Verses

There are only a couple things you need - a couple verses, a couple books, a couple teachers, a couple saints, a couple artists - to lead the way. More than that is often too much.

apertures

Thought about Hannah Wilke for the first time in a long while last night. I think of her art-making though, subliminally, every time I take lint out of the dryer. That is - a lot, in the past year, which is the first year I've had a dryer to take lint out of.

Now that I've brought her up I realize she's been right below the surface, a guiding agent, in these rites, and I've recreated her in my attempts, my experiments, over and over again.

I came across a good line in an article recently - the idea was that each performance is a re-invention of a really good idea. I am reinventing, in ways, Hannah Wilke's really good idea. Though I wouldn't presume to say I'm doing it as good, as bold, as kick-ass, as her.

Hannah Wilke died of cancer in early 1993, as I was going into my second semester of senior year. I came upon her sometime within those years at Connecticut College - can't remember if I just came across her artwork in the library, or more likely, Amii LeGendre - two years ahead of me and my woman-empowerment goddess - turned me on to her. I went to her posthumous IntraVenus exhibit as a new-fledged New Yorker, and could barely stand in front of her huge baby-blue terricloth madonna photos, her chemotherapy-softened beauty. She broke me down then, and she still does.

Looking at her work now, though, I'm so relieved to see the mix of media. Thank god we don't have to work with the same material our whole lives. The only consistency we have is our own bodies - which aren't even that consistent, as her explicit documentations make clear. Let's mix it up. Let's be different from ourselves. Let's be many things.

Brother Fire

St. Francis' Order was founded eight hundred years ago this year - in 1209 AD, in Assisi.

St. Francis was so crazy in love with God! So was Clare. Both renounced medieval middle-class. She was a young girl who followed him - escaped the marriage her parents set up. She eloped to Francis' chapel, San Damiano, outside of Assisi, cut off her hair and married God. Both undertook a life of keeping their hands empty - burning themselves up for God.

They created twin orders, the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares. Francis turned over San Damiano to Clare, where she gathered followers, and became its abbess. He died in a hut, on a mat on the floor. She lived more and more in seclusion. By the end, she didn't need to leave her cell to attend Mass - it appeared as a vision on her stone wall. Today she is the Roman Catholic Church's patron saint of television.

I think they were lovers. They shared one meal. I love their foolish love affair with the world and the sun and moon and birds and mountains and olive groves. Their unequivocal sense of place in those God-lit hills of Umbria.

Here is a verse of Francis' Canticle of the Sun, as we descend into the darkest part of the year:

"Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong."

all saints

Turn the tables to November: cool not cold, damp. Trees' hilarious outburst is over. Now, sober rusts and coppers, with a few deep-yellow maples and birches, like the most luminescent Easter egg I could dye, or its yolk. The prayer begins: "Winter, hold me safe till then!" The spice of the leaves - dying both wet and drying - answers, overpowers.

All saints, all souls - I was called back to haunt this spot again! I've found a chair. Life is good for the departed here, nestled in bowl in hillside.

I look up, in The American Heritage Dictionary:

Evocation: "summoning or calling forth; creation anew through the power of memory or imagination - ' calling out'"

Invocation: "calling upon for assistance, support, or inspiration - 'calling in'"

Don't trust something that doesn't smell. City art-making-and-selling - sanitary poison. Thought-tinkered process, packaging, selling, structure for structure's sake, commentary and comparison - death-dealing. Undercuts evocation, invocation, purpose, feeling, how they are the same as the material, the stuff, the movement, the leaves.

the feeling

Don't dance prose.
Don't talk about something else with dance.
The dance is itself. Let it live.
Dance these days - a horror house of mirrors - overefractingly self-and-history-referential. Just make it. All that other stuff about you and your process and your investigations will be there, don't worry.

by the seams

I performed Martha Graham's "Lamentation" in Paul Besaw's Dance History & Legends class this morning. I hadn't spent time with it in since last February, and coming back to it I realize: must understand better what I am doing. I can't just be doing Martha Graham - not to imply, Martha, that you are just anything. When doing a work as famous as this, there is a complex layering of identity and purpose. And then there are the images and movement contained, suspended in the fabric of the work itself. This is fundamentally what to get at - this is what Martha was getting at. The first time around I was just trying to get at her.

So here I am, trying to get into the seams - in the backdoor - down to the bedrock - of Lamentation. I am just beginning, but think Lamentation might be good done on a rock. Or it is the rock. The shapes are like caves, the core is powerful, solid. Skin and rock, seams and fissures, wounds gaping, wounds hidden. Wombs hidden. The first shape, a mound of the dancer, folded on herself by the seams - is a deep purple mountain.

Here is Lamentation in whole, performed by Peggy Lyman.