La Blanche (third time lucky)

The solo that first saw the light one January evening in Bangalore in 2010 is in the process of being dusted down and life breathed back into her.  She’ll be closing Arts Care Gofal Celf’s D12 dance festival which is part of Pembrokeshire Fish Week.  I’ll be performing  La Blanche (the white girl) at about 17:40 this Sunday, June 24^th at Port Authority, Milford Haven.   The stage is going to be built under a bridge (so safe from any drizzle on the day) and facing the sea.  Those who know her know she’s a solo about growing up on and in the sea in Gabon, so I’m excited about the setting, if a bit worried about some of the technical quandaries (the marriage of live spoken and recorded sound outdoors, dancing on the toe I broke just over a week ago…)

 

Through Arts Care Gofal Celf, I’ve also been working with a class from Milford Haven Junior School, creating a work in progress based loosely on the poem in La Blanche.  The children will be sharing what they’ve made at about 17:15.  So if you’re anywhere near Milford Haven, please come!  And if not, please send blessings.

Here is some of what I wrote the day before I performed La Blanche in Cardiff last July (2011):

I have a sense she has shifted where she lives in me since her first and last outing in Bangalore in January 2010.

Thoughts – in no particular order – on this revisiting of the SOLO:

Nicky (Visser)’s thoughts from her email responding to the film There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in – that for a change, the film allowed her to enter in to the SOMATIC experience of the moving.  I started thinking:

SOMATIC → SOMA, elixir, ecstasy, somehow EROTIC – so the truly somatic is also deeply and subtly erotic.  At any rate, this seems true now in this piece: creativity / embodiment / eroticism emanating from a felt sense of the second (and first) chakras – the language, especially the poem “Vaguely Waving” must honour this – and suddenly this poem seems charged with eroticism – the goddess exploding from my mouth and senses… the rhythm, the sounds, the shapes of the words in my mouth, the images – I had never realised this.

So the task is to embody, be present, be fully alive to the sensations evoked by the story of the piece – the physical and not the mental story (let the structure take care of that) to be my focus…

Thoughts of Kirstie (Simson) “maybe I’m just a sex maniac”…

Thoughts of Nancy (Stark Smith) – bridging the gap in experience between practice and performance – something about the body chemicals of “performance” sending me out of my body and more into my head → control.  My seed for tomorrow is to be conscious when this happens and re-embody.

TRUST:   myself

                my body

                my experience

                my practice

                my training

                my creation

                my work

Image / message in meditation this week:  red flow, Shakti, (kundalini?) rising up between my legs, out the top of me and expanding spherically from me – strength / power comes from this core deep within me, not an external hardening (of my carapace), an external impulse of fear wanting me to shape, to contain, to control. Instead work to soften, dissolve this outer shell so the red → white explosion can expand from me, expand beyond measure.  Power but not mine, and yet mine.

This may be a bit too stream-of-consciousness processing for some, but in case people are curious, here’s the movement score as it currently stands for the varying sections of the piece, and the text of the poem, for readers of French:

LA BLANCHE SCORE – JUNE 2012

strong  Atlantic waves:

disorientation → head lead → soft →spirals

vaguely waving (poem)

fishermen’s song:

pleine d’écume et de sel et de sable pointu (motif) → waving

sting rays & calm waters:

piercing the circles, stillness, balance

the women’s song:

body touch, fragments of set material, low ground, Shakti, sacral chakra, kalari serpent & elephant

We’ll see what changes by Sunday.  At the moment, it’s the last section, the women’s song, which is the least secure, not least because it involves some of the more challenging movement on my broken toe.

And finally, here’s the poem, for those who like French:

(VAGUELY WAVING)

I wave, waver, waive

Wave at the ocean –

Green grey

Waves coming into shore.

Pictures of sine waves breaking on the beach

Vague trigonometric memories

Vague, wave

Vague, vague

La vague sur la plage qui s’écrase,

La vague qui écrase la plage

La vague qui m’écrase sur la plage

La vague qui m’écrase sur la plage

Forçant le sable dur

Forçant le gros sable dur

Dans ma bouche ouverte,

Dans ma bouche ouverte

Pleine d’écume et de sel et de sable pointu.

Vagues vertes

Terrain des raies-requin

Que les pêcheurs tirent

Que les pêcheurs noirs

Tirent des fonds verts

Des fonds lugubres

Des fonds si profond que j’ai peur.

Les pêcheurs noirs

Qui traversent les vagues vertes

Dans leurs pirogues marron

Qui traversent les vagues vertes

Qui traversent la troisième vague,

La vague d’où – si on la dépasse –

On ne revient pas.

La fille blanche regarde

Les pêcheurs noirs

Qui traversent les vagues vertes

Vagues vertes-grises

Dans leurs pirogues marron

Dans leurs pirogues en bois marron,

Les pêcheurs noirs

Qui trouvent les raies-requin

A travers les vagues,

Raies-requin couleur de sable

Couleur de sable dur et pointu

Dans ma bouche pleine d’écume et de sel.

La fille blanche regarde

Les pêcheurs sur les vagues

Qui vaguent.

I vaguely wave

At the fishermen.

From Lucy, with love xx

© Lucy May Constantini, June 2012

Kalari Retrospective

I am measuring time in the passing of objects: the end of the tiny, poor-quality matches I bought in the rickety shop in Puerto Lopez, the end of the decadently sturdy matches in expensive packaging I picked up in a restaurant in Santa Monica, the re-discovery of the last of the herbal tea (al cedron) I took with me to the Isla de la Plata...

Exactly two years ago, I was in Trivandrum (sorry, Thiruvananthapuram), sweating away every morning at CVN Kalari. The object I have from there is a little card I was given at my neighbourhood temple.  I have no idea what it says, as it's all in Malayalam. I look at the curls of the script and the image of the Goddess whenever I happen to glance towards the mirror in which the card is tucked, and I remember.

While I was at the kalari, I met a French photographer who was recovering from a foot injury. He would come and watch our practice in the early mornings before his treatment in the clinic, and sometimes we would end up in the little hotel (café, to non-Indians) nearby, drinking countless servings of hot sweet chai out of tiny steel cups and generally perplexing our hosts with our French chatter and custom of hanging around the worn tables for hours, unlike our fellow local diners who would eat and clear out in record time.

I meant to post some of Laurent's photos on my blog, but what with the logistics of travelling and the passing of time, I never got round to it.  But I see on Facebook he is back in India, and I am hopeful the universe will send me back to Kerala this year (of course, I was also hopeful last year, but I remain optimistic).  So in honour of the month of February, my kalari-month, here are some photos, posted in fond memory of rivers of sweat, red earth, gods and goddesses, kind hosts and melting heat.

All photos by Laurent Lavergne.

looking behind

Rajan adjusting

the three foreign visitors: Marjory Dupres, Karen Watts and me

practising lions

horse and kick

traffic

into elephant by weapons and portrait

elephant

learning with Karen

fish in the earth and onlookers

waiting for a gap in the traffic

a little higher, a little more force

composition

Durga is all that is still.

from Lucy, with love x

On Pain

Pain, suffering: something I have been mulling over for a while.  Perhaps I am more Buddhist than I thought.

I spent the first half of August in London, doing some work for the National Youth Theatre and dodging riots.  With my customary flair for crisis, I was staying in Peckham, one of the unfortunate areas that was smashed and looted.  I was fine, though saddened, and there were a few wry comments on my Facebook page referring to the fact that Bangkok was also in riot when I passed through last.  But while plenty of people suffered as London burned, I was not one of them.  Well, in no more than the societal existential sense.

I was working with fourteen to eighteen year olds at NYT, not an age-group I generally have a lot to do with.  On three occasions, I was called upon to deal with minor injuries.  In all cases, they were the results of some tension or other causing muscles to go into spasm, probably brought about by the shifts, both physical and psychological, of the first experience of living away from home and immersing themselves in an intense (and in the case of my group, physical) workshop.  I’m not convinced the cocktail of rubbish food and chemical sugary drinks, the preferred diet of many of them, didn’t have something to add in terms of sending confused bodies into spasm.

As I palpated and organised hurting limbs, I frequently found myself uncrossing arms, urging  “Breathe.  Try and breathe.  Try not to hold your breath.  Breathe.”  I’d place my hands across their chests, encouraging breath into them.  I remember doing similar the last time I accompanied my brother to hospital with a bad asthma attack.  “Uncross your arms.  Breathe.”

What is it about pain that stops our breath?  

And not just physical pain.

I’ve noticed the same when practising yoga asana while in the grip of a bout of depression.  Impossible to breathe deeply.  Impossible for the breath to be anything other than shallow, for it to reach and stimulate my shut-down core.

It’s as though a (my) being in pain rejects any form of inspiration (inhalation, inspiration, the inhaling, breathing in, taking in of spirit).  I sometimes wonder whether this isn’t pain turning us away from life itself.  After all, without breath, what are we?

Dead, that’s what.

Often, by the end of my yoga practice, my breath has shifted, deepened, and with it something in my state of mind shifts.  But sometimes pain isn’t possible to move through and I must give in to stasis.  Interestingly, this is more true (for me) of emotional pain than the physical variety.

There’s a paradox here.  Pain is life-denying and binds me in stasis, perhaps the state I fear most.  Yet it is pain that pushes me to transformation.  This is how Tantra (as I understand it) explains the usefulness of suffering: it leads us to seek higher states of awareness, of consciousness, to learn to move past, to move with pain.  This too has been my experience.

So pain binds me and propels me to liberation.  A paradox.

A couple of months ago, after a particularly trying morning, I was surprised as I drove into the Tesco car park to find my neck wet with tears.  I dried my face, ran my errands and saw the café above Swansea’s one bookshop advertising a £1.00 deal on filter coffee.  I walked up the stairs, paid my pound and took my coffee to a high table overlooking gracious Victorian windows and drizzle.  I can’t pretend my thoughts were cheerful.  Mainly I remember thinking that the nature of my suffering was exactly what it had been when I was a child. Nothing had changed except perhaps my relationship to it.  The only difference being that when I was nine, eleven or thirteen, I had the impetus to detail my pain and perceived injustices at length in one of my diaries.  At the time it felt vital, unique.  So many years on, it strikes me as desperately mundane.

What’s so interesting about pain, about my pain in particular?  We all have it.  It’s no more unusual than skin, or a digestive tract.

On my way out, I passed a table where I‘d noticed a woman with short silvered hair.  She stopped me as I went by.

“Are you all right dear?  You looked so sad.”

I had a disembodied sense of witnessing myself simultaneously from two angles.  The first was one of intense gratitude that someone had noticed, someone was kind enough to care.  The other vacillated between grief and desperation;  sweet Lord, what am I become?

Yes, that transformation can be painfully slow in coming.

You may remember that I wrote some time ago about the sensation I have of walking over the earth and leaving no prints.  This most vividly came to me as I was circumambulating Tushita’s gompa in Dharamsala under a full moon, conscious of my feet treading my walking meditation.

I have been ambivalent about this sense of leaving no mark behind me, unsure whether to embrace it or correct it.  Should I force myself to root, to anchor?  It feels as unnatural, unattainable and unlikely as forcing my hair to grow blonde.

In February, my lovely friend Simone came to visit from Switzerland.  We went walking one day on Rhossili’s beach and at a certain point turned back to look at our footprints.  Simone is probably 10kg lighter than me and yet there were the marks our passing had made: hers clearly marked into the sand, mine barely visible.  So perhaps this is not simply something I imagine.

Somehow this feeling of passing without trace connects to my sense of my essential wateriness.  Fish leave no marks in the water they swim through.  I’ve also felt it connects to some of my deepest pain.  For a long time, I thought the solution was to earth myself, to find ground and force a mark upon the place where I stood.  Whenever I have tried this, it has resulted in me trapped, unhappy and scrabbling for survival.

Of course, I am still scrabbling for that.

A little while ago, during a craniosacral therapy treatment, the image came to me of my sacrum.  It was exactly as I imagined the stingray that lanced my heel in Thailand, and it was trying to swim free.  Only perhaps I was treading on it. At any rate, the left side, swimming along, was free of pain, while the right, which the rest of my skeleton was desperately holding onto, was in great distress.

So perhaps, I thought, the answer is not to tether, to root, to ground, but to swim.  Embrace the movement of water.

I haven’t found a way yet, but I am working on it.

From Lucy, with love. xx