limerick IRELAND 2012
limerick IRELAND 2012
rewriting distance / Limerick Ireland, November 2012
“Stories enchant and seduce because of their magic multidimensionality”
bell hooks
We are waiting for Mary, who is taking us to the Cliffs of Mohar, by the sea in the west of Ireland.
As I reflect back on the past three days of teaching MA and BA students of Dance here in Limerick,
I am again amazed at how much happened. Young people are inspiring as the force and openness
of their age reminds me of a natural vitality and an approach this is unafraid and intuitively wise.
It is a privilege to teach.
…
a thought,
written before beginning the rewriting distance practice,
Seems this land is filled with faith …
walking on it
my skin senses the merriness of life and death,
the party that celebrates
towards all events,
this constant furry of living,
the music and song of a capture,
the word
releasing
all.
day one
an action I remember
I went to the desk immediately
and poured water on the paper …
I picked up a pen and drew around the droplet.
I drew and drew around and around allowing the lines
to expand away from the first line,
it got larger and larger as
the lines circled outwards and became
the sound of the sea siphoned from the tip of a pen
as it moved around and around
in a continuous sound of never ending,
and then suddenly,
I lifted the pen from the page,
and looked at the shell I had drawn.
after the first practice
dream come true,
take the paper off the table
and
horizontal becomes vertical
as you read the length of the body
breathing towards the window,
running a race with pink
sneakers, and a dance, a dance
of inhaling and exhaling,
escaping the desk becomes a
tricky question, unstuck because
a song comes along
and a chair is there
follow the tune, the
the, the, circling
of words creates a
rhythm, a phrase, a daze
away …
I thought it was
over
then you came along
we then sang a song,
she helped you
she whispered, she laughed, she spoke about
Egypt … he left me at disco dancing
then I,
needing to and finding
the right arm/wing/sing,
scrolling, scribbling, this
circling of words,
the water spider appearing
in the delicate manner
of writing and erasing,
it’s the momentum that comes
to the surface
watermark
thoughts after the first practice
shell
scrolls
softly
listening
to
its
song,
a kind
of momentum
of rolling
it along.
Quote from Mary
“ the delight of keeping it light”
Lin discovers a definition of poetry while dancing during the first day of practice it comes from
a rephrasing of Guy’s story of spitting on his hands.
“ a bit,
of spit,
it’s a bit
of spit.”
We seem to be conjuring up other poets …
today Wallace Stevens comes up as Mary speaks a line from
his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
XI
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
of one of many circles.
day two
We ask Mary if she has any questions for us before we begin. She is curious about the position of the audience,
about audiencing, and about the substance of the activity.
the man
holds his hands out and
walks away from the raft, towards
where there is someone sitting down,
watching.
he is getting closer and closer to the shoreline
where someone is leaving
and someone has arrived
there is the smell of music
We finish altogether watching each other,
the names of Seamus Heaney and Walt Whitman
and William Blake have been mentioned.
It all began with the breeze
the small movings
of grass outside the window,
the stain and smell of music also present,
how I watched her feet slide and
glide in a grid like pattern
until she was stopped by a very tall man.
they became like a gentle tide,
crashing inevitably towards each other
until the urgency of water pushed the
pathway onwards.
these smells, and
the open doorways of the
body; a life raft for imagination
and the business of construction
and digging in the ground;
Discovery at the drop of a pen,
the sounds of a shadow
travelling briskly against
a wood surface …
the fantasy of walking underwater
or being able to dissolve through a window,
the appearing and disappearing sun casting
its glow into and onto the wood floor
of this studio
where we are all now, sitting and writing
reflection
rrrr flec ois
reflexion in Spanish
the nature of mind,
the mirror of memory,
the outline of the body,
skin like a raft bringing us to the surface.
some afterthoughts before dinner that evening … waiting for the brown rice
Somatics … how do we/I compose with body
with breathe
with thought
with imagination
with physicality
Does somatic training and application allow the imagination to be part of awareness in composing in real time?
I think so …
think it
feel it
forget it
let it happen
from my time studying with Nancy Topf and her amazing work in Experiential Anatomy
another thought
yesterday without planning it,
our orientation in the room,
the diagonal line from the
witness chair to the performer
lined up with the direction
of the sun and how it spilled through
the shape of the window
onto the floor.
For our second practice we changed the orientation of the room,
and again, without planning, it fell
in line with the path of the sun.
… to consider after Mary’s question about the audience …
How porous we are as performers and how does this state of porousness communicate to the audience,
to the witness and back to the performer ?
Breathe, breathing
this plays into what we are doing as music,
opening the song of the heart.
day three
A word,
a fragment
a story
told as a fortune
a long page that keeps the
story’s line,
a poem begins
and has the word
“squat”
and it is always about digging
towards
a bright red fragment
that is a truck
something isn’t said and
the next thing
a man transcribes
what she is speaking,
she is speaking sounds
he is looking for the word
“eventually something was settling
but it wasn’t said”
How much of the story is just the
written fragment
what is underneath the page? …. and
she said squat
you are squat
and I am snug
and I have a pen,
And we are cutting up the poems
all of these lines
dancing momentarily
as sound and movement
as you hug me snug to your body
laughing madly as heroes in our
own story, standing on the page
our weight leaving creases
our ages together spread through
our feet as imprints on paper,
it wasn’t said
it wasn’t written
it was danced.
We knit together a shiny fragment
that breathes life into
the tossing of three pennies
and who is holding the pen
like a gun
like a cigarette
like a magic wand ?
Like magicians we are map making
discovering the ways
the plays
the poems
the squat fragments
that dance into what isn’t said
transcribing onto this long river
of scroll,
filling it in with the
in between breaths
the breathing betweens
the discovery of a rare new beast
that has a beak
that flies and sings
and appeared out of nowhere
as my pen wrote down
the shape of our sound.
today …
Mary quoted William Carlos Williams from his poem about a wheelbarrow.
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
And Seamus Heaney’s famous poem also arrived in the practice
Digging
by Seamus Heany
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
The name of Brendan Kennelly comes up and so I look for the poem I think Guy is
referring to and I find a Kennelly quote as well.
“ A writer is not interested in explaining reality; he’s interested in capturing it”
and then I found Brendan Kennelly’s poem The Happy Grass and wrote it down with the others.
The Happy Grass
Here, in their final quiet, the singers lie.
True to the dead, to the living true
The grass is growing as it always grew
Drinking every human cry
Like the rain of summer reaching the repose
Of singers long out of sight.
Will we ever know what the grass knows
Flourishing in green wisdom, green delight?
True to the dead, to the living true
The grass is growing as it always grew
Drinking every human cry
Like the rain of summer reaching the repose
Of singers long out of sight.
Will we ever know what the grass knows
Flourishing in green wisdom, green delight?
When delusions of communication cease
And we are victims once again
Of rumours the gossip wind is bringing
We’ll celebrate the singers in their peace
Because above the graves of men
The happy grass is singing.
And we are victims once again
Of rumours the gossip wind is bringing
We’ll celebrate the singers in their peace
Because above the graves of men
The happy grass is singing.
day four
it is the day of sun
and
I also called it
Thursday of three
After our practice, we write as usual, but for some reason I can only remember what we have done
in short bursts and as soon as I begin by writing them down, they keep bursting into my memory and
I recall the whole practice in this manner of bursts.
He begins by opening the doors
and instantly the fresh morning air enters
the sunlit room.
…
She looks out at me
from the underneath of white
I think ice,
Igloo.
…
She braids my hair
from out of nowhere.
…
He shows me two dead bees
and a lock of hair
potion for motion.
…
She looks at me from the
blanket of paper
I am afraid,
she says “selfish”.
…
He says dropped
and it stays,
the page stays.
…
I am afloat on a raft of words
Dancing the creases
ironing them into the air.
…
He all of a sudden
from behind the camera
he says “clockwise”.
…
She is sliding and skipping
shunting her body forward
in space;
I think Hawkins,
how did she do that?.
…
He puts the pen to his tongue
and begins to write
and I am reminded
of the name
of a childhood
classmate.
…
The rain came when I
was busy writing
“when did it start to rain?”
I ask you,
“a few minutes ago”
you reply.
…
the blades of grass
are singing in the
rain … “to see the world in
a blade of grass,
eternity in an hour.”
…
Reciting the poems of famous
Irish male poets …
there are women you say
“maybe it doesn’t really matter”
He says
“What is the name of a famous Irish female poet?”
You say
“Eavan Boland”
…
It matters,
everything invisible and groundless
sings through
the centuries of rain,
the caves,
the wells,
the magic of land,
and story and sea,
all of this
making the word
memory.
that evening I add two poems to my collection written by women and mentioned by Mary in the practice.
The Red Poppy
Louise Gluck
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
Atlantis — A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city — arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals — had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
and finally,
the first four lines of William Blake’s’ poem Auguries of Innocence, from a valedictorian speech I gave in Grade 13,
many many many years ago.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
That evening … after I write down all the poems, rewrite them into my book for
Rewriting Distance … I look up one of my favourite female Canadian poets, Margaret Atwood. She is now most often
remembered as a novelist; I always think of her as a poet. Mary is a mother, and she has the most exquisite hands.
You Begin
Margaret Atwood
You begin this way
This is your hand
This is your eye
That is a fish, blue and flat
On the paper, almost
The shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
Or a moon, whichever
You like. This is yellow.
That is a fish, blue and flat
On the paper, almost
The shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
Or a moon, whichever
You like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
Is the rain, green
Because it’s summer, and beyond that
The trees and then the world,
Which is round and has only
The colours of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
And more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
With the red and then
The orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
You will learn that there are more
Words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
Like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
Your hand to this table,
Your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
Which is round but not flat and has more colours
Than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
This is what you will
Come back to, this is your hand.
Guy is reading John Dewey Art as Experience.
At the end of the practice, after we do some writing Guy reads a bit from this
book, things he feels resonate with what we are doing.
This is what I write down from what is read directly from the book.
“for in architecture, as in painting and poetry, raw materials are reordered through the interaction with
the self to make experience delightful”
this is how John Dewey describes rhythm.
“ It is ordered variation of changes.”
After a while Mary begins to talk about her own research for her PhD. that brought her to the question
“ What do we see when we feel the dance?”
I write down.
“thereness.”
And I am struck by the architecture of all the buildings on the campus of this university. They all have windows,
wonderfully placed to let you see and feel the landscape on which the buildings sit. The windows in this room
seem to me now to be like paintings …alive with the change of weather and green with the centuries of rain.
The sun makes rhythmic appearances.
day five
the informal showing
1 pm
in the studio we have been working in
which is the
Irish Chamber Orchestra Rehearsal Hall.
There is an audience of about fifty people. They are students from the MA in Dance, and the BA in Voice and Dance.
They are teachers and colleagues of Mary, and they are dancers and artists from the Irish community. Mary’s brother
Bev came with his wife and three children.
It began with many people coming into the room,
we kept putting out chairs …
Guy introduced the work of Rewriting Distance,
Mary spoke briefly about our visit,
and Lin started.
It really began with the image I acted on
of Bev’s children running out on the grass past the low alcove window
as everyone was entering the room …
It began again
on the grass,
with running …
as it began with a conversation
close to Guy and Mary and the audience …
my socks ….
I took them off …
I confessed to Guy
they had L and R on them
then my sweater,
my mothers from the 50’s
I took it off and put it down …
Telling you: or is it me … it’s us;
telling the order will only be a lie
I will tell you what I remember as moments
re- appearing to me now …
At the desk,
It is for certain I would like to read Margaret Atwood’s poem
“You Begin” to Mary …
Mary is a mother, and Mary has the most expressive hands …
There is an outline of her hand on the paper in front of me … she drew its outline sometime this week …
my own hand floats over it
“like a small cloud over a lake”
I read the whole poem,
like it is written on the page …
and like it is a conversation between us as she sits in the witness chair …
the “affects/effects” of the room,
the details of now enter the telling …
as I recite and revisit simultaneously
by adding the real of the room …
there is the memory of a magpie …
the stories and songs of birds as we together
flap our arms as wings and sing and sing and sing …
the sound of shrill birdcalls or babies crying,
the gurgling of brooks, and water flowing
and the crazy clasp of a clip in your hair
that becomes the beak
that steals the pen
and writes the air.
Workshop at Dance Ireland: Dublin
November 5-9, 2012.
“Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed, convert to things foreknown”.
Seamus Heaney
We spend the week teaching the Rewriting Distance practice to four people who have signed up for the workshop.
They are interested in choreographic practice and what they might glean for themselves from embarking with us in
the practicing of Rewriting Distance.
Some questions that arise
How to stay flexible with your process.
How to keep the joy in things you make.
How do you really do what you would like given the constraints of the professional milieu?
How does do you maintain integrity and integrate this towards your own creative process?
Is there an ideal mix of freedom and structure and how is this fine line built in a dance?
When to edit material, and leave a pause, realizing not saying can be just as powerful as saying.
Liz Roche says at the end of one of the days while we are talking
“ a certain amount of training puts you to sleep.”
I walk into the city in the mornings when our workshop is in the afternoons.
I discover many of Simone Forti’s books in the bookshop of the project arts centre and I buy as many of them as I can afford. I have always loved the way she moves and writes. In the forward to the reissuing of her book “Handbook in Motion” she writes this.
“ I’m improvising from that root behaviour, simultaneously dancing and speaking, trying to keep it earnest, light, and surprising.”
writing from day five
The big silence,
Leviathan is behind the paper
her hands holding the paper in such an odd and wonderful way;
Guy and Alysha writing as
if they have all the time in the world,
and they do …
for a moment together they give
us all the time in the world.
funny …
how watching
invites you into rhythms of making,
and seeing
…what will they do?
…oh, they did that!
…now what?
I love to watch people making things up.
This week there have been so many layers of inside and outside
and questions of why and when;
a conversation that weaves and meanders and muses and makes,
a dance of sense and nonsense; a serious debate,
a stream of consciousness conversation
with breaks and pauses and silences and songs.
Sinead makes a long sound through a scroll of paper
she moves the paper scroll around with her feet in ways extraordinary/ordinary
and Liz sings a song The Black Hills of Dakota
I drag a chair to the window to reach
the waiting paper roll there, the sound of a waiting roll of paper is a
smile, a surprise
a million drops of rain
and she decided
to tell the tale of one …
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
on and on
Lin Snelling
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