Română
My dear moving body,
I feel like you could be a part of me, a wise part of me. I haven’t written for a long time, the words I say to myself are rarefied as a mantra of blessings that we all need as we are in full transformation.
But in the middle of the cyclone all is quiet.
I like to let your questions flow through my body and take time to see how and if answers arise. I love to silence the most, especially when I’m with someone else.
The silence has thinner and thinner layers where I can sense the emotions still unspoken. I listen to that which does not yet have a voice.
That’s why I too will start from within, from the infinite space of the oikos – my body-home without physical boundaries: the particle and the wave, the information and the vibration, in a permanent self-definition.
This is what I was working on when the coronavirus appeared. I was working to observe my thoughts, and emotions and how they materialize in the biochemistry of emotions, in free or, on the contrary, instinctive actions.
And this alien materialized throughout the ecosystem. Now only this topic is talked about, our liberties have also been restricted for our own good. Fight or coexistence?
It seems that the side effects of isolation are much more dangerous for the immune system and the harmonious development of all.
Dragul meu, cum putem ajuta tinerele generații? We should gradually bring them back to the reality of their bodies, to the concreteness of their touches.
My immune system starts screaming behind the mask: when I wear it I get a terrible migraine and visual difficulty. How can sick or elderly people breathe?
Since the pandemic broke out, I have gone through many states, I had to reinvent myself, and take on other roles. Out of necessity, I learned not to restrict myself, not to identify myself. When the mind created blockages, the body dissolved them.
I developed a rebellious ability to build long-distance relationships.
A piece of our skin has been taken from us, even though we don’t want to admit it: the others. We looked for new forms of coexistence and contact, through amplification of how we can build a relationship. I had to look beyond the much too visual relationship with the students, beyond the screen, the masks and the interfaces. To listen to what is happening and explore through movement: groping, uncertainty, absence of a body, interruption of flow, disappearance of image, jamming, interpretation of information through the screen, resistance. The way the image appeared on the screen, cropping it, zooming in, zooming out, modulating my voice, finding my body, all these elements that became new ways of relating and creating.
It was not easy: I carefully observed when we risk slipping into alienation, distance, fear of the future and fear of stability.
Now I’m in the mountains, nature surrounds me and heals me. I am bathed in thousands of perceptions. I have so many parameters that I can track. I study the relationship between the inside and the outside depending on the environment and I come to feel whole. I forgot, for the moment, about the problems and the virus…
I love trees, I started to feel their silent presence. And plants know and know us. Neurobiologists talk about plant cognition.
Here I learn to be steady like a stone, in continuous flow like an evil, in motion like a butterfly: everything is in everything – pan en paintì. It is an indefinable feeling that dilates the temporal dynamics.
I encounter the long-avoided death everywhere in nature, death is silence… but life continues in other forms. I see how an old tree has died and becomes host to new-born trees and other life.
I now step on the grass, on the paths, on the soft uneven earth. After three months of lockdown, simple things like walking take on a whole new meaning. I enjoy every step with the pleasure of a newborn. I would never have had this experience without missing it before.
During the 3 months of isolation in the house, the joy was the contemplation of the sky and the others near me.
My dear body, how can we restore the connections between all of us and all things?
I think this human isolation had already started before the pandemic… and the virus only accentuated its power and made us fully aware of it.
The way I feel the skeleton in motion with each step, the rhythm of breathing, the internal volumes, then the sounds, what I see, smell and touch stimulate the skin sensors, which become very active; the experience of nature has not been so total for a long time.
The body renews itself with every step. We have dance “studios” dotted along the route and it’s amazing to move in the wide open space of nature: new words and associations are born. A new hyper-sensory is activated for me, to which are added feelings of instability, visual chaos and compression.
The sun’s rays are transformed into matter and life within plants, which allows us to breathe. Astrology, chemistry, biology, physics… intertwine in us. For Lynn Margulis, organic life is born from the non-organic.
I now feel the energy rising and with it the inner stillness, I am present with what is being transformed through the synesthesia of my senses. The love of trees, for us, is palpable. Knowledge does not depend on sight, but rather on its absence. People dance with hoods covering their eyes. In the absence of one sense, the others are amplified.
And in the absence of the other, what awakens in us: a deeper encounter with ourselves?
Jung taught me that what we fear must be looked at deeply.
I watched the pandemic: I got used to being afraid only of what is developing in me, of my conditioning, of what I identify with.
The process of observing helped me notice what I identify with and what is important.
I have been running for many years. I run restless and my mind races. It’s not the healthiest way to live.
The pandemic blocked me and forced me to suddenly change my perspective, the eye that sees inside and outside.
Nu mi-a plăcut deloc ceea ce am observat în mine, nici felul în care mă raportam la noi sarcini, nici la relaționări.
One for all, and all for one, has become the new motto, to discover together new possibilities for coexistence.
I realize that I only indirectly answered how dance was born for me and what it turned into. Dance is a conglomeration of possibilities: it reinvents what we live, what we would like to live, and what doesn’t exist yet. The dance starts much earlier to make itself visible, through intuitions when you don’t even have expectations… when I play, I prepare the pieces, when I relax. Când nu mă gândesc, desenul dansului începe să capete formă.
When I’m not thinking, the dance drawing starts to take shape. The dance started like in Paradise, I remember when I was six years old choreographing my first piece with my friends in the garden of the block. I was a flower. Now I have teleported thousands of kilometres away, decades have passed and still, nature welcomes me. She has long been waiting for us to resume the interrupted dialogue.
I hug you dearly,
The sixth body
In 2021, several choreographers told and forwarded to their colleagues’ questions about the body, the pandemic and the place/meaning of dance for them, in the form of anonymous letters.
Each letter served as inspiration for an illustrator to create an augmented animation during DANSTOPIC workshops in the spring, a guided journey by Skeptic Dog Animation and Human Interface.
The animation of Letter #6 was created by Cristina Rădulescu and can be discovered through the Artivive application.
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.artivive
Apple Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/artivive/id1188737494?mt=8
