Heloise Gold “And Now What” poem
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?
Tags: Heloise Gold review