Birds, Women, and War
/That first weekend of shelter-in-place, I took a class over zoom that was taught by a dancer living in San Fransisco.
Guess who I saw in that dance class?
Breanna Rogers!
Some of you know that name, and maybe even remember the dances Bre and I made together, from 2005-2009.
Remember the one where we duct-taped food to a dining room table? Or the one where we danced on, around, and inside my Suburu Outback? The one where we hung parasols from the ceiling and had wash tubs filled with cornmeal that we danced in? The one in the river?
And one of my favorite dances we made, that I'm pretty sure only 5 people ever saw, Birds, Women, and War. We had on big rubber knee pads that buckled in the back that I borrowed from Long’s Gardens. That's all I remember about that dance, but I'm assuming we danced in that dance? I’ll have to ask Bre.
After Bre and her family moved to Arizona in 2009, it got harder and harder to collaborate, and we eventually fell out of touch.
Anyway, so I saw Breanna on zoom that first weekend in March
(which is really so serendipitous: Although I planned on taking all the dance classes, all the time, from all over the world that are now being offered through zoom, that is the only one I've taken so far, and probably ever will. And out of all of those dance classes, that's the one Bre decided to take too? I mean, I"m not really into the woo woo, but I don't know, that feels pretty woo woo to me...)
and I started waving wildly at her little zoom box to get her attention. It took me a minute to understand why 35 people I didn’t know were wildly waving back.
Bre and I had our own zoom call a few days later and decided, what the hell, let’s make a dance together over zoom.
More than a decade has gone by since we’ve made a dance, and as the old saying goes, it feels like no time has passed.
We are starting our rehearsal process as we've always done: one of us dancing, and the other one writing and watching. Then we switch roles.
We usually do that for a few months until a pattern begins to emerge in our writing and our dancing.
I'm so curious to find out what the patterns, repetitions, and rituals of this dance will be.
Here’s what I wrote this past Saturday, watching Breanna dance. The writing is dark, I guess, but it's kinda a dark time, so anyway...
Watching Bre, I:
The slowness of a world that is crumbling.
Small little crashes here and there, in corners no one sees.
Beautiful paintings on the walls of women dancing in braids.
Those paintings erased and the braids undone.
Fallow fields where bodies lie,
bones articulated out through the skin.
The slowness of a body finding its way to earth, crying
“Plague, Plague, Plague!”
The weight of that body as it pulls itself back up again, crying,
“Plague, Plague, Plague!”
The braids and the arms, whipping through space,
running like mad to grab hold of branches that are breaking.
Scooping out the mud from the mouths that will not close.
Packing that mud into suitcases that slowly bust open at the seams.
Bodies adrift and floating.
Watching Bre, II:
The secret pockets of a body unfurling.
Your skin falls on the floor, and right away you pick it back up, draping it over the kitchen cabinets, so that the children will know where you are when they come home from school.
Blankets of your skin, stacked in a basket by the hamper in the bathroom.
Tilting the body off its axis, not so it falls, but so that it re-emerges as a stone, washed by the river.
Steady trust of impulse, of dreams, of washing away.
Steady trust of imagination to guide a spiraling body into those dreams.
Birds, Women, and War.
Do you remember that dance?
I can’t remember
where it went.
Hollow bodies, those birds.
Falling bodies, the women,
sliding down the walls, one after the other after the other,
into the river.
All the women
in the river
lifting each other up for air.
Beautiful bounty of bodies rippling through a world that is falling.
The silver lining of reconnecting with Bre to dance and write during this time has been so sweet.
With Warmth,
Joanna