe, if it came up, I might do a bit of dance teaching, but only as a way to re-connect with past friends. 

I am not the first person to observe that India has a mind and logic all her own.  And India had other ideas.

Suddenly I was more solidly a dancer than I had felt in years of half-apologising for my insistence in Britain.  My calling and my identity were quite clear to me (and what a relief that was). 

Some people expressed bemusement that I, supposedly a yogi, was in India dancing (and ok, meditating) rather than studying asana.  In this I should probably clarify that my dance and yoga practice don’t feel separate to me, but rather twines of the same rope.  I have often said that I more regularly encounter and work with the conundrums of yoga philosophy and meditation when dancing than I do in asana (which feels like it serves a completely different purpose to me – but I won’t get into that now).

As a re-introduction to dance in Europe, I thought, last August, on my way back to that continent after nearly a year away, that I would try the Ibiza Contact Festival.

Well, there was a faith-shaker.

Then, in January this year, I went to dance with Nancy Stark Smith and her partner, Mike Vargas, for the three weeks of her “continuing” workshop at Earthdance in Massachusetts in the U.S (the pictures in this entry were all taken in and around Earthdance at that time).  Nancy is one of the dancers Steve made Contact Improvisation on, and I have long held her as a role-model (I’m not sure what she’d make of that).  Among many other things, Nancy is the author of “the UnderScore”, a subtle dance between prescribing and describing the possibilities of a jam (a jam is an open improvisation, much as most people might associate the term with what jazz musicians are thought to do).  UnderScores, usually between two and three hours long, have provided the containers of some of my most profound dance experiences.

Some of the UnderScore

Silent Day Schedule

Here is some of what I wrote for myself after the workshop ended:

As always, it was a pleasure and a privilege to study with Nancy.  I have long felt that I carry her work in mine, frequently stuttering and incomplete and confused, but nonetheless carried with great gratitude and love.  With this third period of study with her, I have more fully realised (or perhaps articulated to myself) how affirming and inspirational a model of artistic and human practice Nancy is to me.

I said to Mike that I appreciate his input more each time I meet him.  This is true.  Mike’s insights and thoughts are very much with me as I attempt to digest our three weeks of work.  His music always fills and holds and empties the space for me in a way I can’t articulate but find a profoundly supportive dialogue with the dance.

Our last Thursday together, Nancy held a discussion period over lunch.  I remember saying that I was coming more and more frequently to a place of wondering whether I should be doing this work at all, wondering whether there is a place for me in it.  This isn’t for a lack of love or interest or questions in it, but mostly due to the fact that I feel the gravity of the “contact improvisation community” has moved to a place I find neither interesting nor (personally) healthy.

Almost immediately after this discussion, I read Daniel Lepkoff’s article in the latest edition of Contact Quarterly (“Contact Improvisation: A Question”).  It came timely into my mini existential crisis.  I found it affirming and reassuring that at least somebody (and somebody with a lot more experience and knowledge than me; Daniel Lepkoff is another of the original CI dancers from the early seventies) seems to be interested in the same starting point for Contact Improvisation (of the many possible) as I am.

Below are some extracts that resonated with me.  (The bold lettering is my own highlighting.)

My understanding of the original intention of Contact Improvisation as an art event was to display to the public the body’s innate ability to respond physically to its environment.  Implied is an interest in the diversity of people’s survival strategies and an indication that this spontaneous physical material can be viewed as danced composition…

…The underlying technique needed to prepare for and survive the surprises of a Contact Improvisation duet is to pose and maintain a question…  The idea that a question can be the definition of a movement form is sophisticated.  The dominant association triggered by the word form is perhaps the idea of the shape of a physical object.  In the case of Contact Improvisation, however, the word form refers to synaptic architecture…  What is commonly referred to as the “duet form” has no knowable outer form…

…Some of the developments and directions the work has taken have not aligned with my own understanding of its essence.  Does the name name what I think it is or does it name something else?!...

…Almost four decades later, with more distance, I’ve decided to decide that however much Contact Improvisation is codified, presented as a collection of 562 techniques, made to be entertaining, dressed to be pretty or graceful, shaped to be therapeutic, practiced in rooms filled with social interaction and conversation, used as a basis for building a community – ultimately, its initial stance of empowering individuals to rely on their own physical intelligence, to meet their moment with senses open and perceptions stretching, and to compose their own response remains intact.

SOMATIC ENJOYMENT AND PHYSICS

…I think that a little bit of a problem arises for me when the resulting intimacy or feeling of aliveness or of connection with partners becomes the point, rather than the result…       (Nancy Stark Smith)

It seems to me that for a proportion of practitioners of CI, somatic and interpersonal enjoyment are the chief motivations in the dancing.  I am finding this increasingly problematic and increasingly distant from my own interests.

It is not that I do not enjoy the pleasure of release or touch or weight-sharing.  I was reflecting recently that I have been missing more focussed, slow, weight-bearing engagement with a partner, and that sometimes, being given specific tasks can temporarily remove my responsibility and a lot of the mental chatter that goes with it, and allows me to find a deeper connection to myself, the earth and my partner which later feeds adventurous, physical dancing supported by genuine listening.  I have been reflecting that this is an element I wish to re-focus into my practice.

An important aspect to this kind of somatic sharing for me is that it is “transpersonal” (to quote Nancy).  We are not engaging in this physical practice because we wish to sleep together or to chat as best friends.  We have no need to talk at all (and generally, I find such work much more satisfying if we don’t).  The interest for me in such somatic explorations is that they function beneath the layer of personality.

This is very different to what I saw at the CI festival I attended in Ibiza last summer, and what I saw in some participants of this January’s workshop.  At Earthdance, a few of us joked that for certain kinds of dancer, there are only two kinds of dance: the patterns of lifting dance (which requires both partners to know and wish to engage in these predetermined patterns) and the rolling around the floor hugging dance (which again, seems to require only specific partners).  Both these forms seem distinctly personal and often extremely hormonal – and frankly, not very interesting.  What I also observe is that these behaviours have a huge impact on the people and space around them; they generally seem to take over.  What I witnessed at Ibiza was a significant minority involved in these patterns and a small majority either trying (and failing) to be part of them, confused, or trying (with varying degrees of success) to forge their own dancing in the face of what some only half-jokingly referred to as a “hippy love-fest”.

The argument is usually posited that the “contact community” is large and varied and that there is space for everybody within it to pursue his or her interests.  This sometimes seems to me to be an excuse not to take responsibility for our behaviour.  It also fails to address how this wider “community” reflects on any of us who goes out into the world working under the label of Contact Improvisation.

In Ibiza last summer, about 120 dancers met with varying degrees of pleasure and success.  Regardless of our experiences, a significant minority of the dancers involved were either from Ibiza or further afield in Spain, and most of us belonged to a culture that was either European or American, hence broadly sharing the culture of our hosts.  Recently, via Facebook, I was sent a flyer for a somatic dance festival in Goa (India).  The flyer featured two gloriously fair Scandinavian-looking people.  I posted a comment on my Facebook page, to the effect that I wondered where the brown Indian somatic skins were.  Immediately, I got a comment back from a friend, saying he had similar thoughts when seeing pictures from the Goa Contact Festival (almost no brown skins visible).

I feel hesitant here, because I don’t particularly wish to take high moral ground and bang a drum on this undoubtedly complex issue.  However, I grew up in a post-colonial country where white Western enclaves went about their business and their pleasure in comfortable compounds, surrounded by the rest of Africa going about her generally much less comfortable business.  The two seldom met.

It disturbs me that in parts of the wider “contact community” we are effectively following a neo-colonial model, justified, it seems to me, by the same self-involvement that allows some dancers to follow their somatic preferences above any other consideration.  If we consider ourselves artists (which most of us claim to), then it seems to me that we have a duty and responsibility to remove our heads from our navels long enough to take into account how our artistic activity impacts on the world around us.  Perhaps this definition of an artist as someone who reflects back to the world s/he inhabits is an old-fashioned one, but if we don’t follow some broad interpretation of this, I don’t see how we can expect the world we inhabit to support or nurture our artistic activity.

I know there are Indian dancers who are interested in Contact Improvisation.  I know because I have taught or danced with quite a few of them.  I have found myself in the awkward position of having to explain or defend what they see as the narcissistic hedonism that occurs in such Western-dominated events as the Goa Contact Festival.  It’s a position I find awkward because in part, I share their reservations.  I have not been to Goa and so perhaps these accusations are unjustified.  However, it disturbs me that Contact Improvisation as a whole is in danger of being defined in this way by people who are actually very sympathetic to its practice as danced physics.  

…I can imagine that people who are not in that social group are not interested in becoming cuddly with people they don’t know – why would they?  But I’d say that if you go the other way, where you present it quite neutrally as just a physical phenomenon, as something to do or experience, a physical conversation, that many more people are right there for it…                                                 (Nancy Stark Smith)

Which is absolutely my experience.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m saying here with regard to some of the most publicly visible branches of the “contact community”, other than I am uncomfortable at what I see as a hypocrisy: a hypocrisy in which people proclaim their dance as open and welcoming to all when it is increasingly exclusive in practice, on all sorts of levels.  In my head, I hear Nancy talk of our different values.  The problem for me is that some people’s values seem to have drowned out others.

I suppose that another discomfort is that the CI I thought I was taught and the CI I teach is not what I or any of my students seem to encounter when we move into the wider fora of such festivals.  Hence arises my question as to whether there is a place for me and my interests.  Perhaps I need to be more assertive, but frankly, that’s not where I’m wishful to spend my energy.

So one solution is no longer to take part in the sorts of festivals or gatherings with this focus of personal relationship and somatic indulgence.  One of the difficulties with this choice is that it is hard to know that this will be the theme until you get to such a festival, because they usually advertise themselves as focussing on the dancing.  My other (and far more pressing) question is: where do I go?  Where do I go to find the kind of dancing, the kind of training that empowers “individuals to rely on their own physical intelligence, to meet their moment with senses open and perceptions stretching, and to compose their own response” (to quote Daniel Lepkoff)?

Certainly I try to foster this when I teach, but my own skills are limited.  I want to be stretched, to be challenged (in a way that isn’t just about dealing with the unpleasantness of difficult inter-personal relationships), to be challenged physically, from the gross acrobatic to the subtle synaptic.  How do I find this?

I have found in recent years that the interpersonal dynamics have swallowed such a proportion of my attention that my physical skills have actually regressed.  Certainly other skills have improved. I am far happier soloing now than I have ever been.  But I don’t come to dance Contact to spend most of my time in solo.  I can do that all by myself without forking out a festival or workshop fee.  I feel like my basic skill of managing weight (mine and others) has deteriorated significantly and I haven’t yet figured out how to remedy this, or where to find concentrated dance practice that is about Steve’s physics and not the “gland game”.

Sometimes I think it must be all down to me and my terrible interpersonal skills.  Then I reflect that I have been all round the world for extensive periods alone, during which time I have taught, made and studied dance with people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds.  I am happy to take responsibility for my reactions, but on balance, it feels disingenuous to lay the blame for my frustrating experiences solely at the door of poor interpersonal skills.

U/DYSTOPIA

…there was a prioritising of the work and of the discipline of the work, and we were encouraged not to bring the socializing or the teasing or the so-called “gland-game”, as Steve called it, into the dancing… And Steve’s attention and therefore most of ours most of the time was focused on the physical phenomena of the form.             (Nancy Stark Smith)

Reading back through my notes, I am struck by Nancy’s remark that there is a “utopian” sense to some workshops.

I have rarely felt any sense of utopia within dance workshops.  Perhaps this is a question of semantics (perhaps Thomas Moore’s work inaugurating that term is too present with me from the first year tussles of my English degree).  I have felt stimulated, inspired, exhilarated, connected, elevated, transported (the list goes on) but this has always come with a certain challenge that at its best makes the experience (for me) an expansive and rigorous working environment rather than a utopia.  Fundamentally, while I enjoy making personal connections and friendships with co-participants, I am primarily interested in a workshop as a serious artistic enquiry.  I am not interested in it as a forum for personal development (for which I would seek counselling or other appropriate channels).  That the work may touch on personal matters is inevitable when we are dealing so completely with the physical body (and indeed, the fact that this work resonated with so many other aspects of my wider Self was a strong factor in what drew me to it in the first place).  But, for me, the appropriate place to further investigate and develop any personal issues that may arise is not on a dance floor which is supposed to be hosting an investigation into artistic practice.

Perhaps my apparently unfashionable attitude comes from my training and teaching in theatre, where the accepted etiquette was to leave your baggage at the door and enter the studio ready to work.  However, looking back over Nancy’s words, it seems that Steve Paxton shared this preference in the early years of CI’s development.

I left Ibiza to stay with a friend (a physical theatre practitioner) in Valencia.  When I recounted my experiences to her, her strongly-accented response colourfully (and probably more honestly) reflected my own reaction:

“I hate it when people use the work like therapy!  I’m not interested!  If that’s what you need, pay a f****** psychologist!  Just don’t make the rest of us sit through it when we are trying to work!”  

The dorm building at Earthdance

GENEROSITY

I’ve been contemplating the definition of generosity Mike gave us as that which is given “expecting nothing in return, not even acknowledgment”.  In some nebulous realm I can’t quite navigate, this feels like a key I can’t quite grasp.  My question in the face of this demand (from myself? because some of my life is only bearable, manageable, if I can be generous in this way?) has been: how do I resource such a generosity?  How do I give in this unconditional way and yet remain whole, undiminished?

Nearly all human interaction is transactional: I give you this attention and you return it in this manner; you give me goodwill or time or support or love and I return it by my investment in our relationship somehow, somewhere along our timeline.  Where and how do we give when we genuinely expect nothing in return?

This question has been all the more vivid to me because of my frequent confrontations with my own sense of depletion.  I remember a turning point when I was seventeen; I realised, when trying to meet something I no longer could, that my energy, my stamina, my attention, my very will had been exhausted in the struggle of surviving what had gone before. There were no renewable resources left, and very few of the finite variety either.  Where could I find the energy, the support, the generosity that brought my lost virtuosity into being?  Twenty years later, I still haven’t answered that question.

During an early underscore with Mike, soon after he mentioned this idea of generosity, I noticed one of the trees outside.  I can’t remember which of the windows I was looking out, but I remember the tree, winter-dark and bare.  It occurred to me then that the tree held an answer.  I derided myself for an unspecific hippy but then I corrected myself.  The tree continues to give, even in death and decay.  The tree gives (oxygen, wood, nutrition to the soil, fossil fuels) because of what it is.  Being a tree, it can do no other.  It gives by virtue of what it is, not by virtue of what it does.  Or rather, it does by virtue of what it is. 

I feel like I am beginning to touch an answer here, unformed, incomplete: that it is not through a focus on acting but through a focus on being that I can be truly generous (with myself or anyone else), as though somehow, the more fully I can be, the more generously I can do.

My most developed practice of being lies in meditation, which has many connections with dance.

I think back to my time in Rishikesh, sitting on the classroom floor of the Dayananda Ashram, Swami Aparoksananda sitting before us, explaining in his musical poetry the mysteries of the Kathopanisad.  “Everything is Brahman.  And the nature of Brahman is saccidananda: pure being, pure consciousness, pure bliss.  We are by nature full of bliss.”  His cadences fall on and emphasise the “full”.

Our task is simply to uncover this essential nature of reality.

I feel very far from this resource, but I also feel that I have touched on the only way I know so far to cultivate it.

VALUES:

Relative values were on the agenda for a few of our discussions.  On reflection, here are some of mine:

·         Cutting through comforting self-delusion

·         Honesty

·         Rigour

·         Physical virtuosity – of all and varied sorts (and that a choice is not pedestrian simply because the dancer has no other vocabulary available to him/her)

·         Courage

·         Kindness

·         Expansion beyond the preferences, interests, limits of the self to encompass something greater

·         Enquiry (philosophical and physical)

·         Intuition – “Is working with intuition also working with when I have no sense of it? and if I allow that, it seems to re-emerge…” (from my notes, day 3 when my secret aspect for the afternoon  – of Mike’s 86 Aspects of Composition – was intuition)

·         The support and influence of alternative body/mind/spirit practices

I often feel my tastes and interests veer to a less fashionable ascetic / monastic / puritanical pursuit – that any pleasure experienced (and it can be profound) comes as a result of the work rather than as its focus.  I suppose, fundamentally, it feels narcissistic and limited to me to devote my time and energy to something that has no greater goal than enjoyment.

This ties in very neatly with a lot of my yoga practice, both scripturally (there’s the famous verse in the Bhagavad Gita: “Your right is for action alone, never for the results”… but that’s a whole other thesis) and in its practice.  I suppose that it is no coincidence that the focus of my yoga practice is connection, expansion of my Self, transcendence. 

Fundamentally, I have to admit (to myself as much as to anyone) that I am looking for my dance and artistic practice to assist this transcending (both mine and others’), and in this I echo some of Nancy’s thoughts on her “States of Grace” and Mike’s wish “to model and manifest transcendence”.

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I feel that I have mentioned dance and Contact Improvisation so often through the course of this blog in passing, that it was time I gave it an entry all of its own.  Many (most?) of you, dear readers, are not dancers and this is a subject which perplexes and divides people who practise it, let alone anyone who chooses to devote his or her time and energy to other pursuits.

I’m not sure I have clarified anything for anyone, least of all myself.  I am yet again at one of my impasses, wondering how to continue, in all ways, and more to the point perhaps, where to continue.

Some time at the beginning of Nancy’s workshop last January, we sat in a circle in the circle of Earthdance’s round dance barn, the windows all around us framing the snow-filled vistas of the bone-deep cold of a North American winter.  Everyone was asked to state an intention or a wish.  Mike Vargas’s was “to model and manifest transcendence”.  I remember feeling slightly shocked.  Such a wish felt too ambitious even to dare to articulate.

So I’m grateful Mike is more courageous than I am.

I have been reflecting a lot on what he said since.  In reality, Mike’s wish differs very little from the core of my own wish and intention in my yoga practice (which ok, while we’re being honest about these things, is to know and fully experience myself as divine consciousness – and if that isn’t transcendence, then what is?).  And I have said all along that my yoga and dance practice go hand in hand.  Perhaps it’s time to start acknowledging and naming things for what they are.  How else are we ever supposed to manifest them?  And perhaps the dancing has served its purpose in my journey in this.  Perhaps that’s what the unsustainability is telling me.  Perhaps…   But somehow I doubt it.

Next week, I am going to Plymouth to take part in an improvisation workshop with Kirstie Simson (another early CI practitioner and great inspiration) and Adam Benjamin (co-founder of Candoco, among many other things).  The question I go with is whether this is my swansong.  I wonder…  But I can’t quite believe it.

At the beginning of July, I’ll be taking part in the first Welsh Dance Platform in Cardiff.  I’ll be shortening and re-working La Blanche, my solo from Bangalore (if I can ever manage to find affordable rehearsal space in Swansea) and I am enjoying collaborating with Jane Hosgood, aikido sensei and film-maker, on a short film.  It’s scheduled to be screened the same day as I perform my solo and its working title is There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.

After that, I have no idea – though I feel a tidal push, urging me far, far away.  Maybe it’s time, once and for all, to stop banging my head against walls.

How, is the question…

Wishing you answers to all your questions and sending love, love, love,

Lucy xx

Moving Movies

It has been a mission of mine for some time to join the world of the twenty-first century arts professional and get some of my work onto the internet.

This sounds very simple but implementing it took many months (if not years).  It involved such minor quandaries as getting ten year old video footage onto DVD, and then converting that into something a programme could edit.  There was the small matter of more DVD footage travelling from south India to California to find me, and then completing its circumnavigation of the globe until further conversion and the lending of a computer (from Switzerland) that could actually do the editing (thank you, thank you, thank you Simone) was possible.

There were more logistical conundrums, but you get the drift.  Just because I was bored silly by them doesn’t mean you should be too.

The inherent frustrations came to a computer-hazed apotheosis last week, semi-sleepless, reducing me to a state last experienced during the self-inflicted essay-crises of undergraduate days.  I’m not sure the results bear fitting testament to this struggle.  Dance never films quite as I would like, not unless it’s been specifically designed for it.  And film is not my medium of expertise.  In the end, it felt more important to get the thing done at all than to worry too much over any intrinsic artistic merit.

So here we are.

I find it pleasingly appropriate that each of the three films comes from one of three different continents.

This first is called On Your Island Does the Night Fall Later? (The title comes from a poem by John Berger.)  It’s some straightforward footage of a performance in Cape Town in September 2001, performed by Malcolm Black and Nicola Visser.

Next come some excerpts from the group piece I made on six dancers in Bangalore just over a year ago.  It was very much a work in progress, lots of new ways of working for all involved.  I called it The Spaces Between and it is performed by Nayana Bhat, Pia Bunglowala, Charan C. S., Marjory Dupres, Sowmya Jaganmurthy and Vibhinna Ramdev.

And finally, the solo, La Blanche, I performed on the same evening.  I am still mulling over it and considering ways to re-work it.  My long-suffering brother accompanied me to one of the beaches around Swansea one morning last autumn to film some ideas from it.  The movement material isn’t quite what I would like, but some of the themes are probably clear…

 Or if you prefer, here is the link to their home on my Youtube channel.  

More words and stories will follow soon, probably also on dance, as that has been the theme of the year so far.

from Lucy, with love x

Further Lessons in Gratitude

I have been silent for some months, though not for lack of wandering around, caught in the midst of routine tasks, mentally composing far more eloquent blogs than I will every write.  I am sitting here on the first floor of Swansea’s Central Library (in what used to be called County Hall), snatching the only hours of calm and relative quiet I seem to have managed over the last few weeks.

It is Christmas Eve and most people are either at their last morning of work before the holiday break or sensibly at home.  I am sitting at my favourite table (unusually, no one else is here to nab it) at the huge picture windows overlooking Swansea Bay.  The tide is high (I am told we have the second biggest tides in the world here, surprising for such an unknown little corner) and the small hill below the window is covered in snow.  All the white shines the sea a rare blue.  The water here is frequently dark and mysterious but rarely displays the lapis and aquamarine hues of postcards.  Today we have them, the end of the sunrise faintly pink in the sky above, the sea shining jewel-rich under the low winter sun.  I’m not sure the man walking by, rubbing his hands against the cold, is noticing these beauties, his dog trotting behind sinking in her pawprints.  A few evergreens remind me that there are other colours in this world than white and blue and I am almost shocked to see the green of the grass patches underneath them, shocked that anything can have escaped the snow.

We have had the sort of snow I have never seen in this country before.  Instead of melting almost as soon as it hits the ground, it has lingered and built for a week now, so the landscapes and streetscenes look more what I imagine of Scandinavia or North America (though I believe they clear their streets rather better).

Here is the view from my table at the library a couple of weeks ago, before the snows came.  It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was setting.

So this library is the first object of my gratitude, a (frequently not-so-silent) haven where I have been able to work and write – though judging from my blog output, not nearly as often as I would like.

It was strange and difficult coming back to the UK, as I knew it would be.  Though of course, knowing something and experiencing it are not the same thing.

I had come back to Europe via Spain (more on that jewel of a county another time) and as I walked around the airport in Madrid, trying to find some sign of my flight as it mysteriously disappeared from all the billboards, a voice rang in my head, over and over:

I am with you.  I am with you.  I am with you…

I am grateful for the reminder, because what was to come was not easy.

It was good and strange to see old friends in London, in the few days I passed through.  I had missed them and miss them still, but, with most of them, witnessing their rush and their worry and their struggle to hold things together in that city… well, I do not miss that.

I came to Wales, to Swansea, Abertawe, to give its Welsh name (which means something like “on the mouth of the river Tawe”), to stay at my grandmother’s house, in a way and for a period of time I have not done in memory.  My brother was here too until recently and it was a novelty to me, who has not lived with my family for more than a few weeks here or there since I was fourteen years old.  The boxroom I am in is full, the furniture in it full of things that are not mine and the bags and boxes around it largely full of things that are.  My clothes are still in suitcases, my papers still in bags, there is not enough floor space for even a very simple yoga practice.  Initially I found it very claustrophobic.  I walked by the sea, I found the library and with a little time I (mostly) swapped distress for acceptance.  There is just enough space on the floor of my room to lay two blocks and kneel and meditate, furniture and boxes and bags brushing me all around.  I don’t do this as often as I would like, but I do it.

Swansea is one of those unfortunate towns that was bombed to bits in the Second World War and put back up in fantastically cheap and ugly haste after it.  Efforts have been made to beautify it in more recent years, but the town is still nothing to write home about.  The countryside around it however is quite special, the Gower coast designated Britain’s first area of outstanding natural beauty some time in the fifties. 

Rhossili Bay

Moonrise over Swansea Bay on an autumn walk

On my walks, I occasionally thought to myself how glad I am that I could not look ahead when I was twenty-two to see where I am now.  I don’t know that my fragile optimism would have coped.  No home, no relationship, no career – all the things I vaguely assumed would somehow materialise as I grew older.  Of course, I am not entirely sure whether I want these things, whether they contradict me, as familiar seeming mutually exclusives tug at me.  But I often think it would be nice, comforting to have just one…

And so I went for more walks, worrying over the fact that “no money” was also in that list and a growing problem.

So I found myself a job.  South Wales is beautiful in parts but also one of the poorest parts of the United Kingdom.  The news informs me (I am not sure how reliably) that Wales has the highest child poverty rates and lowest educational attainment in the UK.  Part of the reason for this is that there is very little work around.  Well, you take what you can get and so I took a near minimum-wage temporary job as one of thousands working for an extremely well-known online retailer in its enormous warehouse on the outskirts of Swansea en route to the motorway.

For two months, I entered into an Orwellian universe where every movement was monitored:  I was marked by three electronic tags as I came to work and clocked in.  Another three marked me as I left.  For my first three weeks, my location and rates of work were monitored by my hand-held computer as I “picked” stock, wheeling increasingly heavy trolleys around the ten football pitches that I am told are the size of the warehouse.  My shift started at six in the morning and finished at two in the afternoon.  In that I got a half hour break (again monitored by all the electronics).  We were routinely searched and while this could eat into our break time or delay our home-going, any lateness, extended breaks or absence on our part, for whatever reason, accrued penalty points which would result in disciplinary action.

The work was repetitive, heavy, exhausting and rather dirty, but I was grateful to be physically tired at the end of each day and that it somehow felt more honest than some of the other equally poorly-paid but more white-collar stupid fill-in jobs I have done over the years.  At least I was doing something tangible.  Someone somewhere was receiving an item because I had dug it out of its box, picked it off its shelf.

It being a proper Orwellian universe, it is full of jargon.  For a few days, I thought someone had put a sign high above the IT room as joke.  “SNOG IT,” it proclaimed to all us ants below.  No one I had come across in IT particularly appealed but sometimes I thought it might be worth a try just to alleviate the boredom.  I then realised that the G was in fact a C and SNOC must be yet another incomprehensible acronym.  It made me laugh whenever I walked past it, some security guard peering at the cameras, doubtless wondering who the inanely giggling woman is.

I have grown up around Welsh accents and usually have no difficulty understanding them but some of the voices in our “fulfilment centre” (no, not a warehouse because no one is fulfilled in a warehouse – yes our Brave New World has American jargon) were so broad I had to ask them politely to repeat themselves three times before I had the remotest idea what they were saying.  So hearing them talk of “totes” and going to find the “team lead” was quite memorable (“Can’t they speak proper fucking English?” was a not infrequent grumble).  Possibly my favourite was a sign I saw one day: PACKAGE MANIFEST PENDING. I still have no idea what that means.

I learned to be grateful for small things:  that my break was a bit later so the second half of the shift seemed shorter, that sometimes my picking route would take me past the windows. There is something very poignant about the skeleton of a tree against the sky when framed by concrete and seen through a twenty metre high corridor of shelved pallets.  That my machine would suddenly order me out of the sweltering, airless tower and to the coolness of the high-corridored racking.  I was grateful for the friendliness of my “team lead” who promoted me to “kickouts” in week four, which removed me from the constant computer scrutiny, put me in a slightly more social setting and enabled me to use a little judgment as I followed the (computerised) procedures for dealing with problematic packages that weren’t as they were expected to be.  There was less walking but usually more lifting, as I worked in the XL (extra large) section. The shippers on the line would occasionally shout as I struggled with a particularly unwieldy box “Oi Luce! That package is bigger than you are!”

I am beginning to think I should change my name to Luce.  So many people call me it anyway and it seems more grown-up and truer to its meaning than Lucy.  And of course there’s the French feminist intellectual Luce Irigaray.  Lucy seems a name for little girls and old maids… Then again, I have been one of those and I have every chance of also being the other.

One of the shippers decided I must be a great intellectual because I know how to pronounce Montague (a name on one of the shipping labels.  I hope Mr. Montague received his parcel in happy ignorance of the two-days of conversation he provoked).  The same shipper later asked me what an asparagus is, also “that yellow vegetable which can be big or small” (it turned out to be sweetcorn), confessed he had never eaten a tomato until he was eighteen and to this day only eats three kinds of vegetable (cabbage, sprouts and peas; it felt beyond the call of duty to try explaining that a pea is not a vegetable but a legume).  He lives in Port Talbot, which is a peculiar place, characterised by enormous steelworks, great social deprivation and for producing some of the more legendary male British actors (Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, and now Michael Sheen is making his way up there).  He would give me sweets and bring the heavy boxes over and put them directly on the scales for me so that I wouldn’t have to lift them off the floor.  The other shippers stuck a sign to his back one day which said “I love Lucy” but I don’t think he did.

I remarked to my team-lead that many of our colleagues were a testament to the parlous state of British dentistry.

“Put it this way,” he replied.  “There are five lads here. If you put them all together, you might have a full set of teeth.  You might.”

Another boy (there were definitely boys and men in this place, and far fewer women) I had studiously avoided, although he was friendly enough.  I felt rather guilty but he smelt too much of tramp for my nostrils (oh yes, I am so not headed for enlightenment any lifetime soon).  Around the Montague time, names were a theme and I spotted an incomprehensibly spelt Welsh one even more incomprehensibly on its way to London.   Mr. Odour, boyishly keen to prove himself, turned out to be the only Welsh-speaker amongst us and delivered the name in bewitchingly flowing tones.  I was quite stunned to discover such music amongst the dirt and boxes and stench and deeply regretted my olfactory compulsion to avoid his offers to improve my Welsh.  He spent the rest of the day picking fights with people and was banished to another part of the unfulfilment centre.

But really what I re-discovered amongst these people I would never normally meet is that the world is a fundamentally kind place.  At least, my world is a fundamentally kind place, full of fundamentally kind people (and the occasional wanker), from the stranger I meet by the boxes offering me the sort of sweet I would normally avoid like the plague before seven in the morning, to the chat with the old coal-miner who’s looking for a job that will take him through the next ten years.  And I have this sort of conversation, a sort I very rarely have:

A packer comes to my kickout station with a problem order.  The weather has been very bad and most people are snowed or iced in.  He tells me about his journey to work.

“I come from Llanelli,” he says.  “I live on the Felinfoel Road” (that’s VELINVOLE – long Welsh O at the end – for anyone unfamiliar with Welsh pronunciation. I’m not even going to try with Llanelli).

“Really?” I say.  “My aunt and uncle lived there…” which is not the sort of thing I usually say anywhere.

“What number?” he asks, and so it goes until we resolve his order problem.

In general, these blue-collar registers and cadences are familiar to me, familiar but unusual, because I only hear them from my grandmother and her brothers and sister.  It’s the first time I make this connection and I am careful not to tell her.  I don’t know what I make of having both so much and so little in common with the people with whom I work.

“What’s that voice? That’s not from around here,” men say to me.

Another giver of sweets, a forklift truck driver, shouts over to me one day:

“Are you on Strictly Come Dancing?”

“No.”

“What sort of dancing do you do?”

Well, how do you answer a question like that?  These days, I go for as briefly as possible.  “Contemporary.  You won’t see that on Strictly. Ever.”

An occasional curiosity about my dancing has arisen because a few people know that I am off to Massachusetts to take part in Nancy Stark Smith’s workshop at Earthdance in January (though I generally stop after the Massachusetts bit).  All the snow and ice is giving me a chance to road-test my thermals before I throw them at a North American winter (last time I was in western Massachusetts in January, the temperature plummeted to -29C).  The thought of going is what is keeping me sane.  “Anithya, anithya, anithya”, I keep hearing Goenka’s voice droning in my head on my solitary walks.  It’s interesting how much my sweaty time in Cambodian Vipassana boot-camp comes back to me here.  I can’t even remember exactly what it means, just generally that everything is temporary.  “This too will pass”, I’ve kept remembering – as too will the time in Massachusetts, and savings on minimum wage jobs being what they are, I may well be back to it come February.

With the snow being so heavy, many pre-Christmas orders have been cancelled and there are pallets and pallets of parcels waiting for the lorries to collect them.  Work was grinding to an uncomfortable halt.  My pre-dawn journeys had morphed into a crash-course in arctic driving, but despite being one of the few who made it in every day of bad weather, my services were no longer required and on Monday I was let go a day and a half early.  Well, I could have done with the money, but it’s also nice to have some time – though that’s being swallowed up by the monster that is the pre-Christmas panic.

Mumbles under snow

Early in my stay here, on a beautiful autumn day, my brother and I took my grandmother into Ceredigion, near the coast in west Wales.  We went to a Nash estate called Llanerchaeron (good luck pronouncing that one) where Nana’s grandfather had been head gardener in the 1930s.  On the drive out, we stopped at the cottage where she and her sister had stayed with their grandparents as children.  It struck me that this is the closest I’ve seen to anything resembling the ideal home of my imaginings, with its remoteness, quaint local windows and the river Aeron running its last couple of miles to the Irish Sea through the back garden.  Now it’s a very pricey National Trust holiday cottage, complete with satellite dish hidden in the bushes.  I suspect it was rather less comfortable in the days my great-great-grandparents lived there, when there was no electricity, what heating there was came from the fire and my great-great-grandfather would carry the household drinking, cooking and washing water home with him as he walked the four miles from the main house every day.  (I couldn’t quite understand why they didn’t just get the water from the river.  Perhaps it wasn’t safe…)

Nana and Nino in front of the cottage

In some ways, I feel I am still in the state I was when I was travelling.  That is something I am grateful for.  Not always, but often, things seem less oppressive, less of a sentence I can’t escape, because I know they are temporary.  I am just passing through, I am just passing through.  Again and again the image has come to me that was a constant companion on my travels: of my feet walking and leaving no prints, the image of passing through this earth, passing over this earth and leaving no trace.  Instead of frightening me now, it comforts me.

I got my sleeping bag out a few days ago, as I began to gather the things I will need for my next trip.  (A month seems a very short time now.)  A fierce relief gripped me as I held my sleeping bag, a sense of coming home, being myself once again.  I drove out into west Wales two days ago, achingly beautiful in silent snow.  Part of me longs for a house, fiercely longs for a house in quiet and space, with a fire, a reading and writing room, a dance/yoga studio, a kitchen, maybe a dog, remote, surrounded by fields and hills and trees and not too far from the sea.  Another part of me equally fiercely knows itself at home when I am on the move and is relieved at the order, the simplicity of condensing my life to a suitcase, a rucksack, something very portable.

As I cannot afford much of either at the moment, I should be grateful that this is not a choice I have to make.  But I am not quite.

I am not sure if it’s the effect of my travels, the meditation boot-camps or just encroaching middle age but I feel myself better at accepting what comes to me.  Yes, I still find it difficult, I still get frustrated but monotony doesn’t reduce me to the neurotic and miserable wreck it once did.  Perhaps it is my increasingly conscious experience of impermanence, of change.  I have felt far more isolated over the last few months than I was at any point in my wanderings.  The two or three times I have had contact with friends who know or care anything of what I do and love and am, I have flooded them with a torrent of verbal diarrhoea, an untrammelled outpouring of recognition and relief.  But the isolation too is alright, if a bit sad at times.

Wyrm's Head, Rhossili

What makes it alright is the landscape around me.  I remember my friend Barbara coming back from a hike up the mountain in Dharamsala and saying to me it was so beautiful she felt like she was looking at the face of God.  Through the windows of the industrial warehouses, above the traffic on the road that borders the sea, on my walks, against the ugliest of Swansea’s ugly buildings, I have found the changes in the sky a bewitching comfort.  I can see the skies here as I never could in London and somewhat to my surprise, I have found myself falling in love with these landscapes, these skyscapes.  The dreary grey British weather that so depresses me has been conspicuous by its absence.  I was welcomed with a bright golden autumn that transformed into a bright white winter.  I have loved the snow and ice, the quiet of it, the light of it, the joy of children skidding on the plastic toboggans which have emerged from seemingly nowhere, watching adults pulling everything from their shopping to their toddlers along on the ice behind them.  I have been lucky in that I have been able to get out and about in it.  It’s as though the land has conspired to woo me out of my hostility to British weather, to British vistas.  Again and again I have seen the face of God as the clouds move over changing skies, in the seal pup that looked up at me from his rock, and in the silence of snow-bound fields.  Again and again it has comforted me.

I am with you.  I am with you.  I am with you…

And while my experience of god has little to do with mangers or virgins or plum puddings, this seems nonetheless a fitting note on which to wish you a joyful and beautiful Christmas.

From Lucy with love. x