Take a Walk Around West Tisbury, MA

I listened to the story of this tree  [from stop 1] 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, wherever 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 a 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.

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.