Take a Walk Around West Tisbury, MA

My first reaction to the music I interpreted [from stop 2] 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 found 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 about the dance I interpreted [from stop 3] was the energy the dancer struggled against and contained in her movements. 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 dancer’s 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 below 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, and 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 sculpture’s 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 is a dynamic life force that sustains us – if we, in turn, sustain it.

Claudia interpreted the sculpture from stop 4 and wrote this poem in reaction.

This is an Interview between Claudia and Sally:

Sally: What made you want to participate in this project?

Claudia: Not only am I interested in writing poetry in general; I also find this project fascinating and “right up my alley.” I’ve always been involved in multiple areas of the arts. I also have synesthesia (which is quite literally a blending of the senses). I find that Consenses is very much suited to who I am.

Sally: What emotion did the sculpture elicit?

Claudia: a sweet kind of pain.  I thought of what it can be like in general to talk frankly about pain, and to see beauty in it (whether that beauty is justified or not).

My original poem I titled “Felling” (not a typo!). Felling, of course, is the act of cutting down a tree, which ties in with the nature theme of the poem. The poem expresses the process of dying or fading away in some way. Felling, then, is one way to represent that final moment on earth.

Sally: What part of your work came to you first?

Claudia: The parts about nature and pain were a given for writing the poem; I had those in my mind first. There was a line of poetry I’d had in my head for a while (the first line of the poem), and I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. I used it and wrote from there.