Rehearsal Log: Beau

Poem 2024

 

When I have gone,

then the blue shines from

paths cut naturally through land,

blue deep

with black marbling.

If the darkness is strong,

blue is the horizon.

It grows with each corner crossed

as we learn it.

The idea of finding ourselves by getting lost is age old -

To sea endless lonely,

momentum of water and

rivulets across glass,

windshield with drips 

and cold on a small ship, a vessel

on the platform above the ocean.

The low and the high and the sting of the water on my skin.

Water clinging to a buoy so

you can try to separate.

Water is not always blue.

And what flowers are truly blue?

The truth is everything always gets mixed -

is all the same really.

 

When the crisp air reminds us of lungs,

particles bind together out of interest

and the complex feeling of now knowing what comes next

spill.

The way the body organized is different than that -

We are built as intertwining systems of soft parts,

a self-contained knowing

based on how we feel,

items in your space by color or shape.

but that is just you.

It is the puzzlement and precarious edge -

The far edge.

It is the desire for certainty and instead it is the ending of something sure.

But can we keep the binding cycling?

We are organized and the body is primary in all of it.

We’re training ourselves to think through parts we wouldn’t usually -

Each organ tissue muscle bone is separate.

We want to find the crevices,

we want to find the far edges of our minds to connect to the larger consciousness.

One of three.

 

When blue undertones come through as you

and when the fire is

blue blending with white,

a blue note.

Hot burning blue flares lick

pure

so clearly can we see

an essentialness that brings us back where we started.

The only way home is through -

The end is the beginning.

We don’t understand it -

That action is spooky.

Craving order in a chaotic world

but we see it with dissection.

Chaotic at once

militant.

What can you do to stop yourself from breaking down in the face of almost heresy?

 

When blue is gray,

we march down secret passageways with goal in mind,

can we find a musk that is our own?

A small human -

Humans so small choosing again to cross

the far edge as darkness with

light in the center

shades.

Blue glow deep in pockets,

edge is light.

Smell their humanness -

It is primary

like sky 

white with a sheen of blue.

Sky stayed on the edge

out from under orange.

What is the manifesting?

 

When we set off to wander we must have an idea of landmarks.

A hero brings a sword to bear in all obstacles that hinder growing light.

We bob blue and small

again to another bit of land.

The usual scores of our lives apply to wandering travel -

We need to just go at times,

we need to stop at others.

We must pack or find food,

we must stop to eat and evacuate.

Organize the physical.

Can we get comfortable with the not knowing,

ease towards a dark

flow,

and in the dreaming imagine selves divine?

We love to dream -

We create a constraint and then take it for granted.

Impossible to think we can even get away from landmarks.

Ancestral grief traces its way through us

with the trodden path.

 

When we go off on our own they are with us,

connecting to the vague journey of a midwestern intellectual.

Songs of the ancestors distracting us the moment where our steps could diverge -

We cannot know whose foot has touched down before because it is possible that a particular spot hasn’t been touched for a long time.

The choice is not final but it is a forward push -

How do you keep yourself steaming into a future of the inevitable?

Everyone has rules that dictate our behavior -

Finding the edge of consciousness has never been my goal.

Getting lost in the thinking of my body has and is -

It’s usually the ancestors who provide us with the container.

We do need all the ancestors we can get -

And water that we drink in great gasping gulps.

Blue is aspiration of air -

Bone is pink dries to 

life

copied on photostatic paper.

Blue of a sky with fully

white clouds, no silver lining

and no gray.

 

When we see her in a blue silk,

let her fill you with Blue -

Let the dripping of Goddess spill out.

Bring your God into you -

It’s a gravity that isn’t spatial.

It’s centered so the far

parts of your

wandering arteries or capillaries

choose to sing to Blue.

Knowing when is the wisdom -

Knowing how to spot the knowing is God.

Do we know ourselves through blood?

Know yourself -

cerulean

rather than purple.

You have the dreams.

Blue gives back in spades,

But once you are gone, it's gone.

It is fleeting really as 

stepping on spongy moss of these woods.

 

When I’m blue then blue is gray.

Blue is dripping days.

Blue is the deep -

the dropping of pretense.

Blue is the reminder of space,

blue is also the reminder of the coldness of infinite space -

the heart stopping chill of winter.

Blue is deepening into the void.

Blue is the only place where you can feel simultaneously comforted and cold -

they call it the blues because it means something truly melancholy -

the unrequited love.

Blue is the harvest moon -

is maybe Least Heat Moon.

Blue is the collapse -

the callous disregard for fellow feelings.

Blue is the systematic measure of failures -

much is only offensive when it is foreign.

Blue is the facet of crystal that infinitely prisms.

Blue is the drop zone.

Blue is the heroic push to ignore the ignominy of death,

the dead end is just a reminder to breathe.

Blue is the egg from the robin that cracks with ecstatic joy in spring.

Blue is the passing of a great swarm of birds in a rush of direction -

the skirt blowing in the wind sea against

gravity and ongoing blue out.

Blue is the frisky -

the great push into life.

Blue is the hidden desire -

the neckline

the silk covered buttons.

Blue is the hollow feeling -

the desiccated feeling.

Blue is a forgotten place -

it’s exciting in its decrepit,

it’s the unknown in it that is so attractive.

Blue is the ache deep in the pelvis.

Blue is the pussywillow in bloom -

uncapturable.

 

When winter is too long

and the small going

blue seeps out from under the happiest of days,

I want to lean into somebody -

ease into shifting light,

I want to feel their salty skin -

ease into your bath alone,

who bathed in blue came out.

The depths of the snow

makes me blue -

You feel so familiar and so knowing.

We are only ever blue in the morning.

We want the decaying home.

We can finish off the edges without simple visions of what might be.

There is a blossoming that happens when we bring patience -

Maybe it’s about time and mutuality.

​

 

 

Journal Excerpts 2020

 

The original prompt for the solo exploration:  Follow the initiations below to create unexpected physical pathways. Shifts of weight, locomotion, direction and level changes are at your discretion.  Pause frequently to recall where you have been. Breathing keeps the traveling gentle. This deep diving into the tracks of movement leads us in, keep that burrowing but also keep looking out too (internal commitment + external engagement). Work through the list until you lose interest. Start over if desired.  

I went back to this prompt in an open and non-judgmental way, moving from one initiation point to the next. It felt like burrowing, and was more satisfying than any of our recent investigations… made me wonder if we are trying too hard. The complexity that we add is admirable and has given us a refined skill set, but I'm starting to wonder if it is stifling.  I wonder what a version that dances through the original prompt over and over again would feel like: Work through the list until you lose interest. Start over if desired.

 

I felt something that was coming up in rehearsal this weekend together, something about leaning into the impasse rather than skirting around it. When I move away from a trouble spot it always felt forced or inauthentic, but when the next landmark took me further into the knot then it was most satisfying.  Heat Moon has "axioms of the blue road" peppered through the text.  Maybe this can guide us in our further shaping…  Blue Road Axioms:  Ball Rolling, Jorge Suerat, Wafting, Noticing, Wringing, Isolated Floor, Moving the ground

 

Trouble starting and unfocused working- reminds me of the rainy days for Least Heat Moon- No vista or interesting story, just canned foods and solitude. There is something ordinary in it all… You always talk about the magic of dailiness, or something like that.

 

Benoit shared his new sound with us today. I started on the floor with the sound, hearing found sounds of the forest - which reminded me strongly of our film, and being in the woods by Stockton with the brook running and the crunch of  leaves. Beniot’s sound is so spacious- allows me to wander, not quite guiding myself in any particular direction. Like all good blue highways rambles I discovered what I think are gems of new understanding:  I started thinking of each landmark not as a landmark but what it is - right, left, left side of rib cage, pelvic floor, etc. I realized that I normally just move to the general area for each landmark, and for some of the joints tune into their particular action, but rarely do I consider their function, what they do for the body.  I think this is important to the score:  the right ear hears! the diaphragm breaths! the left SI is tension between the sacrum and pelvis! the left clavicle is three dimensional, and a joint, and delicate!

 

Excerpts 2018

 

I found that I was shifting between ways of accessing the landmarks, sometimes hitting them directly like dart to board, sometimes slowly accessing them through new pathways in the body, other times taking a superficial or outward path around the body. 

​

I find that the space to explore is important right now, maybe because I’m a little removed from my dancing body and still on vacation, in the beach body. But why does that have to feel different? Can’t I dance in my beach body?

 

Things that came up — the shape of bone, murky land, spongy, restrictive surfaces and hardness that gets eroded over time like what happens in cave formation, and fog keeps recurring.

 

Separated the seven tracks into 3, approximately 7-minute chunks:  For #1, I started with my eyes closed, sensing each landmark and making my way with extreme consideration through the body.  This way my warm up, and I kept my eyes closed nearly the entire time. When I did open my eyes, I maintained the internal logic that I had established, the clear mining of each pathway.  This was a felt experience.  For #2, I wanted to move more through space, so added the intention that each landmark would help me locomote. The quickness of this version forced me to shortcut certain pathways, to drop them mid stream which felt exciting.  For #3, I actively started shaping the vocabulary, creating more recognizable dance shapes and transitions.  This was designed, crafted. Overall, I like each of these three versions and their permutations.

​

Can my attention to all of the details of the movement be so refined that even the large, fast, and strong be sensorially acute? Can my qualitative range grow without diminishing my internal perceptions of pathways, patterns, and points of initiation?  The value of this seems to be inside the continuing, the repetition is the reward.