dartmouth NS 2021
dartmouth NS
christ church parish hall / december 2021
guest artists
susanne chui
Susanne Chui is a mother of two, an award-winning dance artist and Co-Artistic Director of Mocean Dance. With Mocean, Susanne has developed roles in works by Heidi Strauss, Serge Bennathan, Tedd Robinson, Lesandra Dodson and Claire French and co-created with Erin Donovan (Hear Here Productions), Burnwater and Burnwater: Alchemy, both multi-disciplinary, immersive performances. Susanne and Erin’s most recent film collaboration, Woodlight: Field and Tree, has been featured at several Canadian festivals. A passionate improvisor, Susanne collaborates across disciplines and is a faculty member of the Creative Music Workshop, an annual improvisation-based summer program. Susanne has worked in various roles in the arts community and has been Co-Artistic Director of Mocean, in tandem with Sara Coffin, since 2012. Coming up in 2022, Susanne will perform in a new work created by Syreeta Hector, to be presented at Mocean’s 20th Anniversary Mainstage, April 7-9, 2022. www.moceandance.com
jacinte armstrong
Jacinte Armstrong is an artist based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, NS. Her work explores embodied practice through performance, choreography, collaboration, and curation, communicating the experience of the body in relation to objects, materials, and people. She is passionate about bodywork in many forms. Jacinte is Artistic Director and co-founder of SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) dance, and performs regularly with Mocean Dance. From 2014-18 she was Artistic Director of Kinetic Studio, presenting an annual season of contemporary dance workshops and performances in Nova Scotia. In 2020 she received her MFA from NSCAD University. www.jacintearmstrong.com www.sinsdance.com
sara coffin
Sara Coffin is an award-winning dance artist, choreographer, dance educator and Co-Artistic Director of Mocean Dance since 2011. Coffin has been teaching and creating interdisciplinary contemporary dance work for twenty years. She received the NS Established Artist Award in 2018, her MFA in Choreography from Smith College, BFA (Dance) from Simon Fraser University and Bachelor of Science (Kinesiology) from Dalhousie University. Coffin has created over 30 dance works, her choreographic work has been presented in many prominent Canadian dance festivals and in the United States. Her research interests include interdisciplinary collaboration, technology as an extension of the body, contact improvisation, and the poetic junction between vulnerability, resiliency, and courage. As a dance educator, Coffin has taught as adjunct faculty at Smith College and Hampshire College in Massachusetts, a visiting artist at Universidad Rafael Landívar (Guatemala City), Earth Dance, and as a guest artist/lecturer at Holland College School of Performing Arts (Charlottetown, PEI), NSCAD (Halifax, NS) and University of Alberta. www.saracoffin.ca
doug cameron
Doug Cameron is a Halifax-based jazz and improv drum set player, instructor and composer. He attended St. F.X. University and studied with Mark Adam, John Hollenbeck, Owen Howard, and Terry O’Mahoney. Since moving to Halifax in 2002 Doug has been heavily involved with the local jazz and new music scene. He works regularly with the Upstream Orchestra, SuddenlyLISTEN and is faculty member of Creative Music Workshop, co-founded by the late Jerry Granelli. His band, The New Bridge, was awarded the Stingray Music Rising Stars award at the 2015 TD Halifax Jazz Festival. Doug has participated in several Mocean events and projects, most notably Burnwater: Alchemy. He is pleased to be part of this reunion of Rewriting Distance.
notes
jacinte armstrong
nov. 30/21
R.D. Practice #2
Backlit angel. Rapunzel.
Doug is a modern dad. Grandmas.
What’s your favourite shape? Getting in shape.
Wondering (as always), whether to suppress all of my natural instructs.
Circular.
Wrestling fan grandmas- more common than you thought.
Yelling. Smoking.
Where was the storm?
Guy didn’t want to be saved, so there had to be a replay.
Good things happen to bad people.
What’s present in the space?
Gambling, competition. Cards.
It’s easy to win with good cards, but a skilled player loses less with bad ones….
Thinking about being saved. And help. Needing help, not wanting help.
Susanne’s grandma getting all dressed up to go gamble. Then having the children brought to her to breastfeed. A Modern Woman.
Nice that the sun is out.
————————————————————-
Wince, wind.
Turtles, hamsters guinea pigs, shrivelled eyes. Busted lip. Anything boys can do, girls can do better.
Doug’s dead hummingbird. My dead rabbit. Eggs thrown from planes. Careful how you joke. Get to know a style. Gongs, stick dance, mallet massage.
Eggs going out of the box and into my body, pounding around like an inner storm. Lin joins to twin in the storm. That alleyway has ugly fluorescent lights.
Looking at the hooks.
The worms. 98 & humidity. Cut off the story, but it keeps itself going.
Animals. All the animals have died. Do we have pets to learn about death? And care? How much of what is going on do I see? Quit or keep growing?
Sitting on the ironing board for photos and shadow drawings in pre-school. Lin’s ukulele soliloquy to end the show.
——————————
dec. 1/21
Minefield of online duds. Wearing white socks with flip flops.
Revisionist Romantic History. Wearing brown Campers in Venice.
I don’t know, it just feels half-done.
Dancing with drums, feet in the air, head in a cymbal bag.
Using sounds to test for height and failing.
Coats on, walking in the Tuilleries, but not together yet.
Fragments of a love story.
Just kind of humming along.
———————-
DARTMOUTH
City of Lakes
Have a Heart
You are a Melody. You are like a Melody.
It took me all that time to connect the building we’re in to the graveyard and the church beside us.
Grayeheart. Gravehart. Graveyard.
Monopoly of the gravestones.
Do you want to be buried? Do you want a headstone? Do you want to be buried with your parents? Your children? Your partner?
There’s no more room. How much room should be dedicated to new spots? New plots?
Singing Slogans.
Run through the room. Activate your core enough to jump. We’re rolling. We’re singing. I’m embarrassed because I can only a) copy and b) sing 2 or 3 notes, but it feels so good.
Wind on my face.
Sun on my face.
Wind I feel running and hopping through the room.
Group hum.
———————————
Greek Orthodox Easter parade.
Greek Orthodox baptisms.
Greek Orthodox weddings – I just like to say Greek Orthodox.
Sea shell dreams interrupted by the parties next door.
Murky middle. Tangled up in garbage washed ashore. Balloons and ribbons. Mask strings.
Games you don’t understand but go through the motions of anyway.
Wake up, go to sleep.
Get used to the discomfort. Find where there is room to move.
Don’t forget about the alleyway.
It’s good to get a little lost sometimes.
Rewriting Distance- a lullaby to the party that never ends.
———
nov. 29/21
If I get to the sore, I’ll buy you a notebook for this process too.
Grow apart. Grow together.
Guy and Lin’s smiling faces.
The last word. The tune. The off tune.
The rain. Laundry list of flashing images.
Games. Tunes. NSEW. NESW. The Northwest Arm. The balloon that flew to East Germany from Belgium and won Guy a bike and a penpal.
Chicken Chop Mop Hop.
Wondering, wandering. Time. Always something going on. Taking a break. Wearing a winter coat. Superstition. How to sing a song when you can’t carry the tune?
That’s just a cough, not a covid cough.
The birds out the window on the cold tree.
How do you help? How do you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped?
Risk. Personal senses of risk. What’s a risk?
Commitment, connection, container.
Specialization, Specialist.
The high spaces. Where do I look when Guy raises the mop? And Susanne with the umbrella that just only goes so high I barely raise my eyes. What can make you look up? Change perspective, change the space?
Can see some of what’s going on, but not all. What goes in?
Floodgates.
Exfoliated the trauma of that memory.
notes
sara coffin
Rewriting Distance 2021 – Dartmouth, NS
Christ Church Parish Hall
nov 30
A flood gate has opened – care. Precision, familiarity, humour, simplicity, nonsense.
Circles, wood turning listening to the Rain, squashing through eelgrass mud. Drumstick ribs.
Being Gonged. Feeling the vibrational force of togetherness. Sensemaking in the north, east, south, west. Directions and words are always not what they seem.
Opening to each other – the space, sharing time, pace.
a beautiful welcome.
Let your roots from your feet spread into the nutrient dense soil below, we are all interconnected. penpal balloon, Message in a Bottle, chicken chop mop a dance of endurance and release. A Pandemic memory mopping the audience sprung the question of 6 ft distancing. The Home Depot 6 ft measuring tape barrier as a strategy. Clever and humorous and sad all the same time. Resilient and resourceful. exfoliate the trauma out of the memory.
nov 30
a drum set wrapped in white paper, a Gong resetting each new round. Towering banana boxes falling down. Sunny Tuesday with a quiet heart. Grandmother’s know best. The history of many ladies we don’t know yet. a bit of their blood resides in all of us. I tried to do a shoulder stance. who am I kidding I don’t have enough strength built back yet. all kids arrive a little bit fucked, all adults are fucked. We all learn to live with it to varying degrees of fucked.
It was really nice to waltz with Guy. I thought of my mother who loves to Jive. I need to learn how to jive since she can no longer do it. There are so many layers to this onion. If these walls could talk.?
We are all just temporary custodians between Generations.
It’s easy to win with good cards, it is more difficult to not lose as much with bad cards.
dec 1
Presence, the seduction of fashion, if being in and on. Are they together yet?
Where will I be let to next? Does this go with that, is this together? Brown campers, brown coats, brown chair.
I wonder where we are going?
A lign, no circles the bells are really satisfying to play. I pretend at least myself I had musical training and I know what I’m doing.
What are we doing today?
Being here, present, playful column making a healing storm. We all passed the test. If you open your mouth something will come out.
I’m telling people to keep myself honest
Where is the writing, how to make space for riding in our chaos?
PARISH HALL NEIGHBOURHOOD WALK
Have a heart
what will today bring
Love our Earth
All together
You got this
This area reminds me of my grandparents still, Must be the era of the houses. Empty homes, laneway neighborhoods, tiny fairy houses. Prayer Flags hanging under a tree mourning the loss of indigenous children. Deborah and Ann in the graveyard, 1951 to 1952 – Gone Too Soon.
Have a heart
what will today bring?
You should be working at this direction with the pitch of this roof. Keep your leg wide.
Tiny House
Tiny fairy swing
Walking alone on sad hopeful streets
dec 2
A little Memory Bank of our childhood pet losses. The pet cemetery spirits visited us with the new moon today. It is funny how our childhood spirit lives in each of those tiny furry bodies somehow. And when they go away does part of us go with them?
Today I think about writing, connecting empty corridors – most of it forced, some of it natural surprises. The orderly space is causing Disorderly thoughts.
Fall into the backspace, slide on the floor. Fall Fall Fall
Sink in.
Missing sensation and tiring of the overused front brain. Each time we step into the garden a new seed blooms.
dec 6
Jumping onto one idea procession 6 person parade. Wrapped in colours, sweeping the street, humerus bone swing. Swing with cowbell fingers, a marching drum, tiny chair alter, and calf stuck bells, the ideas get recycled and renewed.
Monday feels dark and stormy. Like molasses but not quite as yummy, but we warm the room.
I can’t wait to see what lamps will arrive today. Light on, Light off, heads and tails. Which hand is it?
The element of surprise is a well practiced tool by Guy. I tried writing but it didn’t feel as satisfying as reading scholarly articles about writing in my bathtub.
If you write things down it is not of you anymore, so you are more likely to forget. This is a very true gospel for me.
Happy Birthday, Please pick up after yourself and don’t be too loud for the sleeping neighbours.
Lin’s beautiful storytelling is a well practiced tool. She reminds me how my mother speaks. I wonder how she is today. I gave her an energetic hello and large hug when we were sounding our heart. Tiny chairs and closed doors keep us together.
Rewriting Distance – a lullaby to the party that never ends.
notes
susanne chui
day 1
the death of a salesman
the drums are all in your head
why is everything so funny?
wow it’s amazing how much one can do with an umbrella
why do I just want to hide?
who was going to clean up this mess?
Direction
directionless
Directionfull
Let’s Orient from the water. Water is everywhere
Everything sounds good in here, the space is vast, it swallows stories
Circles, so many circles. We circle out and circle back. How many cycles until it’s over? Spirals. There’s fullness in a circle but it’s also ongoing, perpetual.
What are we welcoming?
What’s under the surface?
How much don’t we know about each other?
How do we cope?
Is there hope?
Is the question in fact the answer?
I remember when Guy bought the wood turned vases from the market 7 years ago. I didn’t know how significant it was to him.
When did Guy take off his shirt and why?
I couldn’t help but break the rules.
Is this what is needed right now? Who decides? Who decides what matters?
I only have questions.
day 2
Circle
what is your favourite shape?
good things happen to bad people
the grandmothers entered the circle in rounds. Some people don’t want to be saved. Some people want to fall.
Some people want to lose, to get stuck, to fail.
It’s a delicate balance, this game of life, house of cards or boxes.
Everything circles back, smoking and games and grandmothers smoking while playing games.
We all do bad things, we all get twisted and bent out of shape. The skill is in not losing when you’re dealt a bad hand.
day 3
There’s a beauty in trying. To get dressed to impress. To be part of the game. To call and respond to a pulse.
Sneaking
Dressing
Undressing
Addressing
Fragments of sound, and incomplete outfit
Drums disconnected, giving space to each part
Trying hard to piece it back together, piece it back together.
Drawing the outline of a thing, hands become paws, feet become hands. Paper becomes storm. Every great piece has a storm right?
Watching Doug do a contact dance, deep lunges and trying to balance. So close, so close, (insert the Charlie Brown theme song). Maybe next time Charlie Brown.
Two little clowns emerged from little footsteps that started the circus.
Threads, threads, patchwork. Unraveling, sewing back together. It’s like a big patchwork quilt.
Words come out as sound. Today’s writing is coming out like a bad internet connection.
day 4
Have a heart.
Quakers were here.
Meeting hall becomes schoolhouse becomes fire station becomes post office becomes vacant.
1785
White Oak, Black Gum, many trees planted in a row, each one different.
The wife of the wife of the wife of the wife of… Deteriorating flowers must be removed. Deteriorating artificial flowers must be removed. Drop key in the mail slot. In solidarity. Corner of Park and Park. Founders corner. Founders, was this place ever lost? Margaret’s house. Dartmouth housing. Meals on Wheels.
You are like a melody (not a Melody exactly).
be kind
cover your pie hole
stop
no parking
no parking anytime
no parking, we mean it
Wentworth, Octerloney, Park, Dundas
you are welcome to use our picnic tables
hope
wherever you are on your journey you are welcome here
eventually even words fade and return to the earth.
day 5
It’s fun to pretend to be a musician, and a horny turtle, and baby, and an egg, and a Taiko drummer, and a baton twirler.
what happens in grade five, stays in grade five.
When would bananas fall from the sky?
The rules of logic get recycled here.
Sometimes the witness is the cork in the bottle to prevent anything else coming in. Or sometimes the witness is a little buddy, a pet friend, so you’re not alone.
Contact dance is almost a health restriction. I can feel my body pull away instinctively after so much distance and rules around contact.
The space is changing. I can feel the resonance.
day 6
Well I thought I’d want to talk about the Halifax Explosion but that’s not where it went.
But it went to many other places.
Tidal waves collect party balloons. Words trail, tongue tied together like prayer flags or a bunch of kids on chairs just the right size.
We return to places that call us and re-emerge in a parade of memories.
Easter ceremony, wedding ceremony, baptism. What is the prayer they sing to the asses? I want every part of my body to be blessed.
I tried my best to be a blooming flower, but people only saw what they wanted to see.
Lin wanted the party to exit.
I love how long this narrative suspended in space like a conversation by letter. There’s a staying power, nothing gets figured out right away. But if you wait long enough the roof will cave in and flowers will grow where pews once sat.
This doesn’t feel finished but then again there really is no end.
show #1
If the ceiling is the bow of the boat, then the floor is the sky, and I am a bird.
(I’ll take that as an invitation)
How many bananas will it take to power the ship? (71)
Oh, an Angel
My ancestors were boatbuilders, miners.
There are two diagonals. North/South is the strong diagonal. East/West is the weak one.
Boat pose makes you strong and hot.
It’s not a cool name, it’s a hot one.
Two people (or more) share and tell the same story. We tell the same stories to ourselves and others. In this way, we create connections, a part of your brain now resides in mine. Our reality becomes shared.
Stones from last week, from 7 years ago, from people/audience in the room all become part of the landscape, and it was so stimulating, perhaps overly so, like returning to a city you once lived in and every street is full of memories. Yours and others. The present dissolves. We walk the line of memory and imagination and in fact it’s more like we are miners, digging into the mine, mining our memories and experiences for something that will bring us warmth.
It was so amazing to watch a fire crackling away. Endlessly engrossing.
There’s something about balancing a singing bowl on my head that connects me to my East/West line.
Jerome crawled back into the story. As did mamére. And Jerry. The lessons are always there.
Don’t get stuck.
Blundstones and new music. My arches are too high for blundstones.
Ideas and words crash together like a boat on a choppy ocean.
The shoes of my ancestors. Mixing them up, looking for a new match. Which ones are mine?
Getting stuck, but staying until the frame of a new story was illuminated.
show #2
Stories of hideous lamps that refused to leave. We tried to give it away but it came back. Bejeweled, holes drilled by caring husbands in Florida.
Colours, shades of dull what is the name for…?
Guy walks through Montréal looking for green and finds stories of card playing, Christmas balls and pants. He warned me that he was in the mood to pick someone up. Turns out I was dressed for success.
Spinning through Montréal reliving the sounds of dogs barking and French speakers. What’s the colour of dizzy?
How can you tell a good player? I still don’t know the punchline but I do know the story. I also know how to chicken chop hop.
Somewhere I heard an invitation to jump in the pool and out came my childhood swimming activities and anxieties. Synchro became diving, became swimming in memories, became the undertow, became a small scared boy, saved and pulled ashore. I knew I had to be calm because if not we would both drown.
Laying down drumstick bones. Accompanying Lin as she tells a story of her mother’s inability to swim, in a pool of tears. The body is just one big salty ocean.
No sudden moves, don’t want to wake the baby.
A storm. Rain gongs. Too heavy to hold.
I tried to balance the bowl on Guy’s head, but it didn’t work, then on my head. We got so close but failed again. No replay this time.
That’s the golden question — where is Cory?
Lin and Doug swim safely to shore.
notes
lin snelling
day one
A welcoming to
centuries of rain
and the circle
that creates new bearings for north, south, east and west depending on where your feet are … on land or sea?
How wood curves into a speciality that becomes a dance with a mop
without and with words
that are
and are not what they seem.
How superstitions
can become oracles of all things possible.
Stories that bring
a turning and opened umbrella colliding with
bird shit on my shoulder
in the fine line of
imagination …
dreaming of the day job,
one thing at a time,
and the gentleness of a sway,
and the rhythm of doing something
again and again.
a ritual
a practice
a dance
a meeting
a story
that welcomes all to the hall
… everything moved, spilled, mopped
and re-arranged as our first day finishes.
day two
Stories of grandmothers. …
who smoked,
and gambled,
and yelled.
And were well dressed
and danced,
and did yoga;
who breast fed in public,
and played with
the worst cards and won.
Trickery comes in
various shapes …
a circle
and
a pink triangle carried your back.
What is your favourite shape?
This is a very good question.
The shape of a voice,
of a story,
of a memory.
How can I hold it?
…. perhaps carry it on my back
for a long while,
preserving gently,
telling the story
back and forth
like a tide.
my grandmother,
your grandmother …
our grandmothers’ hands,
touching back through distances,
each new round,
a shape I have no name for
yet hold in my heart.
day three
Steps
stepping
feet …. footfall.
Thoughts that lift and lift and land,
lift and land, life and land.
Humming … humming.
A voice that lifts and lands,
lifts and lands,
lifts and lands.
Dancing into the shape of your voice,
voicing into the shape of your dance.
Contact …. Landing onto another and
moving this landing.
The fine line …
imagines itself on paper,
tracing contours.
2 women of similar size
and very different,
yet beneficial,
styles of shopping.
Style … the way someone
the way you
the way I
lift and land into
these clothes
we are wearing,
have worn,
will wear.
Weaving rhythm threads,
re-dressing … and
addressing a long diagonal line.
Light in the room,
giving us the direction of
west from the window.
A wardrobe of sound …
A fashion show
of style
and song.
And the lift and land of an ear to the sound.
A walk to the water in Dartmouth
I am writing after a walk to the water, to the harbour, to the sea.
I come back to the studio with this walk. When I begin to move
it is so visceral, so much to dance with; over half an hour horizontal …
on the floor, being this felt image of the sea, with light and current. It
was so healing, so helpful to this body.
day four
I played a ukulele … for the first time in my life …
the surprise being I played with my left hand;
whenever I play an instrument;
for instance, when I learned
a bit of drumming I played with my left hand dominant.
Hand
Left or right?
Soft landings, full landings
landings that protect,
something fragile.
Light lands on a
canvas and lines begin to take shape.
A story about turtles;
Malcolm and Jerome.
Dancing hands landing into
the softest punches
and the fine line of
imagination surprises me
once again.
day five
Something catches … something of a certain time …
a search for water
and a door
it repeats as a tide.
Gently opening and closing
like a shell
or a butterfly
or a game.
Which hand is the hamburger in?
This one opens … No!
This one opens … No!
This all opens into how does
something begin,
or middle
or end?
All of it capricious,
Uncharted.
A parade that gathers a drum, a man with a bell and a little chair, a woman with a mop, another with a blue box, another with a long coat, a man wrapped in a scarf of clothing ….
Weaving in the hall
in the sea,
in the search,
for a song,
a story,
a spiral.
The shell still singing somewhere
softly bringing echoes
of all the stories
A lullaby to a party that never ends.
(Rewriting Distance: a lullaby to a party that never ends)
Alderney Landing Dartmouth before leaving.
Sitting in front of the sea thinking about how transforming two weeks can be.
There is liquid in my eyes … tears softly cleansing my vision. “Have a heart” it
said on the side of the Parish Hall … yes, indeed. “Centuries of rain” … this soul
crying for the sadness of so many ancestors; for the joy too; bringing the dance
to the “floodgates of being together” in the same room. Jacinte, Doug, Sara, Susanne
and Guy … together we held something dear … sounds of the shapes of our stories;
hearing how listening creates an echo from a shell passed between generations …
and we, the custodians, bring the water, to the wood, to the boat, to the family …
to the way time dissolves into the telling of a tale, like a river, to a lake, to an ocean;
to the mouth of this harbour … waves singing into the sun and wind of this very day.
notes
guy cools
Rewriting Distance
Halifax December 2021
first day
You don’t need to tune in with old friends with whom you have a shared past. You just have to let the memories flow and follow them, wherever they take you.
North. South. East. West.
A message in a bottle or an address card sent with a balloon.
Sometimes when your message gets returned, it makes you pen pals for life.
Today’s practice was already extremely circular, spiraling between inside and outside. Bringing the weather and the rain inside. We even created a storm, which according to Ruth Little, every good performance should have.
I feel extremely welcomed by this weather, by the rain, by this space, by this group of people with whom I can share both my tears and my silliness.
I have no special skills, but I like to connect and build a world with all these fragments of stories resonating with each other.
Floodgates of togetherness.
second day
Grandmothers and children.
Different shapes and colours.
Discovering different perspectives to look at the space.
to go into a conversation.
to play body percussion.
to get stuck into a knot.
to try to balance.
to yell!
It is very hard to make a mess in this space.
Something about the vastness of the wooden floor that absorbs everything.
If good things happen to bad people and bad things to good people, we maybe need fairy tales to reverse this.
I love the sparks of gold that remain on the floor as traces of Jacinte’s goldilocks.
We are just temporary custodians in-between generations.
Charlotte – Jeanne – Charlotte – Guy – Steven – Mila.
third day
We re-created the ancient clash between culture and nature.
A forest of animal sounds versus high fashion shopping.
When Susanne dressed me up, I felt transformed into a bear.
Doug’s instruments offer so many possibilities, not only sound wise, but also sculpturally that I wonder if we still need the paper.
Can we imagine or invent another way for the writing to happen?
The satisfaction of being upside down.
of trying without succeeding.
of sharing happy memories.
of feeling supported.
We are… together even if we follow parallel tracks and vibrate differently.
In polyphony, there are usually three voices:
- the one that narrates.
- the one that goes underneath to support.
- the one that goes higher to pull up the energy.
Walking Dartmouth.
You are like a melody!
I love to visit old graveyards. An old man collecting Canadian flags left between the gravestones. A lot of gravestones have an obelisk shape and are family graves. Wenna, 2 years old, died in the Halifax Explosion. Buddhist prayer flags in a tree for a recent ritual to commemorate those who died in the resident schools. It is one thing to visit a graveyard, but how must it feel to live in one of the houses that look out on it, every day. I remember at least once, staying in an apartment in Montreal, looking out over the Jewish graveyard and that I had to leave it because my sleep was so restless.
Like the practice, the walk creates its own narrative and patterns. In front of the post office, a memorial for those who died in the Great War. The columns in-between the engraved names have lists of places: Somme, Ypres,… bringing me back close to home. In the next block, Dartmouth funeral home next to an Escape Room.
Another pattern: workers profiting from the good weather to get on roofs or in a lift against a façade. So my gaze is pulled up, to discover all the amazing reflections on the ceiling, which interact with the reflections in my glasses.
fourth day
It is new moon tonight.
Sarah’s warm up becomes a prologue to practice.
Doug’s story of a dead hummingbird triggered my story of Jerome, which is one of my ‘standards’.
When Susanne started, we continued to be in the universe of kindergartens and pet animals.
How to learn to take care of them, like eggs that might be thrown out of plane.
I really like the verticality of this space. Something I only started to discover yesterday during and after the walk.
Susanne transformed into Jerome, with the green, Easter egg basket I dropped from the window upstairs.
I embodied Jerome with Sarah’s green yoga mat.
To learn to take care.
to iron.
to fall.
to let go.
to transform.
to become.
Lin’s ukulele soliloquy finishes the practice.
second week
December 6th. It is the 104th anniversary of the Halifax explosion today.
We created our own rituals to commemorate the dead.
It involved elements of different faiths coming together in an Easter parade.
There were moments when we were blind and didn’t know where we were or lost our balance.
But we could always reorientate listening to the shells people had given us or use the chairs to support us, creating different pathways through the space like water flowing through the holes in the roof, baptizing us again and again.
These damned floodgates again. Never ending. Always together.
Lin: Rewriting Distance is a lullaby to a party that never ends!
The public performances.
Every time and place triggers its own group dynamics and stories.
This time there are a lot of stories of our ancestors. Their trades, the houses they lived in. How they inspired and guided us.
And our children.
We are only temporary custodians in-between generations!
The practice is a lot about giving ourselves permission to rediscover our inner child and play.
The energy is very circular. There is a lot of flow, like the water that is omnipresent everywhere.
The voice practice makes us tune into each other and often the one starting the practice brings in immediately my own desire of the day.
Sarah’s pink lamp with colorful rhinestones corresponding with my desire for colour, green in particular.
Lin’s opening line, referencing the ‘heart’ graffiti on the building outside, which gives me my red thread for the day, tuning in to the irregular heartbeat of my mother.
Often the unspoken thoughts are as important as the stories we share.
