Fisherman Waders, for Sink Float Swallow Spit (a film)

A remembered s(p)lice of dance film research

an urban ritual,

a moment of mythology between kinesthetic friends.

I approach the site -

A river under an overpass in a city

with many white columns spanning its width

I approach with all of my senses

I am reflected in the water, the noise, the quiet, the cooperation, the clashes of species

I try to suspend language at first

I approach as if words don’t exist

It seems almost impossible, such rapidness of mind.

I track the movement of my attention

The rhythmic pull of the doves

The need to check my footing as I wade in these fisherman boots close to the edge

And then the difference as I do,

feeling how the cold shrinks the material around my legs, a new kind of squeeze

The water insists on weight shifts I am not accustomed to

I yield,

I resist

Many impulses at once

As Chelsea wades farther from me,

into her own world towards the middle of the river.

Demands from light, sound, gravity

stares from grilling parties, children, joggers -

as we are not walking, nor fishing, nor boating, nor running along the river’s shore,

we are not fishermen, in our fisherman waders.

We are rooting in mud and almost falling.

Awkwardly attempting to charm the ground that is shifting,

hidden from view below the dark waters.

Restraint –

this sort of river dance with shoes like casts to set bones,

gives rise to withholding and wrestling forces and a surprising beauty of tensions.

Chelsea submerges

I didn’t intend for that today,

but something swells in me as she does.

She takes the moment,

she can’t hear me out there

Relieved,

I let go of worries of city bacteria seeping into exposed skin

Instead I am happy she seized her urge, trusting her strength and immunity,

trusting the water that is for an instant, like an invisible portal.

Under the highway, with the hum of cars and the massive white columns,

immersed in the urban river with the pigeons and boaters and sleeping bats -

time slows

Aware of the circular space around, above and below her as water pours over cloth and skin

even her face for a second swallowed up

We are a certain kind of outsider here,

Come home

dance artists come to touch the body’s right to move three dimensionally, in public,

non-linearly, to meander with no understandable Modern recreational purpose,

we are here to explore and stumble, to fall back into the arms of the water,

for a moment.

Mulberry

A softening traverses my landscape

not just jaw, belly or calves,

but now in all of me,

less segmented parts,

feeling a sigh of relief

in letting go of internal support beams that were loading more than I knew,

Tensions erected unconsciously.

I think of the colt that falls to her knees in the first attempt at walking

a kind of collapse that speaks of health

the kind that now pulls me down groundward

and suddenly my hands on the dirt - that feels buoyant,

hydrated from the early winter rains, metabolizing dropped Oak leaves -

this soil beckons me

and unlike the colt, here, 

I am learning the essence of yield rather than push to rise.

In this moment fear seeps back into earth and my body feels the rising charge of electromagnetism that was there all along

yet eclipsed by compression and fascial binds

I am now more supple, languid, warm, cool

Exchange available once again between myself and the other elements

where before there was a fortress of protection

a shrunken atmosphere.

And I feel, as my physical form finds space

so too does my inner chemistry of mind-worry and heart-ache

Now I sense the wind collecting clouds, and my pelvic floor held in a sigh

that feels not entirely my own.

In this more porous space I feel the flash of memory of my first encounter with a mulberry tree

walking with my mother to a secret cove in our Philadelphia neighborhood

an internal blossoming I feel, with this unexpected visceral memory

image arising of such an early pleasure

living in the folds of skin

A tree of small scale, a bush really,

relatable to my own smallness

And the bright sweet tang and texture of the blue black berries

ones we could not find in the supermarket

thus carrying their own magic.