His name is…
There are these days in hospital work where by you are reminded of the preciousness and porousness of the body.The mystery of what happens when movement becomes the medium for communication, when it becomes the messenger for the wordless places that live inside us.
Amongst the joy and the delight, which strangely enough there is a great deal of in the hospital, there are these days that we meet the tragedy and tenderness of being.
Today was one of those days.
The privilege of being alongside people in these liminal spaces of change, often a groundless place where people are in some way falling apart.
The arts can provide a way of being together that dives under the words and deep under our rational selves, to reveal a way of relating that is nothing short of mysterious. Perhaps the arts provides a context for the fragments of self flying in the air to just land for the briefest of moments.
The arts has this way of holding us in the middle of the riddle of our human experience,
it’s so often a way to carry meaning without having to utter a word..
We entered the ward then slowly found a way onto the bay and alongside our introductions, and began dancing.
It seems clear to me that what we may be doing is making space through our bodies. Making space, into the space that exists, but a different kind of space, something embodied, something breathing , something slower perhaps.
A space that allows the patients to rest their eyes on movement, just as if you were looking at a bird through the window from your bed,
flying through the sky.
The patient was asleep in the left-hand corner of the bay, head hanging with weight, We finished moving gently and a few patients clapped at the end of our dancing,
this patient woke up.
“What just happened” she said and I explained that we are dancers and we’ve just been dancing.
We walked closer towards her and she looked at us, and in a clear and unhesitant voice said “my son has just died five days ago.. She offered this news to us ‘ I thought you should know’ she said.
In that moment the texture of the air changed, everything slowed. Then, the heart stepped right forward, called into being.
I said how sorry I was, she said, her son loved dancing. He was 40 and She told us his name.
I heard his name fill the air, and I repeated the name back and said
That this dance was for him..
in that moment time slowed. It evaporated through the window above her head. What transpired in the next 5 minutes was a dance of dedication.
Clearly and simply her words had weaved this place, a portal for a ritual of sorts, one that would emerge in response.
Felt not thought, not planned or considered.
One that the body, like clay moulding itself like an offering, some kind of moving flock that could hold and shape,
but most importantly move around and with, such tragic news,
We put the music on and stepped back and immediately assumed what looked like a shape of wings ascending.
Up.. breathe…
As I followed the gaze of my arm, I feel Louise’s arm do the same.
Breathe..
Heart was soaring, shaking..
I saw the tree outside the hospital move,
and I saw the wind move, and I imagine this man in his breathing body,
in his life,
and his mother’s grief, in this moment like a flock of starlings shaping our very gestures – a flicker of a hand, an arcing of the arms..
breathe….. out..
A widening to the end of the horizon of things..
We danced as she looked on , resting her eyes onto our moving bodies..
into some moving form ,the gestures in some small way weaving something visible into the invisible
Traces of Remembrance..
The end of the dance she said I can’t tell you how important that was. He and his friends would have loved that.
I somehow knew it in my body.
The time had a sense to it that is rare, a sense that we were being danced rather than dancing.
At the moment we began a nurse stepped on to the bay, stood and witnessed, the patients in the bed opposite turned their gaze towards us,
I could feel it
They were all witnesses in someway.. the dance was created together..
weaved out of the necessity of the moment
So much of this work is about the invisible, becoming visible . It’s about resonance.
and the unknown
the unthought,
the unthinkable.
It’s about meeting through the body, and responding through the body to the moment. It’s letting the body be the ear and the mouth that dances.
The dance is often a transitory form that shapes the space in a way that may make it breathe.
Perhaps it is a way of revealing the tenderness that often goes into hiding when our way of being together gets stuck on the surface of things.
just there in the holding of her hand at the end..
and her waterlogged eyes
Just holding the hand of what was a stranger 5 minutes ago
How any role I found myself in, melted away and
we we were just there suspended in the real
knowing we probably never see each other again
just there the joy of being able to offer something
just there in the knowing how we need each other to feel ourselves
Nothing to solve nothing to get better
All to be with
