PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

     The performance of The Dip on March the 4th was a medley of different types of dances and people, each dancer bringing their own technique to the performance.  It was a night of stories, some true and some not, some spoken and some silent, all real.



     Heidi Strauss and Darryl Tracy took us on a journey and told us their story in comme deux solitudes, a story told through movement, and perhaps a story of movement.  If one tried to interpret the movement too much one could get tangled in a confusion of words and the dance seemed meaningless and disconnected.  For example, at one point near the beginning of the piece as Strauss was using her hands and gesturing near her stomach, I thought oh, ok, that must mean she has a baby.  I tried to make sense of the rest of the movements from that perspective, only to end up confused a few moments later when Tracy repeated the same movement, leaving me to guess whether the movement meant that they were both having a baby or talking about a child, or maybe it was more symoblic, as in a birth... it was at this point that I decided to let go of thought and interpretation, and just feel the movement as they were feeling it.



     And, there was certainly no shortage of movement going on.  Strauss would often go into what were seemingly fits of random movement, giving the impression of agitation and at the same time careless abandon, with legs and arms and head moving in and out, and up and down.  At this point Tracy would rush to her side and attempt to calm her, sometimes putting a gentle hand under her chin in stark contrast to the frenzied movement going on only moments before, sometimes lifting her up as her knees bent upwards in the air; always giving a sense of slowness and gentleness before the anxiousness would come again, and Strauss would run off to some other corner of the room, kicking and stretching her legs as high in the air as she could.



     So what was the story they were trying to tell, that I so naively tried to read piece by piece with my head, before realizing the power lay in the movement itself, and the willingness of my body to be still and recieve it?  I could not tell you in words, nor did I understand it in words.  Their bodies told me the story, and my own body heard it and saw it and felt it, and holds its memory.  And perhaps just as a word or a name may remind you at times of a story you had long forgotten, a cupped chin or a leg stretched in the air may create a resonance in my body and I, too, will remember the "story" that they told.



     Peggy baker gave us a story of her own, and she even named the piece clearly for all to understand - a true story.  When one thinks of a story one thinks of the traditional form of beginning, middle, and end.  But Baker gave us something else, some hybrid of movement and spoken words that defies the accepted meaning of "story", but nevertheless tells us a tale.



     Baker first started off in silence, showing us only movement, and we accepted it only as movement, feeling it as we felt all the other pieces, accepting it as a whole.  She pumped with her hands towards the ground, she smiled and made other gestures, she stamped her foot once, sharply and startlingly, and through it all we looked for no other meaning.  But then she broke the silence, and she spoke... she told us of a child, and of a mother... and as she spoke her story in words, we saw the same movements we had seen before, the same sequence, this time as echos of the words she was speaking.  We were surprised to see certain movements paired with certain words.  For example, the act of the girl writing the woman's name over and over, while crossing it out and writing mother instead, said at the same time Baker was pumping her hands towards the ground.  It made the words seem more rough, more intense than we had first assumed.  The stamp of the foot also took on new meaning as we learned that this was the mother's shame at the word step-mother.



     The entire piece had an almost desperate edge to it.  The word "mother" was the word heard behind all the other words, the word that painted all of the movement, this primal cry that is somewhere inside of us all.  This is the cry that is deemed only acceptable for very young children; surely as we become more dependent on ourselves we have no need to cry out for a "mother"... or so we would have ourselves believe.  We could not make ourselves believe that the movement had any other interpretation but the one we were given with the words, since movement can be ignored, but words cannot.  Therefore we were forced to watch, to feel, and to re-live the feeling, over and over again, as Baker repeated certain sequences in her dance.  There was no beginning or end to her story, but that didn't make it any less of a story, for the meaning was clear, even as she went back, went forward, repeated, and repeated again.



     It is not the words so much as the movement that creates in us a slightly anxious feeling at being forced to recognize this cry in ourselves.  The words only direct us, but they are not what deeply move us - it is the stretching, the pumping, the stamping, and the reaching up of arms, that move us, that cause us to feel as if we want to turn away from this poignant expression of the meaning of "mother".



     It was a night of stories.  Some true, and some not; but all very, very real.