Porous...
Furry Trunk
You are thick.
Thick and soft
Inside I feel you are light and hollow
Dead
Layers of soft wooden fibres enfold
and I hold
on
to the living part of you
which actually is not you
but is all that is living off your carcass
knitting through your surfacesss...
sssoaking in.
In response to dances in Bacalar Lagoon and Cenotes, in Mexico, April 2021
Cenote Azul
Cenote Azul
Spongey Bottom
Soft Bounce
I dance with a resurgence that comes up through my feet
In the lake, I sink a little into the sand, there I soften the pressure to feel the bounce
and I question how to put this into contact with another dancer,
how to soften at the surfaces?
given speed and impact even, how to find a soft & porous bounce back?
There are also breathing beings all around, the stromatolites are rock like, microbial reefs and the mangroves are plants, unique to Bacalar lagoon. Both living beings photosynthesise, respire and release oxygen into the water, and so we practice just breathing together in touch.
We meet, as dancers like this, being, perhaps in an unconventional way, and we practice breathing with the immediate environment and each other. Below you can see pictures of the broken pirate deck, we call it the 'pirate deck' and we occupy it, because most of the land around the lagoon has been privatised and the pirate deck is one of the only free public entry points remaining.
Manglares
photo-synesthesia
light on the water
In order to dance in the water you have to surrender and let go of tension in order to float. So floating and breathing is where I or we begin. The more I let go, the longer I can stay underwater, and the softer and more porous I become in encountering contact with others.
It's easier to release my body in waters that are warm, where the sun is shining, which makes the sea the lagoons and water caves, that are called cenotes in Mexico, so perfect. As I lay back and let go into a dance, I see light and coloured formations, and I wonder whether we human bodied beings may too, photo-synthesise?
two membranes
cloud time
silence
...there I discover some sort of cloud time, where its quiet, a sort of out of time, out of space sort of place.
Emilie Conrad, the founder of a Somatic Practice called Continuum Movement, considers the embryonic process as ongoing throughout our lives. This idea is based on the principle of fluid resonance, the idea that when fluids move and even subtly vibrate, they affect the liquid crystalline structures of other neighbouring fluid filled cells. This resonance proposes that we maybe be affected on vibrational terms by the presence of other bodies of water and also, that within our internal sea we carry with us the memory and consciousness of other times and universal spaces. As she describes...
"Each undulation, every ripple, every exhale into the welcoming dissolve is a message from a greater world. It conveys its story through the felt sense of movement, sensation, and perhaps feeling tones that we are yet to name. But more than anything it allows us to merge our consciousness with it. I call this "cosmic drowning" (Conrad, 2001, Life on Land, p.11)
Embryo
