Today was the day that the stories came..
Standing in the foyer of this massive theatre with the doors opening at 10am. I began dancing.
Somehow dancing into the idea of becoming visible to passers by.
Somehow holding myself as a moving, breathing question that people can wonder with..
In some way I feel transparent, vulnerable, skinless, like a weather system moving into a village..
Where the villagers may be unprepared..
I sit with a group of men,
they speak Arabic into google translate and sitting next to them I read the words as they appeared translated..
‘who are you, and why are you dancing the sad’
Both questions I didn’t really have an answer to-
so I handed one man the large stone..
he held it, looked at me and I looked at him
I took it away then he felt the lightness return
Then he smiled.. and nodded… in the middle of our gesturing
something was shared.
Somewhere beyond the place of language..
From a distance the faces I read walking through the door look unsure, confused.
So I say hello..in the middle of the dance..
Hello
Then it all softens.
I am no longer an apparition and some people walk toward me.
The children arrive again showing me the way..
I invite them to sit alongside me with their massive sandwiches in their little hands.
They told me they had just been swimming.
They begin..
I begin working with them…
we hold the rocks,
they draw pictures of dogs , so many dogs, the ones who had died perhaps, and the ones who were alive..And a the odd picture of a squid… appears..
A young woman arrives with a friend.. we all hold some stones and she begins talking..
She lost a friend to suicide . She spoke about how when she died how hard it was to make sense of anything….anymore…
So she drew a body, an outline of GOLD….
A holding form for the absence..
People came…
crossed the threshold tentatively to speak with me as I was dancing…
Dancing allows me to build some invisible bridges into space, towards another….
So that language can then walk across, slowly.
So we can be together
This is very ordinary.
A liminal space where perhaps, the usual rules of how we are supposed to be together as strangers no longer hold.
We can let go of the performance of having it all together.
So that there is enough room for the real to emerge.
“ I grew up up in a funeral home’ you kind of got used to the idea of loss.. the inevitability…
“I saw the stones on your body and I felt the weight in mine” I know it..
This last week I have been thinking a lot about the role of the artist these days..
Often I have no idea…..
This piece called Grief encounters I’m playing with here was born out of this thought
and wonder about how you practice loss
So that you can get really good at loving.
Because they both live alongside each other.
The living and dying.. they always have.. and will always
Today whatever happened
I know I was somehow graced by an inkling
That being held with these strangers for that little moment
Was what I was supposed to be doing,
its where the meaning emerged.
through this thing called art and creativity
We were together..
