Movin' Easy Dancewear

Deborah Hay, No Time to Fly, Austin 040710 When cataclysmic creates this island that we are and we leave our glacial remains in our path, then as now we deconstruct and call it clean.

When we are an island and a family of islands and we disappear into the sea, we claim to never have been anywhere.

When we have entered every chasm, innersanctum, Kasbah, tabernacle, when we have traveled every labyrinth, pyramid tomb, stairway to every temple, when we have taken safari upon safari into every capillary into every plasmic configuration of gland, pump, and organ, then as now we can only stand in the personal loss of our limitations, listen and watch.

Watch Cult of Color by Ballet Austin on Time Warner http://www.balletaustin.org/newsletter/january10/cult.php

Extraordinary dance like Cult of Color takes me to another dimension.  Thinking becomes feeling, questioning becomes flying, sliding is definitely taking me toward a portal to the unknown.  Put Harry Potter in the satchel and get ready for a real ride.

Don’t miss Cult of Color the next time Ballet Austin Dance Company presents it live.

“Alone, alone”  Kathy Dunn Hambrick Dance Company 032510

Alone, I know your face.  Striking, ready to leap, bold, brash, giddy or flippant.  Alone, I know how you stare with a stone frozen unwillingness to look.

Lone male captures the immense space of his aloneness, defining and honoring it.  Yes, Alone is the one word I will not look up in a dictionary.  Yes, Alone is the one experience I know like the back of my hand.  Yes, Alone is the one dance I do alone jazz, tap, or modern.

Alone, yes I know the pain and I train myself to fling the sweat of my loneliness while I unwind the torque I entwine within.  Alone, yes I know the vulnerable swallow that could drink in an ocean.  Alone, yes I have clambered for you in long arduous meditations, in songs on lonely mountains, in solitary dances.  Yes, I have too many times used separation to reestablish my claim to loneliness.

Then in the final hour, the music fades to dusk and the lone dancer caresses the aloneness, brushing it, stretching back into it, calling all loneliness from the temple into a ready heart.

And yes I can be thankful for the silence within myself, thankful for the stillness that I share, thankful for the gift of courage to reach out and touch my own life as I touch a partner, a mate, a friend.  Aloneness then becomes my own friend that I can share.

Ballet Afrique Contemporary Dance, choreography by Leah Smiley Tubbs  Preview 3/11/10 Salvage Vanguard Theater

“Through the Silence” dancer Danielle Martin, music Booka Shade

Palms spread on side of rock face.  Body bundle builds, broad stride, large roll.  Enter freefall, tall still, spun wilderness, spun into warbled threads of bread.  Fleeting eyes spreading yarns armed with elbowed pleas.

Spread bold yarns, told through toes into rolled threads passed beyond.  Tales told brushed across forearms and bottoms of feet.  New born cloth run, threaded, and bundled.

“At Play”  danced by Company, music Bobbie McFerrin

 Sister Sister, oogoogah wa bah.  Sister Sister, bah bah oogawa boobahwa  Sister Sister, Hop plop straddle rattle prattle, not to settle, not a saddle, Sister Sister hide a gaggle, glide to spec-tacle, Whee a raffle.  Sister Sister Lather gallop, ripple back, flying knees, shina slap a mattle, Sister Sister Mamma shees, fall and giggle, kickie slapping napping rolling crawling,  Whee Mamma come play with me.

 “Thoughts of You” dancers Stacey Baldon, Danielle Martin, Leah Tubbs, music Ahn Trio

 Three voices meet around an arabic campfire.  Three pairs of eyes stare straight into the flames.  Each brave body comes from the ends of the earth.  All songs sung right here.  All visions flung, all dances begun, all courage to see right here, right here, right here.

 In one voice, one body, pelican perfection meets choppy waves for the catch.  In voice two, one body, propeller spins desert air reaching for flight.  In voice three, one body, funky forest sounds capture ear, heart, imagination.  All songs sung, all bodies flung right here, right here, right here.

“Circles”  dancers Sade Jones, Stacey Baldon, Danielle Martin, Adrianna Ray,  music Bobby McFerrin

 LOOOk  ooah, spin me into the shooom, show me the truth, LOOOk ooah, show me falling into the sheenda.  Ooah, confidence, balancing here.  Show me turning my head to the light, turning my head looking into the night floor.

Splash me into a yoga sunrise.  Careen me flat into an arabic carpet.  Spread my back carved into a mosque calling.  Stop action my knees bending into water.

“Reset”  dancer Stacey Baldon,  music Moby

Deepest night, sleep disturbed, twisted limbs bristled twigs, sprouting then retreating deep into nutrient earth before sending standing shoots seeking cliffs edge with toes. Crackling icy winds, reaching precipice, spreaded wings hide eyes in the cross hairs of life.

Deepest blinding night, bamboo bent takes the blast, crashing into the cracks of the earth.  Only toes can find the heels to guide ascent and descent.  Only bamboo can rattle enough, shaking arms to break free so that spine can speak.

 “Nina Remixed”  danced by Company,  music Nina Simone

Break the spell of history’s kneeling bell.  Nina’s flowering culture captivating new nurture.  Swan shoulders beat below sweet sun’s heat.  Each succulent pulse surges beyond mammas and poppas rowing below decks hiding tears for suffering children.

Afrique’s throbbing gaze, vigilant species on journey’s return into the heart of God’s loving palms.  Slowly spreading toes forever extending legs to break open the horizons beyond the sea’s edge.  Committed grooves brush aside fears, kick the sides of earth, finding life rustling out of tight rib cages, shattering old vocabularies swung from trees and leaping through broken twig nights.

Nina Simone bursts through to the other side of love taking us with her.  Smooth ocean velvet raisins into the spinning sunshine, finding the ripples to touch foot palms.  Fresh lines of horizons bleeding sweet blood spreading tartness of butter on life’s swinging hips, spinning the long awaited breeze into the stillness of new seas, fathoms deep willing to receive.

Boom chi chi chi ah.  From deep forests, from long deserts, from mountains, and sea shores.  Drums sing.  Gut speaks.  Thighs bend.  Pelvic thrusts.  Toes come under solid frame.  Woman of reaching.  Woman of seething.  Woman of standing.  Woman of commanding, all turn together and sing their bodies through their very bones.

Music takes me for a walk on these lonely streets, yes  my elbows choose their own way, my rotating arms state what finally needs to be said.  I stand.  I see.  Yes, I swing into the power of the heartful falling seasons.  Now I look into the spring within me where I am not hurt, where I feel my toes under me.

Right from my heart, I give everything I’ve got.  From here I see.  From here I open my heart.

Ballet Afrique Contemporary Dance  Preview 3/11/10 Salvage Vanguard Theater

Second piece “Through the Silence” by Leah Smiley Tubbs, dancer Danielle Martin

Palms spread on side of rock face.  Body bundle builds, broad stride, large roll.  Enter freefall, tall still, spun wilderness, spun into warbled threads of bread.  Fleeting eyes spreading yarns armed with elbowed pleas.  Spread bold yarns, told through toes into rolled threads passed beyond.  Tales told brushed across forearms and bottoms of feet.  New born cloth run, threaded, and bundled.

Clear and firm in her direction, she blossoms one Pilates move into the next and I only go along for the ride.  Do you dance I ask and she says she is too old at twenty or something less.  So I say, “Well you know there is more to know and especially if you dance, your teaching will expand all this creativity you are molding for me and all the rest.”

So the future flashed before our eyes and there she was at The Pilates Studio Austin leading me once more beyond where my body wanted to go.  “What you said about dance is true, I am really feeling stronger in my moves.”  She said it without knowing the smile that lit up her whole body.  And then she let it slip, the belly dance that took so much concentration to ride the tide, the ballet that passed the brilliance of her body into thin air, and the splash of energy in learning Salsa first time at Copa’s.  Then She said,”I think I will go learn Salsa.  Uptown Dance is right near my house.”

I think I will begin the One Move Dance School where I negotiate a price with every dancer I meet, maybe I need to barter or wash their feet or maybe a three dollar bill or a twenty if it came to me.  What more delight could I find in the aisle of the grocery store or a hidden studio in their school just to take the infinity of a moment that might become ten thousand mini-moments in my full day.  Beware then dancer that I may ask you standing in line at the bank or to rise from the Pilates machine or please not at the stop light.

Toni Bravo, Is There a Heaven  May 2009

Me and my Ginger and my favorite little ones all four of the three girls and the one boy all six or seven or eight, we all went to the Umlauf Sculpture Garden for Toni’s moving dance performance.  I took no notes except to keep up with each one of us and what we were watching and when we were moving from place to place.

It was a nice crowd of serious enjoyers of dance moving quickly to find the next dance coming out of the trees and between the molded sensuous and passionate bodies of Umlauf.  “Why do they not have any clothes, Granma?”

We sat in the grass and walked the paths.  We cuddled all together wondering and sometimes waiting.  Dancers and their ambient music painted the rolling nooks of nature with thick and thin strokes and splashes of color washes.  We were all dipped into French settings of lightness and sadness, “Are they telling a story?” into raucous meetings in the park, “Are they mad at each other, Granma?” into powerful corridors of war by Hindi woman and Western man, “Can we go now?” into Toni’s signature conversations of playful interaction and comments on too many monkeys, “What’s she doing, Granma?”

Then we arrived at an open plain layered with rock housing many young ballet and modern dancers.  We tucked around each other on the side and absorbed the warm and glowing movements of the dancers all dressed in white.  The imagery and the dancing was very satisfying and kept us all still for a little while.

The connections between the dancers seemed to help us to bind together sitting there, the boy leaning back on me and one little one leaning on each side with the independent one sitting on the edge of the rock taking in every move.  That worked until the boy started making buzzing noises with his mouth and the one on the edge kept saying, “Be quiet.”  After three times of no change with requests, I took him off to the side and that broke the concentration of all except the one on the edge.  They followed me and we ended up in a fire ant bed stinging and brushing and whapping away while the dance continued with such beauty and power.

Afterwards I asked what their favorite part was.  The one on the edge said, “I liked the old woman.”  The older woman I think was in black.  Throughout this section, she watched the younger dancers with a serious expression.  When she came center, she commanded the arena with powerful and convincing moves.

I had to run for cold wet towels to soothe the fire ant bites and that was all the dancing for us.  We had to have water and a break.  We passed a poignant dancer portraying a priest and made our way to the gallery where they watched a showing of  the Umlauf sculptures.  The dances did their job because all four recognized each sculptures, “I saw that one.”  “I saw that one.”

I checked my pocket and realized I had laid my camera down in the park so I ran outside.  Half way down the first walk way I was called back by the boy’s father who had picked it up.  On the way back I got the gift of the performance ending with the whole gang of dancers in white moving slowly toward the audience.  The feeling was the anticipation of friends and loved ones coming together, slowly approaching the dancers interacted with each other and with us.

Well, we had our heaven today and went straight for Amy’s ice cream.

Danger:  Dance Ahead

And Now What Happens, produced by Heloise Gold

Watch your head.  I mean really watch your head.  You are about to enter a zone from which you may not return.

I am viewing still in my head the show by Heloise Gold and Beverly Bajema of January 2009 and Heloise’s Fusebox Festival show at some time in the Spring of 2009.  As you can see, I am slightly disoriented months later and am writing to distill the experience of this earthly ethereal choreography.

My mind reels from watching the two in January and the variety of performers in the Fusebox show.  It is as if my palate is being asked to process the smoothest textured mud pie that actually has the sensation, the taste, and the emotional transport of the finest chocolate.

But let me get back to the danger warning with which I began.  Just as an example, Ginger and I have never recovered from a show Heloise did 10 years ago.  She performs these full body blasts of bird sounds that wake up the soul.  I would guess that we woke up in some way because since that day we communicate with each other by using “peep, peep.”  That is the way we find each other in the grocery store and greet each other on the phone.  That would be bad enough but we refer to each other as “Mr. and Mrs. Peep.”

That is only one part of the Dance Danger as I am sure our hard drive is permeated with movements and sideways glances beyond our awareness.

And we are not the only ones.  There are people all over this planet flaring their nostrils and communicating as if they were pigs.  This was happening pre-Miss Piggie and pre-piggie world everywhere with pets and toys.  Piggie phobia folk may not want to continue with my exploration of the depths of pigdom.

Just as an example of the danger to others, listen to the language of the January audience afterwards.  Sorry, I do not have a “before” example to compare what they were like before the performance.  Here are their words, “arugula beauty” “mesmerizing perspiration”  “happy fancy”  “laughing variety”  “primordial yeah” and “pump infinitesimal.”

So much for the warnings.  Let’s launch into my poems which are the only way I can begin to process the slippery sublimity of these dances.

The Fusebox show begins

Chrysanthemum by Heloise goes beyond description

Have a Nice Life–How does a group of meshlings become a wingness and a palmness pulling the wind into the setting sun?

Lauren entrance–How does one come to this state?  How does one come to this smoothness, a skill of slipping inside and outside a transparent skin, immulating the juices of the innards blending, melting, and molting all states into lightness and springing that does not touch the earth.

Meg entrance–How does one become as casual as a child’s knee hanging over a creek bottom?

Elaine entrance–How does one become the “Oh” personality of the “O” movement?

Heloise entrance–How does a soaring bird bank her flight beyond the horizon?  White inhales sought the sender, unfurling, exhaling more white into a flight of surrender.

The Sound of Paper

My mind wipes clean everything and returns with Heloise appearing as a dream in a huge white paper costume.  Heloise’s encasement of paper is 8 feet high and wide wide, designed by Beverly Bajema to obliterate any previous image or concept in the human visual or emotional vocabulary.  Here is my commentary:

Once there was a whiteness, a brightness, a thirdness of arm that had, yes, surrendered to the windness, leaning white lines feathered crackles into a million mile homage.  Only stillness will arrive.

The huge white costume home of the dancer is complete, quintessential, so much largeness of itself.  What are you doing on this earth, great white one?  So much of itself, a face beyond an ancient face, an arm as large and round as a serpent, a skirt and fringe trickling the ground.  The face of Heloise radiates as an ancient one generating more and more whiteness.  It moves, every movement magnified in the universe, making a crackling sound emanating from the forest itself, a growling, an unraveling anticipation.

I am startled by my cell phone that I had failed to turn off.  It had to ring at this crucial quiet moment.  I fumble in my pocket and instead of the phone, my wad of keys falls to the floor with a loud clunk.  Devastated I am stunned and still in an altered state from this dance moment.  Heloise continues an infinitesimally slow turn occasionally using a third arm.  The audience recovers somehow from my chaos of sound, the lights go to black, and the show goes on.

Duet–Julie entrance with a tube

Can a meeting of two come due more alive?  Rubble troubled slap and rap could have cuddled slip or clap.  Stiletto pointatello.  Dribble, slide in, then find a wall and riddle falling metaphor, stallion ridden, slid spit split behind over with and off.  A lean.  A break.  Standing alone pounced up a wall, strike and throw away into an openness beyond any yearn or shallow rattling wall.  As two become due, due and two slip like the river through.  They listen and speak as if two and due never were, yet there they are slithering into the heart of the wave, emerging with a wild single sound something like  a melody of rocks clacking in rapids

Bottles and Birds–Heloise enters humbled with French horn and saxophone

Sometimes mining requires a long slow spelunker’s journey into craggy tiny passages sometimes in darkness, always in the vacuous space between explosive and surprising sound.  Like a garden, once the ground has felt the slow touch of the spade all around and experienced its underside freshly exposed, then a surprising “now” sends its aroma to the spelunker ready to ply his luck at the mine.  Tools like a saxophone noodling with a French horn become one with the spelunker and float with them into the vacuous nothingness that began once the fresh earth aroma arrived at the tintillated hairs of nostrils.  The body of the spelunker has no choise at this point but to laugh or cry into the flight down or up the rope into an oblivion of lightness.  The vocal chords likewise have no choice but to call out as a soaring bird calling for it clearest echo.  At long last or short or absence of duration, the treasure of the hunt, the ore of yore or other poetic click or clack dissolves and runs like water into around and through the earth, the air, the light until only one thing remains and that is delight as if that were the grail at the end of the trail or other such nostalgias.  Only the sound of wind remains, tintalatory sweet swift soft rippling.  And once the vibration flutters the hairs of the ears, the spectrums of the eyes, the nostrils, the dermal pairs, the secretion’s mares, the gastral squirts, and the heartal squoosh., still all that is left is delight in the wind.

Pigz R Us–Questions for a piggie, both mechanical and humane?

Well, if you were the symbol of life, well yes you are pink and almost ooshy like the squooshy gooshy around an open heart, and yes you are just as insistent and loud and you do like to snuggle down into mud like our most precious ancestors and their plankton friends.  Well I have to admit your squeal is seminal inside my brain calling once and for all now to have it all, promising to fall into an avalanche of tears unless life gives you more life.  So, well what of your symbol of mating and courting and dreaming and simply smiling in the mud.  Could you symbol those too?

Poems by Tim Hurst

Never Too Far, Produced and choreographed by Deborah Tate

Trumpet Star Spangled Banner begins and I am immediately puzzled.  The feeling in the room is different from other performances.  There is a quality from the sound of the trumpet that hints that something really good is about to happen.

What is the difference?  A singer’s pose, a dancer’s presence, a body of wholeness, a voice of stillness, enticing life, connecting with God at the speed of light.

What is the difference?  There is a stillness in these bodies, man and woman; a resting that passes desperation on their way to a higher power.  There is a quietness of reaching within.  There is a softness, a firmness, a powerful spark always at work.  There is a connection to brightness pulsing within and showing itself fully that goes beyond excellence, beyond sexiness, and beyond the dancing and singing within my own heart.

So the story begins and the son is told a home always awaits him.  Gone away, he sings his songs of stench and emptiness.  His angels come sliding on his dark cloud.  With fishing gear and dancing shoes, they call him from his knees and ask for his “yes.”

The son sings with his whole being.  Only a man of such huge wholeness could bring the quest for forgiveness through his stomach, his entrails boiling with his “yes.”  His singular angel of triumph is called to thaw his frozen sun, to raise his broken chest, to make sure all the anguish is spun and flung into the hands of God.  His angel finishes with a walk that washes all his pathways back home.

Here is the real steadiness I see in these bodies, these men, these women.  They know nothing will ever separate them from their loving Father.  They will never be too far to come back.  The full round sound of the trumpet calls in gratitude for the setting sun.

After a pause, dancers bring us back with Glorious song.

Dancers’ joyful noise again captivates wholeness, stillness centers itself to spin, ribbons awake the space, fans surprise the heartbeat, and unison surges to spell the purpose of fullness.

Singers call, “can you buy me a resolution…old me, new me…I love to ask for that funny little game we play…amazing grace.”

Duet dancers run to Turn it Out.  Here we are.  Bring it.  Tell it.  No, don’t.  OK knees feel it.  Here we are.  Tell it.  No, wait.  OK now tell it, kick it, leap it.  Now fly.  We are the heat.  Here we stay.  We can bring it quiet, spin it loud, smile it right, live it.

Dancing chief comes to speak of the Promise.  Her torso explodes across the sky.  Her palms cool the contour of the earth.  Her complete energy proclaims.  Her footprints are from her maker.

A poets’ message for me:  “finally get away from the madness, just call my name.”  “You can “stand in the midst and let God have his way.”

Dancers reprise and respond with Marvelous.

Marvelous, the message flows, connects.  I will see space carved to the end of the earth, movement redeemed, all given.

Marvelous, the message flows, ignites.  I will see fire’s center, flames of light, life given.

Marvelous, the message flows.  I will see me set free, elbows unclasped, torsos unleashed, fullness forever.  Marvel.

Piano washes away all the stillness of the sea waiting for you and me.  The quiet is God blessing our own.  And we hear the echo of the poet again, “I am done holding on.  Today I am standing on your promises.”