Take a Walk Around West Tisbury, MA

I listened to the story of this tree like a vibrational stenographer, recording the sound of its roots descending down and its branches reaching up. A huge portion of it is underground. I imagine this tree’s roots look just like it does up top: a huge thick tangle of subterranean wood and then, where ever the roots end, I imagine that energetically they keep expanding deeper into the earth. I imagine it’s the same for the branches, that they extend into the universe way beyond their physical expression. Maybe the roots meet up with the branches somewhere down the line as their invisible limbs wrap out into the space.

My job was taking this collection of shapes and putting them into a tapestry of sound. There’s a bit in the song where all of the sudden it breaks into a completely different rhythm. It gets heavily swung and breaks into a whole different pattern. That was my attempt to express where the tree leaves the boundaries of its physical self and the drum rolls come in and that’s where you get outside the boundaries of the tree. That’s where the tree enters its energetic life and exits into the space around it.

My first reaction to the music was Panic! Fear and worry! My first thought was that I would not be physically capable (being 8 months pregnant) of honoring the kinetic reaction I was having to it. The music felt very foreign to me: soulful but electronic, distressed but humorous…the word I would use is “alien.” Being as pregnant as I am, any dance I do now is more of a duet than a solo, so it occurred to me that maybe this music was the voice of the little stranger growing inside of me – someone who, despite coming from my body, is still his own entity completely independent from me and ultimately beyond my control. The opening sequence of the dance came to me first – a stirring that begins as a seed, grows, and takes over. My opening movements were carefully formed, but as the dance continued I began to give in to a sense of play, silliness, and lack of control and ultimately finding a real sense of pleasure, wonder, and sensuality in the act of letting go of my body and my head, and my need to control the outcome. I loved this project! I loved the emotional journey – from excitement to panic/fear/worry to surrender to fun and play. And transcendence.

What struck me the most was the energy that she both struggled against and contained in her dance. She was exuberant, a life force… but also seemed trapped. I loved the architecture of space in her pregnant form and I tapped into the metaphor that her pregnant body represented the larger body of Mother Earth that we all share and depend on for life. We humans mine into our earth and exploit it to gain our own energy & life force… minerals, metals, oil, gas, water. Many of the dancers arm movements seem to mime vertical digging movements (mining, hydro-fracking, drilling), and her kicking and arm gestures implied a column of dimensional space above her, to the sides and bellow her, as if her symbolic life force was walled in, but barely suppressed.

In interpreting the dance as a sculpture, I used many torn, dirty layers of square man-made materials that are made from oil: foam, rubber, tar, acrylic, to form a dark column of external support. I contrasted this with a lush, circular tunnel-like interior of real green moss, that surrounds a dynamic and reflective seed of light at its core. Upon further discovery, the sculptures internal seed becomes kinetic – with gentle participation. The expression of this sculptural form is a micro illustration of a macro concept: within ourselves and every stratum of our Earth, there contains a dynamic life force that sustains us – if we, in turn, sustain it.

What struck me the most was the energy that she both struggled against and contained in her dance. She was exuberant, a life force… but also seemed trapped. I loved the architecture of space in her pregnant form and I tapped into the metaphor that her pregnant body represented the larger body of Mother Earth that we all share and depend on for life. We humans mine into our earth and exploit it to gain our own energy & life force… minerals, metals, oil, gas, water. Many of the dancers arm movements seem to mime vertical digging movements (mining, hydro-fracking, drilling), and her kicking and arm gestures implied a column of dimensional space above her, to the sides and bellow her, as if her symbolic life force was walled in, but barely suppressed.

In interpreting the dance as a sculpture, I used many torn, dirty layers of square man-made materials that are made from oil: foam, rubber, tar, acrylic, to form a dark column of external support. I contrasted this with a lush, circular tunnel-like interior of real green moss, that surrounds a dynamic and reflective seed of light at its core. Upon further discovery, the sculptures internal seed becomes kinetic – with gentle participation. The expression of this sculptural form is a micro illustration of a macro concept: within ourselves and every stratum of our Earth, there contains a dynamic life force that sustains us – if we, in turn, sustain it.