Photo by Lydia Daniller
[ID: Chris Black, a white woman with long dark hair, faces the camera with bare arms crossed. She is holding an antique picture of a muscled man with a shaved head, John L. Sullivan, in the same pose but looking to the side.]

 

The day Donald Trump was inaugurated, a man spat on me as I walked to CounterPulse to see the Meg Stuart show. I spotted him walking towards me about a half a block away. He looked harmless. When he got closer, he looked around briefly. There was no one else within a block of us. And then he spat on me. My reaction was the closest I’ve ever come to physically assaulting someone. Screaming, I followed him up Potrero Ave, swinging my backpack, looking at the back of his head. But at 5’1” and maybe 105 pounds, even in that moment, I knew that I’d only be setting myself up for worse. So I turned around and went to the show.

I love dancers. More than actually dancing or dance itself, I love dancers. I love the way we think. I love the way we can relate to one another in a purely physical way, how we can have deep relationships that don’t look anything like regular friendships or romances. Dancers have been my favorite people since I was a teenager, even when my closest friends were not dancers.

Watching Meg Stuart dance on that teeny stage, watching that body five years older than my own, in a space filled with collective sadness and private rage, I could calm down. Surprisingly, briefly, I could calm down.

For years I have said the saddest words in the English language are I used to be a dancer.

I am wondering if I used to be a dancer.

*****

The best dance teacher I ever had was Woody McGriff. SO MUCH JOY. He would stand in the back of the theater where class was being held at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, and he would yell: Good Chris! Gooooooooooooooood!

My teachers in SF:

Ellie Klopp could be mean but her technical instruction was unparalleled. She gave me a note about the placement of my coupé: I can’t tell if you’re in passé or coupé. Pick one. Months later she walked past me in a class of at least thirty dancers and muttered, Better.

Joe Goode taught me to do inversions by grabbing my pelvis and holding it above my shoulders. I always got the giggles.

Lizz Roman made me strong.

*****

I came to San Francisco in 1992. I lived in the Castro, up the hill on 17th Street. I was often the only woman on the MUNI platform in the morning when I went to work. I took nothing but ballet that first summer because I could walk to The Academy of Ballet without worrying about getting lost. I knew to simply point myself toward Sutro Tower to get home. I had those pendulum swings of emotion that came from experiencing so much for the first time and dancing, dancing, dancing — so much physical joy! — and the gut punch of running into neighbors I hadn’t seen in a few weeks to find them thinner, frailer, walking with a new cane. These men were incredibly sweet to young, lucky me. I don’t remember their names.

I showed up at Dancers’ Group (then known as Footwork) because someone back east had told me that’s how I could meet people. Wayne Hazzard gave me a little smile when I wandered in one day and he looped me into what would be my life. I was so shy back then. How I would have managed that first year without his welcome I don’t know.

Soon after I got here I read a review of a piece choreographed by Tracy Rhoades. His company was called Exploding Roses! It sounded incredible! I never saw his work live because nine months later he was dead at 31.

Woody McGriff died in 1994. He was 36.

One opening night in the mid-’90s I got called to the box office phone at the New Performance Gallery (now ODC Theater). I can’t let him come, said the partner of one of the dancers. He’s too sick. The rest of us reworked the quartet choreography in the loft studio during intermission. We didn’t talk about anything else. The piece stayed a trio for all the years it was performed. That dancer, Jesselito Bie, is thankfully still here.

*****

At a very specific moment in my career, someone with some power and access in the American dance scene tried to give me a boost. They really tried. They got me invited to a gathering of presenters in another city, the idea being I would meet people who could also give me a boost. I met some lovely people. I saw some good work. But it felt like being in high school and I didn’t belong to that clique. I didn’t schmooze the right people and I couldn’t bring myself to network in the right ways. All those things that I was supposed to do… that weren’t dancing. And I found myself at show after show, wondering about these states performers entered, the entropy being explored, the pettiness of the presenters when they thought I wasn’t listening, and I texted my then-girlfriend-now-wife, WHERE’S THE JOY MOTHERFUCKERS???

*****

I got funded in the early years of my career because the people who held the purse strings looked at me and could see themselves. I got to make what I wanted to make: personal, thoughtful dances; abstract, technical dances; fluffy, entertaining dances. This was my privilege as a white, cis woman in the dance world.

Around 2016 I stopped applying for funding. I couldn’t rally to do all the non-dance things anymore. The writing, the video editing, the justifying. And I’d been gifted my funding in those early years. Not large sums of money, but money nonetheless. I also found myself feeling defeated by the capitalist structure that artists have somehow been convinced to buy into, where someone else gets to dictate what is worth making and seeing. The few panels I sat on myself were deeply upsetting. What gave any of us the right to decide who “deserved” to be supported? It was all profoundly unhealthy.

I want everyone to get to make what they want to make. For no other reason than that they want to. Dances about history and trauma and politics and yes, joy and love and fluff. I want that for you, young choreographers. So much.

*****

The most recent person to ask me if I support myself solely through dance was an orthopedic surgeon who was looking at an MRI of my “good” knee. I used to get defensive and self-conscious when people asked me that. Now I just laugh.

*****

During one of the darkest times of my life I made a show about love. Ken James and I had been dancing in one another’s work for a decade when we took critic Rita Felciano’s advice that we “should do more together” and made The Adventures of Cunning & Guile. People told us it was romantic (we were invited to do part of it at a wedding!), and grouchy critic Allan Ulrich thought we were married… but it wasn’t even vaguely a show about romance. It was about friendship. Dancer friendship.

I have never had another relationship like the friendship I have with Ken James. It has persisted despite the fact that Ken left San Francisco 14 years ago. We can go into a studio and lie on the floor and drink coffee and eat chocolate and somehow emerge a few hours later having choreographed a series of physical interactions that feel organic and fun and magically appear to the audience that way as well. I’ve never had those kinds of physical conversations with anyone else. Non-dancers have looked at me funny when I’ve tried to explain it, assuming it’s got to be sexual but that’s not what I’m talking about. Dancing with Ken has been one of the most soul-sustaining, joyous experiences of my life. We’re not doing anything traditionally virtuosic or flashy but we’re communicating — with each other and the audience. I keep writing and writing, trying to capture what that connection truly is but I can’t. Part of what is so precious about it is that it’s not something that exists in words.

*****

The last time I performed was in February, 2020, a month after my father died. This is the longest I’ve been offstage since my first school play at age 6.

*****

How you know you’re onto something choreographically: when suddenly seemingly every child in the California Academy of Sciences is leaning over your shoulder: What are you doing? Are you being a bird? I can be a dog! Watch! Mom! I want to do this!

In 2011 I was an artist in residence at the Academy. For five months we rehearsed on the floor of the museum, moving around the kids and tourists. I had an incredible group of collaborators: composer Erik Pearson; performers Rowena Richie, Jennifer Chien, Sophia Chudacoff, Juan De La Rosa; and my extraordinary principal collaborator on the project, Kevin Clarke. A few weeks into the process, I started to panic. I didn’t want to make a finished piece. This was the art, right here, this was the dance: noodling around on the floor of a museum with books filled with pictures of extinct animals, trying to recapture some physical essence of long-gone bodies different from our own and letting people see us figure it out, answer their questions, and yes, even let them laugh at us.

Five years later, I made a self-funded piece called there’s nothing wrong with beauty with another spectacular group of collaborators: Xochitl Colmenarez, Kim Ip, Courtney Moreno, Alicia Ruth, and Sienna Willams. I wanted us to embrace things we loved. There was no tech. I played the score — Bowie and Prince, the ocean and Maryam Mirzakhani talking about math — off my phone and an iPad, both visible on the edge of the space. I would wander over to press play. I sang “Landslide” unironically and asked the audience to close its eyes at the end since we couldn’t have a blackout. It was bits and pieces strung together, snapshots and moments, and I loved it and the women in it so much. An elder of the dance community asked me later if I was going to finish it. I simply said no. But in my head I said, It is finished. This is the dance. This rawness, this seeing of the people behind and in it. Dancers.

*****

When I made my solo show TOUGH, I asked several people I respected, admired and trusted to give me input and guidance. Amara Tabor-Smith was the first person I approached. Her generosity and wisdom in those weeks of work had a profound impact, not only on that piece but on my sense of myself. She led me backwards on long walks through the Mission, and as I watched the sidewalks and buildings and people recede from my view, it felt like I was literally looking into the past and watching it slip away. I punched the pads she held up for me until my knuckles bled like the bareknuckle boxer who had inspired the project. I danced in dark rooms where she helped me conjure that fighter, John L. Sullivan, and my grandmother, Catherine Egan. And finally, we went to China Beach and in a blindfold I fought the sea like the mythic Irish warrior Cú Chulainn. When I had waded out of the waves and could see again, she told me a pod of dolphins had swum by, and she had been tempted to let me stop so I could watch. At the time it was the right choice, to stay in the cold water in my own head with John L. and my grandmother and Cú Chulainn. But today when I wrote this out, I realized that now I would choose the dolphins.

*****

You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.
– Jimmie Fails, The Last Black Man in San Francisco

I am leaving. After thirty years, I am leaving San Francisco. If I leave, am I still a dancer? This city has been one of the great loves of my life. And my life here grew around dance like a tree grows around a rock. My life bent around dancing: how I spent my time, how I paid my bills, how I raised my kid, all fit around this central thing of dancing. And the soil it grew in was San Francisco. I don’t know what will survive when I pull up those roots.

10/23/17
Some mornings you walk down the hill, barely have to pause before sliding up the stairs of the 22, slip off at 16th St, skim across two crosswalks, don’t break stride and glide up the steps of the 14R, completing the choreography of some anonymous urban planner who once took a dance class in college. 

The city has changed and so have I.

The abandoned dance I grieve the most was called The Murmurations Project: an impossible, decades-long project about artistic transmission, place history, and chaos theory. It was to be a rolling installation that traveled across the city from the ocean to the bay. It was going to be non-linear; no section was to depend on what had happened before. I wanted to commission groups with history in different neighborhoods and areas to make sections: indigenous dancers, immigrant communities, displaced residents. I wanted to name the ghosts of San Francisco artists who influence us all, whether we know it or not: Isadora Duncan, Anna Halprin, Ed Mock, Remy Charlip, Chitresh Das, Keriac, Della Davidson, Augusta Moore, Terry Sendgraff, Kathleen Hermesdorf… The list will never end.

To everyone who loves this art form and this city — enough that they sometimes also hate them — I wish you joy.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Paula Kiley
[ID: A beautiful black & white headshot of Vanessa Hernández Cruz. Vanessa is a Mexican American woman who, in this photograph is holding white mesh fabric and making it feel like a tunnel. Her arms are raised high with elegance and she is looking towards the side.]

 

*While this letter is for our disabled dancers, I welcome
all who wish to create equitable changes in our dance field.

My beloved disabled dancers,

I am gazing at the shadows of trees dancing upon
gravel walls as the golden hour sun joins in.
It’s beautiful isn’t it?
There is this longing that tugs at my heart
to have all the answers for you.
How much can I change the world for
our liberation?
I know that our bodies clash with
what society carves out for us.

For my multi-marginalized disabled dancers
future, present & past:
You are a dancer despite being told no.
You are a dancer despite all the rejection placed upon you.
Your artistry is there even if they say it’s not.
You are a dancer even if you had to stop or were told to stop.
You are still a dancer even if you feel alone & unsupported.

You are skilled beyond measure.
The way you caress your wheels as you glide
across the floor.
The strength of how you slow down and shape trembling spirals
with your unique disabled body.
This makes you a fierce and graceful dancer.

“If I wasn’t disabled….”
haunts our minds,
I know, breathe.
I know.
It’s okay,
I know. It hurts.
I know, beautiful. It’ll be okay.
Because it’s not your fault.
It never was.
Your body, mind & spirit are not to blame.
We push these dark thoughts aside
but it’s there every single time
when we are told no.
When we are placed in the back of dance class.
When we struggling to keep up.
When opportunities are robbed from us.
When spaces are inaccessible.
When we are ignored.
When we are left to advocate for ourselves.
When we audition knowing that our bodies will be used against us.
When we are infantilized.
When we are villainized for asking for our basic human rights.
When microaggressions put us down.

It’s okay to grieve but know that your ancestors are embracing you
when no one is there at your lowest.

We may never get an apology from the ableism we have had to endure.
They may never know how deep our wounds go
or how deep they have hurt us.

But I want to say I am sorry.
I am sorry that you have to cry yourself to sleep.
I am sorry that our depression is ignored.
I am sorry that our tears fall on empty grounds instead of warm hugs.
I am sorry you have to mask your needs in order to survive.
I am sorry that our negative experiences make it that much harder to reach out.
I am sorry that this journey can feel lonely.
I am sorry that the dance field makes us feel unworthy.
I am sorry that you have to have your guard up at all times.
I am sorry that you are exhausted from fighting the good fight.
I am sorry that you feel isolated.

Even though our society has reminded us time and time again
that we are to them unloved & unworthy
that is deeply false.

Your disability makes you the incredible dancer that you are.
Your disabled body ignites innovation & creativity.

You are the life force of what community care can look like in dance.
You have so much light to give to this world.
You matter.
Your dance work is vital.
It is vital because you exist!
The countless stories and interests you have
give us a glimpse of possibilities and what utopia could be.

I cannot take your pain away.
I cannot even take my own pain away.
But know that you are not alone, darling.
You carry the wisdom of our disabled ancestors.
The time capsule of what dance will be.

I do not have all the answers.
But I do know that
we must continue to create at whatever pace our bodies allow us.
It’s okay to slow down for a second or 2.
It’s valid and it will always be.
It’s okay to rest.
That is our power.
It’s okay to let go for a while.
But please come back with your beautiful disabled self.

Even though we are far apart
we are still tethered to each other.

Most importantly, create for yourself.
You no longer need to prove to the dance world
that we can dance.

We are the future of dance.

It’s going to be okay.
And if it isn’t I am here fighting for us.
For our liberation.
One moment at a time.

We have each other.

Gazing upon the night sky
filled with ever glistening stars
our ancestors are smiling at us
because we are their wildest dream.

 

With so much love,

Your Chicana Disabled dance friend,

Vanessa Cruz

---

Ways to Connect & Support:

IG:  https://www.instagram.com/galaxiesdance/

Website:  https://www.galaxiesdance.info

Email: galaxiesdance@gmail.com

Support: https://venmo.com/u/galaxiesdance

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Nic Billington.
[ID: Paul Modjadji, an artist from South Africa, looks towards the camera while posing in a wide stance with one leg bent and slightly turned in. His torso is rotating away from the camera with one arm swinging behind. Paul wears a black top with cuffed sleeves, cuffed black pants, white socks with red writing on the top, and black shoes with a bag slung around his body.]

 

For the inaugural Creative Brain Week at Trinity College Dublin, curator Dominic Campbell introduced me to choreographer, activist and scholar Paul Modjadji. Typical of Dominic’s sensitive and inspired relationship building, he used the structures of Creative Brain Week and its focus on creativity and brain science as a way to introduce two dance artists that he suspected might have something in common. This article provides a brief account of the encounter between Paul and me, Fearghus Ó Conchúir. The relationship is still fresh but its impact, as we hope this article conveys, is nonetheless significant enough to want to communicate.

Prompted by Dominic’s creative matchmaking, Paul and I had a conversation via Zoom that allowed us to speak about our dance-making as a way of engaging with and transforming difficult legacies that are invariably written on and encoded in our bodies. This is not to think of our bodies as material without agency, merely molded by external “forces” (as misconceptions of Foucault might suggest).^[1] A combination of Foucault, Butler and Barad helps us to recognise embodiment as material and discursive.^[2]  Dance is a form of knowledge that understands and practises the making of individual and collective bodies. To the extent that it challenges or re-choreographs the pathways of a status quo or proposes alternatives to hegemonic formations of individual and collective bodies, dance is a political activity.

Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination.^[3]

Within that context I shared with Paul how I have worked with dancers to take on and shift particular corporeal legacies in Ireland, a culture shaped by colonialism, Catholicism and nationalism as well as political and economic neo-liberalism and globalisation. When Dominic invited us to present a session in Creative Brain Week based on these initial conversations, I suggested that we exchange choreography from our archives and see how it might resonate and be rearticulated in our differently acculturated, trained and racialised bodies – bodies that nonetheless could acknowledge in one another a queer kinship.  We called our session Moving the Body-Brain, Moving the Brain-Body – a danced lecture.

This approach of asking someone else to take on, or embody a troubling legacy was a strategy I have recognised in operation in my own work. I’ve used it as a way of externalising, examining and ultimately altering through transmission something that I would have struggled to gain perspective on exclusively from an individual subject position. Paul agreed to the offer, perhaps with questions, as his reflections below detail, that he withheld in a spirit of generosity.  Our intention was to exchange choreographies, however my testing positive for Covid the week before the event meant I couldn’t attend in person. Consequently we focused on Paul’s embodying of my work: that’s not to say that there wasn’t an exchange in the process. To witness Paul take on and transform a solo that was made through me was already to learn about the structures in my body that produced the work, and it revealed potential in the movement that wasn’t evident to me before. Exchange doesn’t necessarily require the same or even similar input to be mutually rewarding.

The work I offered him was a solo from a dance film commissioned for national television in Ireland in 2010. The work is called Mo Mhórchoir Féin: A Prayer. The Irish language title (I grew up in an Irish-speaking area ) refers to the Confiteor, a prayer in the Catholic mass which has the words: ‘Trí mo choir féin, trí mo choir féin, trí mo mhórchoir féin’, ‘Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.’  The lines in the prayer are traditionally accompanied by the gesture of beating one’s chest in confession of sin, though the choreography queers the gesture with ripple through the spine that connects ground to a free pelvis and the weight of my elbow as it beats against my ribcage, mixing mortification and pleasure.

As someone who started my dance-training at the age of 23 – relatively late – I am aware that my body was nonetheless trained.  One of the most powerful agents of that training was the Catholic Church where as a member of the congregation and as an altar boy, I learnt an aesthetics of worship and a choreography of when to sit, stand, and how to move with decorous elegance from place to place with just the right bowing of the head – an arrangement no less precise, if less articulated, than the conventions of épaulement in classical ballet.

The film was shot in a Catholic church in Dublin chosen because it resembled the kind of country churches familiar from my childhood.  I knew that activating my personal stake in this work would contribute to its authenticity and to its actual rather than represented transformation of legacy. And so I dance between the sanctuary and the pews, while an altar boy prepares to leave after Mass.  The altar boy and I are watched by an older woman. The context of creation was also the aftermath of the publication of the Ryan and Murphy Reports into abuse perpetrated, concealed and consequently facilitated in Catholic institutions. I was aware that much had been written and spoken about in relation to this abuse and that words were important after generations of disabling silence.  But I was also aware that much of this abuse was perpetrated and suffered bodily and that the full expression of embodiment had not been included in the responses to that abuse.

Though I had not experienced abuse myself, I knew that my body had been shaped by the religious culture that allowed abuse to happen. As a gay man, I might have readily identified myself as a victim of religious exclusion in a state where the legacies of Catholicism and colonialism conspired to keep homosexuality criminalised until 1993. Yet, I felt it was also important to acknowledge my complicity in carrying and thereby carrying on the influences of a Catholic upbringing that I inevitably perpetuate.

In making Mo Mhórchoir Féin, I also wanted to challenge the easy conception of Catholicism as anti-corporeal. The very fact of the church’s perennial anxiety about controlling bodies signals the persistence of bodies in spilling beyond the strictures that nonetheless help constitute them. For the more theologically-minded, the church’s historical emphasis on the mortification of the flesh is also in tension with the religion’s central articles of faith that insist on the incarnation – making flesh – of God in the human form of Jesus: no birth, no bodily suffering on the cross to expiate the sins of humanity, no death, then no redemption and no Catholicism. On a practical level, often forgotten is that the figure of an unclothed man, the crucified Jesus, dominates the church space.  So when the commissioners queried my choice to wear only underwear in the film as potentially provocative, I could draw attention to the sanctioned precedent on the cross. While that presiding body is still, mine moved vigorously and joyfully, as I recognised how I’d managed to make it possible for my queer body to express itself in a space it might not be expected to occupy. It is not a body raging outside the church but one staking a claim inside the church, asserting its always already valid place there. It is important for me to acknowledge this corporeal agency and the responsibility that goes with it rather than only think of myself as a victim of institutional power.  As Foucault reminds us, we are all implicated in networks of power:

Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power […]. We can also say, ‘We all have some element of power in our bodies.’ And power does—at least to some extent—pass or migrate through our bodies.^[4]

This was the complex solo I wanted to share with Paul.

*****

Reflecting on embodying an excerpt from Fearghus Ó Conchúir’s dance work Mo Mhórchoir Féin – A Prayer.

It was Fearghus’ idea to exchange dance excerpts from our existing vocabulary of works as an entry point to a lecture on “The legacies of trauma carried in our bodies”, a dialogue session we were invited to co-facilitate for the Creative Brain Week conference. I must admit that I initially met the suggestion with much trepidation and conflicting emotions. The idea itself sounded tempting, even though my internal compass screamed, “Obstacles and complexities ahead!” Even with our shared commitment to the art of physical expression, I was mindful of my own internal battle to rectify parts of my inherent guilt, which rendered the suggestion a tall order to co-sign on, particularly at this point in my sojourn.

As I fast approached the fourth decade of existence in this sometimes awfully convoluted world, I had arrived at a point in my artist journey where I was in search of my own truth. Which could also be translated as dealing with a masked identity crisis, informed by a heavily loaded past.

I grew up in what could be considered a “Westernized African” setting. I attended what was termed “Model C” or “white” schools in South Africa. I learned from a very young age to accept the white gaze and Eurocentric standards as markers of success and propriety. It is within this predisposition that my development as a young adult, and later, my training as a classical dance student and dancer shaped and primed my identity and work.

Dr. Khanyisile Litchfield Tshabalala, a Pan Africanist and an African spirituality scholar, asserts that, due to our complex exposure to colonization and Islam Christianity, most Africans exist in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Where our very existence is governed by two opposing ideas that are both true to us, yet stand in total contradiction to each other.^[5]

The ambiguity I initially felt at the idea of taking on Fearghus’ piece was underpinned by a rejection to the tempting and strong pull towards returning to that shadow. As I raged through the many reasons why this idea could prove to be retrogressive, and at best only re-traumatize me, I felt from my body, an urge, a pleading, a gentle sway to lean in, and open myself up to it. Yet another classic moment of common cognitive dissonance, where the brain and the body are in conflict.

What most people are likely to notice at face value when they see me are the obvious social constructs: my race, possibly my age, (to those well-versed in queer culture), perhaps my queerness, and my inclination towards dance and the artistic community in general. What many barely perceive fully are the complexities of not only being black, but also African, specifically Molobedu of the Balobedu tribe, a revered matriarchal tribe from Southern Africa that is renowned for its dynasty of queens who conjure up rain.^[6] My grandmother, Queen Mokope, and after her, my cousin, Queen Makobo, are some of the queens who have ruled over the Balobedu tribe. My niece, Mosalanabo, is a queen in waiting. When she turns 21 she too, will ascend the throne and rule over our people and continue on her calling as the queen of rain, Queen Modjadji the seventh. This is my heritage and ancestral lineage. For me, the two identities “black” and “African” hold two different afflictions.

Add on to that, just like Fearghus, I come from a complex history that is troubled and marred by colonial oppression, patriarchy and the enforcement of western religion. A history that informs me to this day. It is in this background that I learned to perform the Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty ballets before I had the chance to learn my own traditional dances and cultural songs, never mind immerse myself in our customs and language. Psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon put it eloquently, “To speak a language, is to take on a world, a culture.”^[7] This is a fracture that I am presently toiling to make up for with the same fragile fervor and stern commitment I showed the ballet barre all those years as a young dancer.

Accepting the call to receive Fearghus’ transformative work Mo Mhórchor Féin- A Prayer was a moment of deep internal clash and turmoil. An opportunity that sparked a commitment to dedicate my work moving forward to righting what has been diminished, rebuffed, and erased, whilst relearning what was inheritably mine.

Experiencing Fearghus’ work, firstly online, I was immediately struck by the intent of the artist to go only where very few have been brave enough to go. Historically, the church is an unchallenged institution. Understanding the delicate history of Ireland and the many years of fighting for its independence and soul, I instantly felt a sense of connection and perhaps even empathy for a people who knew something about the scathing hand of oppression, division and colonization.

As a queer body, the work invited me to also consider our shared trauma, inherited shame and conflicting relationship with our spirituality. These factors cracked open a window for me to understand with my mind, what my body sensed straight from the beginning. But when I did eventually meet up with Fearghus for our first and only walk-through of the piece he was not concerned with theorizing the piece. He had no fascination with breaking it apart and going into its hidden nuances and artistic subtexts. He welcomed me to a space where we would speak through our bodies. And in so doing, revealed right before me a piece of work that speaks beyond he and I as individuals, but calls us to a conversation about us as a collective. A collision of all that is yesterday, today and the future. As two bodies in a space, and not two brains attempting to philosophize the experience of trauma, we were able to instantly find mutual points of connection and recognize our shared humanity.

Yet, we may have our differences, and that’s okay too. This moment, this piece, is an invitation to look deeper and gaze beyond traditions and norms. For me, in its purest form, the piece challenged the structural pedagogies of our religions at the same time as it challenged me to think about what it means to conform, and about how I define morality, spirituality, sexuality, bodies, power, binaries, oppression, control and essentially freedom.

Embodying Fearghus’ Mo Mhórchor Féin first in a quiet rehearsal room in Cork–a vibrant town in southwest Ireland whose name I have always found amusing, and later in front of an audience in Dublin left me bare open, transformed. In it, I felt my own pain, struggles and a lot of stuff too intricate to articulate through words. The rigidity of the piece, and the soul’s instinct to push against that force, immediately connected itself to a familial old struggle and my life’s current pull towards freedom, purity and truth. The silences and still moments in the piece beaconed the spirits within me to whisper in my ears, and gently acknowledge all that I was feeling and experiencing in that moment, without judgment or denial.

At the end of the piece, I found myself seeking a corner to weep. To release. To shake it off. Overcome with emotions. Immersed in a trance, a passageway, a channel of sorts. Cracked open. A feeling of linking to a pathway of healing. A remembering of a deeply seeded truth that is often forgotten: We are all human, everything else is a construct. “Ah… transcendence”.

---

^[1] See for example Nigel Thrift, ‘Entanglements of Power: Shadows?’ in Joanne P. Sharp, Paul Routledge, Chris Philo and Ronan Paddison (eds.), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 269-278, p. 269.

^[2] Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3 (2003), pp. 801-831

Materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily production: matter emerges out of and includes as part of its being the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of the world). p. 822

^[3] Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, p.162.

^[4] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (eds.), David Macey (trans.) (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 29-30.

^[5]Dr. Dr. KL Tshabalala “They are here to kill you” YouTube, upload by Thando “Moziah” Sipuye 14 June 2018 https://youtu.be/FP3h310fu0Q

^[6] The Modjadji: South Africa’s Rain queen. https://hadithi.africa/the-modjadji-south-africas-rain-queen/

^[7] Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon: published in 1986 by Pluto Press. Originally published in France as Peau Noire, Masques Blanc Copyright © 1952

---

Fearghus Ó Conchúir is a choreographer and dance artist. He makes film and live performances that create frameworks for audiences and artists to build communities together. His multi-platform work, The Casement Project, was one of the Arts Council’s National Projects for Ireland 2016. He’s co-leading a dance programme with Micro Rainbow International as part of The Casement Project to support LGBT refugees and asylum seekers. From 2018-2020, he was Artistic Director of National Dance Company Wales. He was appointed to the Arts Council of Ireland in 2018 and became Deputy Chair in 2019. He is Chair of the UK Dance Network.

Paul Modjadji is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from South Africa. He uses dance, theater and filmmaking as a form of both art and activism. He is the founder of production house Imvula Pula and the Chair of non-for-profit organization Leaders Who Dare To Dream Foundation. Modjadji is a current Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health with the Global Brain Health Institute, at Trinity College, University of Dublin, in Ireland.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of In Dance.

Courtesy of Amna
[ID: A group of women participating in Dinami, Amna’s youth program, stand in a circle on a dirt path in a forest. They stand tall with their arms reaching up. They are all dressed casually.]

 

We are born to move. Every heartbeat and every breath we take from the moment we enter the world activates and settles our bodies. In trauma-informed practice, including somatic body work and dance and movement therapy, we learn how to awaken our bodies and emotions when they’ve become shut down, and how to settle our system when it has become overwhelmed.

We’re born to move, but how we move is dependent on us as individuals and our circumstances.

War is dislocating

Amna is an organization dedicated to supporting the psychosocial wellbeing of refugees and other displaced communities. Our story began in 2016 on the border of Greece and North Macedonia where thousands of refugees had become stranded. We set up a tent and started providing therapeutic group sessions for men, women and children who experienced violence, displacement and torture. As refugees continued to arrive, we grew to meet the need of displaced communities in Greece. We worked in camps and community centres with refugees and psychosocial experts to develop our current programming – nonclinical community-based interventions that help people who have experienced violence and forced displacement feel safer again.

100 million people are forcibly displaced around the world,^[1] a new and grim record. Those who are forcibly displaced are more likely to suffer from PTSD, depression and anxiety symptoms.^[2] Throughout their displacement and journeys to safety, refugees are repeatedly traumatised and retraumatised. The compounding layers of stress experienced through living in a war zone, having to make the decision to leave your home, country and loved ones, unknown perilous journeys and hostile experiences in transit and host countries, can result in trauma responses that leave refugees feeling unsafe in their own bodies.

Trauma can impact our ability to cope with daily life even when in a relatively safe environment. This is because, unless it’s released, trauma can continue to live on in our bodies following a traumatic event, causing a part of us to remain in the past, reliving fear and our trauma response. Without the right support, refugees can live with unprocessed trauma throughout their lives. Joy, playfulness, creativity and confidence can become casualties to trauma. People may feel an injured version of themselves even after they’ve arrived in a place of relative safety. We saw this clearly through the stories told in our SADA storytelling project – the emotional impact of displacement is huge and so often misunderstood.

Reconnecting and releasing through movement

At Amna, dance, movement and working with rhythm are some of the psychosocial tools we use, and train others to use, to promote healing from trauma. Marianna is a freelance Dance Movement Therapist and former Amna facilitator and Gabriella is Head of Programmes at Amna. Together, we’ve seen the dislocating impact that war and displacement can have on people’s bodies. Many of the communities we’ve worked with describe pains in their bodies, a somatisation of the grief and loss they continue to experience. The field of epi-genetics research shows that our memories and experiences are stored in every cell of our body and can be passed across generations.

Movement practices have long been recommended to help deal with psychological challenges. Exercise can release serotonin, a mood ‘stabiliser’ or so-called ‘happy chemical’. Moving in communities – whether dancing, drumming, or group bonding activities involving movement in a collective – are practices that promote expression, connection, release and often processing. In many parts of the world, movement, music and rhythm are a part of celebration and grief rituals in births, weddings and funerals.

Movement therapy can help people connect to, make sense of, and express memories and experiences held in their bodies, helping the body release what is no longer useful. It can help us regain a sense of control, feel seen and recognised, relax, have fun, play and practice ways to ground ourselves when we feel overwhelmed or triggered. All of these experiences can help the mind and body to heal.

While movement of all forms can help people, Dance Movement Therapy is a specific form of movement therapy that is often used at Amna. We work with groups including teenagers, women, men and children, for short or long term interventions, creating a safe space where people can communicate, express themselves and heal. The precise tools and ways practices are engaged with is unique in response to the group’s needs, abilities and desires, and how they shape the process and respond to the medium. Dance Movement Therapy is a practice that is built around each participant/client and/or group, with respect to each person’s individuality and the collective.

Building trust through shared power

Dance Movement Therapy has no end goal in terms of learning steps or improving technique. It is very much guided by the group with a big focus on building trust and a safe environment. A therapeutic contract and guiding rules for the space are agreed on from the beginning by the whole group, including the therapist. These are not static but change as the group evolves. There is no classic hierarchy of the teacher and their students, everyone is equal including the therapist. Power dynamics are a particularly important aspect of Amna’s identity-informed approach which underpins all our work.

All sessions begin with a check in to see what energy, feelings and emotions participants are bringing to the space. It can be verbal or use movement as well. Then, depending on the responses, the therapist invites engagement through movement activities. Group members always have a choice about how and if they participate. The group also has freedom to use the space with little intervention from the therapist and are invited to improvise, play, dance, move together and explore how and what they need, being led by their bodies. The sessions close with a check out, an opportunity to reflect and give meaning to what happened during the session, verbally, through art or through movement again. The therapist is there to support without making their own interpretations or judgements.

Recovering confidence and reshaping lives

Dance Movement Therapy can be a powerful tool for healing. Our bodies are affected by our experiences even if we are not conscious of it. In our experiences running Dance Movement Therapy groups, we’ve seen groups have moments of intense expression emotionally, mentally and physically as they process emotions that were hidden deep inside themselves. When these experiences can be safely held by the group with the support of the therapist, group members often leave the session feeling a sense of release, reporting feeling lighter emotionally and physically, with more clarity of mind and openness in their bodies.

In one session we used movement to explore strength and vulnerability. Together we connected with each part of our body to understand what it means to be strong in our legs, our feet, our hands and so on. We ended in a pose that we called our ‘statue of strength’. It was a breakthrough session for one of our group members who began to find clarity in the different meanings of strength and the expectations that she had attached to strength. She shared that she felt she had lost her confidence and through this exercise was able to start reconnecting with her body and mind. We continued working with her to explore how to incorporate this in her everyday life, through ‘confident’ poses and other ways she can bring this sensation into her body.

Everything in life is movement. Our bodies are always moving, even when we think we are still, our organs and breath continue moving and keep us alive. We’re born to move but how and where is dependent on each person and community. That’s why Dance Movement Therapy must also be used with respect to the uniqueness of each person’s pace, particular needs and circumstances. Amna means “safe and caring” in Arabic. We believe, when worked with in a safe and caring, trauma-sensitive and identity-informed way, the impact of Dance Movement Therapy can be life-changing.

---

^[1]https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2022/5/628a389e4/unhcr-ukraine-other-conflicts-push-forcibly-displaced-total-100-million.html

^[2]https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-and-forced-displacement

---

Gabriella Brent is Amna’s Head of Programmes and a transpersonal counsellor and psychotherapist. She oversees Amna’s training and capacity strengthening programmes; Baytna, Dinami, therapeutic work with men and women and Amna’s humanitarian wellbeing capacity-building work – providing training and wellbeing support to other humanitarian organisations working with refugees. Before working with Amna, Gabriella worked across the UK piloting and implementing more humane and trauma-informed models of care.

Marianna Fiotaki is a freelance Dance and Movement Therapist. She runs psychosocial and healing groups for youth and women and is passionate about developing psychosocial support spaces in respectful, equitable contexts, where the community is the central agent and holds the power. She has worked with groups at risk of social exclusion in various settings, from daycare centres to hospitals. Marianna is currently studying Existential Psychotherapy and has a Master’s degree in Dance Movement Therapy.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Alex Kornhuber
[ID: 80 year-old Peruvian Isabel Santa Cruz, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat with green fringe, traditional jacket decorated with colorful buttons and skirt with an embroidered band unrolls her tapestry on the ground outside of her home in the Paru Paru community of the rural Peruvian Andes mountains.]

 

Editor’s Note:

Weaving in the Andes is a kind of dance.

From the finger choreography of belt weaving, to the sophisticated mechanics of building a loom, textile traditions express the importance of the villagers’ culture while exercising their creativity and concentration. Weaving is a full-bodied experience. It is a community choreography that capitalizes on strong bonds between generations and connections with nature.

In this article, (first published in Global Brain Health Perspectives), I discuss a video documentary I co-created about weaving in Andean villages. I explore the links between this ancient practice and brain health, and discuss the way weaving in the Peruvian mountains is at risk of dying out. The forces of poverty and modernization have been pushing the next generation of weavers into cities. Just as the grind of eking out a living and the cost of living in the Bay Area has been pushing dancers out.

My interest in weaving is an extension of my work in the creative aging arena. I’m a senior fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute, a movement and self-expression facilitator for older people and people living with dementia, and a co-producer of Artists & Elders. A common thread in my work is curiosity about how the arts can support wellbeing across lifecourse.

**********

Dotted with sheep and the ruins of ancient Incan civilization, our short film Wisdom Weavers revolves around the practice of weaving in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. This project focuses on an art form that is still part of the fabric of daily life in these remote areas–at once integral for its utilitarian function and a central part of people’s aesthetic.

Wisdom Weavers began as a collaboration between a Peruvian photographer, Alex Kornhuber; a neurologist who grew up in rural Peru, Maritza Pintado Caipa; and myself, an interdisciplinary artist in San Francisco, California. We met as Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute in 2018. Maritza acted as our health expert and cultural consultant. Alex was our photographer, community liaison and local historian. Johnny Miller, photojournalist and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, joined us as lead videographer. We wanted to document the process of weaving and what it represents. We could see that it has loads of cultural value, but could we see connections between weaving and brain health?

To get at the question about weaving’s connection to brain health, we used a combination of interviews and observations. We spent a week driving from community to community in the Urubamba Valley, bringing bags of specialty goods as offerings, and gathered documentary, interview and drone footage.

To be clear, this wasn’t a formal investigation but a field study. One observation that we made repeatedly: multitasking while spinning wool on a spindle is second nature to Andean villagers. Spinning while talking, walking, or shepherding livestock appeared to be a routine task for experienced weavers.

We were curious about this spinning habit and other aspects of weaving: How much concentration is needed? How long does it take you to complete a geometric-patterned cloth six meters long? Do you plan ahead or design as you go? We heard from one veteran weaver that when you first start a weaving project, it requires “total silencio,” but once the pattern is established you get into a flow. Patterns are memorized. A weaver may have more than one hundred patterns stored in their memory. We also learned that weavers improvise, adding personal touches. For instance, the size of a frog’s eyes or the direction of a parrot’s beak can reflect an individual style.

The physical demands of weaving require agility, dexterity, adaptability, and strength. The weaving process encompasses raising sheep, shearing, washing the wool, spinning it into yarn, dying the yarn from homegrown plants, building the loom and weaving “from the waist” – a portable practice of anchoring one end of the yarn to your body and weaving from the waist out.  The people we engaged with are very hardworking, very resilient. And take a lot of pride in their work.

But weaving for hours on end and often earning very little income from it may amount to a level of adversity that is likely bad for brain health. One man told us about how hard weaving is on his body. His eyes are tired. His back hurts. And no one is buying. Some indigenous youth have decided there are better ways to live. They don’t wear the traditional dress and are looking for opportunities to go to university, move out of the community and into cities where they can earn more money at desk jobs. Stress, income, education, occupation, and other social determinants all affect brain health.

Our main intent was to capture the possible connections between an ongoing creative practice and healthy aging in these communities. Given this focus, Wisdom Weavers sidesteps a number of other brain health matters, such as the lack of access to health and mental health services in rural Peru. These inequities need to be considered when exploring weaving’s relationship to brain health.

In the end we can’t definitively claim weaving helps or hurts brain health. But the weavings spoke for themselves, expressing the weavers’ strong family ties and connection to nature – known assets for good brain health. “I especially loved that water, air, and sun are in the weavings as beings – equals with the tigers, birds, and flowers,” friend and Atlantic Fellow Dana Walrath wrote after watching Wisdom Weavers.

I am reminded of an epiphany of writer Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. She realized how a reciprocal, caring relationship between humans and the earth allows not just humans but also the earth to survive and thrive. The wisdom in that is clear as day.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of In Dance.