Dear Meryem,
I have been working with verticality and horizontality, with messiness, and with virtuosity. I have been exploring Mallakhamb, a style of Indian aerial rope that I had a brief period of engagement with in 2010 but have never gone back to. It does multidimensionality and virtuosity and depends entirely on the grip of the big toes to support you, which is so delicate but is meant to hook into a deep internal line of power in the body….it actually is quite painful at the start but there is something beautifully simple about it and it moves in such opposite ways to most other styles of aerial work that is it great to have an interruption to the way I approach movement.
I am continuing to unpack from your last writings, taking those notions into rehearsal. Wondering about colonized bodies, about settlers bodies, about nomadic bodies. I am interested in the idea of the giving up of verticality , the question of what happens when one gives up the privilege of the vertical and enters into a different relationship to effort and mobility. (from Stumbling dance: William L’s crawls)
Here is some automatic writing after rehearsal. (3min practice)
The big toe line. Gently lifting my big toes, allowing my feet to round and cup, feeling the pull up through my bodies centre, some deep energetic line of the body, like a magnetic pole, a pulling , and organizing, a subtle but deep internal support.
Climbing a rope, propelled by my toes, this line active. The lift of my big toes does something that lifts my body, propelling it upwards, strength, delicacy, horizontal engagement for verticle propulsion, upward, sideways and around. The soles of my feet remembering the palms of my hands, my head remembering the space of my pelvis as the body inverts and changes position orientating itself around memory spaces.
Clearly this is not what I am doing but there is something about using verticality in a subversive way that brings in the different relationship to effort and mobility. xo b
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