            
dancing on poetry... a video calling card (2009)
Dancing an Unwinding after a Solstice Celebration
Dance is an ecstatic, uplifting, enlightening experience. I hope this little video imparts some of the warmth and joy of the connectedness that occurs during these wild and nurturing dances. After the Solstice 'Ecstatic Dance' session finished, and most of the women left, a few kindly stayed to dance so we could get some stills for an article, but I liked the footage and created this video dance poem. You can read the prose poem here.
Dancing Women: Erica Ross, Laura Nashman, Evelyn Kryt, Angela Greco, Jade Niemczyk, Linda Robinson & Brenda Clews.
Event: Dance Our Way Home (DOWH), June 20th, 2009, at Dovercourt House in Toronto: danceourwayhome.com.
Background music from *Collection Hapa* by Keli'i Kaneali'i & Barry Flanagan: mountainapplecompany.com.
Videotaped, edited & prose poetry by Brenda Clews.
|
Drumbeat
The palm drops
on the inside
of the skin
animal drumming
beating on the drum
drumbeating the night
beating on the eardrum
drum drumming deeply
drawing the heatbeat drumbeat.
My body is the drumbeat
drumbeating my skin
sweating, hot,
drumbeating my body's
percussion, rub, snare,
pounding, colliding of
musical pulses
lyrical sinewy
or staccato modern
or wild shamanic
hair flying
free.
Red shiny satin clinging,
wet
sweat. |
|
|
The djembe hip bag that I scrubbed, suede dyed to emulate Holstein cow naugahyde, in black and cream, with a wild boar bristle brush and saddle soap because of the dark streaks, smells of animal hide.
I hold it to my nose, and smell. Animal. Hide.
The drumming of the jungle.
An animal skin.
|
|
Taut.
Primal beat bounding
resonating, resounding.
You gaze at me, though you haven't looked at me.
I am in your gaze without your seeing me.
It is my hunger you remember feeding,
that you want to feed.
Our heat burns hotly.
Drumbeating
the rhythms beating in us,
the African djembes
dance us.
© 2008
2003 2004
|
|
|
"Noctilucent Clouds," 2007, 14.5cm x 22.5cm or 5 3/4"x 9";
oils, India ink, on paper coated with acrylic matte medium (sold)
My fingers thick with oil paint spread the paint quickly, in a lucent state of consciousness, barely aware...
I have to be in the "right moment" to paint, and painting is
always a fearful act where I throw my emotional life on the line.
This little piece is to remind me of dance, movement, freedom, the sky. Aug 6, 2007
Celestial Dancer I, 24" x 30", acrylic on canvas, 2003;
Celestial Dancer II, 31" x 35", acrylic on a loose sheet of canvas
can hung by bamboo pole;
Celestial Dancer IV, 24" x 30", oil on canvas board, 2004;
Celestial Dancer V, 24" x 30", oil on canvas board, 2004.
________________________________
I have paired a recording of "Light Catches Diamonds" with a beautiful Jazz recording, "Go Away Blues," from the album, Because, by Buz Hendricks of Jazz Street Trio, who has licensed this album with a Creative Commons license on Jamendo.
(If you have pop-up windows blocked on your computer, there is an embedded player for Light Catches Diamonds at my blog -Google sites doesn't allow java.)
LIGHT CATCHES DIAMONDS
Light catches diamonds in the fabric sewn in diagonal rows with a round disc of thread at each intersection. Discs that gleam like the sun at noon or during an eclipse, depending if the light is outside or in. In this story of the sun within the story of light, where the gold-balled thread is a retrenchment. Silky, sexy growl of morning light dancing on sheers. Sheen of sequins and beads on the aqua greens of the sheer top I am wearing like a bauble of peacocks.
A positioning of approaches, lyric flights, combining capacities, degrees of interactions or effects, attractions and aversions, ways of uniting or reacting, numbers of binding sites.
A perpetual crossing over, synaptic bursts, a valency of the embroidery, or diagonals, or diamonds, or discs of sun-thread.
I had to laugh. It wasn't that semantic polyvalency was elusive, curtains of floating signifiers washing the world with effusive light, delicate glancing diamonds. But that I was making what I was seeing even as it formed me. Did anything gleam? Perhaps.
It was like strands of perceptual DNA locking or unlocking, depending on the configuration of patterns. What we see was shaped so far back. It's just that particles and waves are either Apollo or Dionysus, classic or baroque, clear, boundaried, balanced or coiling immersive ecstatic. Perhaps we're traveling the photonic path with a way of understanding that isn't so new, still intoxicated by the speculations of the ancient Greeks.
I'm not saying it's not complex, how to describe what we're seeing. We fall back on intricate old theories like a beloved comforter. But the point is not in perceiving what you're finding, rather knowing how to find what you're not looking for.
Or the bright warmth on my skin, a sun that is not just a physics but a biology. I'm playing with you and seeing if I can loop the diamonds dancing on water over your vision sparkling like an interwoven net of nexus points in our multivalent minds that are locking and unlocking in love. Silky sexy sheer. Over a bed of dreams. Throaty growl, polyglottal, vibrating threads of labial lucent words on the lingual throat.
Diamonds mitred at the junction that we are. |
Celestial Dancer III, sketch on canvas, drawings, and an oil painting, 24" x 30", 2005, unfinished.
(
Working on "Celestial Dancers," the painting (5' x 6', oil on canvas scroll painting) that forms the background to this website, in my studio in Vancouver in 2004. The figures are from Cambodian art. They are drawings of relief sculptures in temples from the 12-13th centuries when Cambodia, which was Hindu, was assimilating Buddhism. I've always liked this period of Cambodian art where the sensuality of Hindu art combines with the austerity of Buddhist philosophy.
The world is a rich dancing flame.
|
|
