22/11/16
I recently came across the website of a group of beautifully ritualistic, open, sensual, gold-headband wearing, bare-feet tip-toeing, loose hair-flowing, spiritual, joyful, sexy female humans who want to humbly and gently bring that spiritual, sensual, seasonal, open, communal vibe to all people. It looks great. The photos are smiling and a lot of vegans who live on boats and in warehouses, and have Tate membership cards will connect with them and love it.
But I can’t afford a Tate card and really love cheese. It is all true, right, good, fundamentally human and beautifully important. I celebrate it. It is necessary. But it brought back to me my thought of the last few years. It is not me. I need to roll up my non-costumed sleeves.
I want to have the grit to introduce ritual to the kids with teeth knocked out from a fight. The 12 year olds with Mum in prison and Dad off with a new family. To the 14 year olds with court dates. To the kids coming into school stoned and hungry. To the teenagers and young people who don’t give a fuck about how to use a dictionary; who come to school to get lunch and leave. To the Dad with 19 children. To his youngest child. To the overweight, medicated kid with long fingernails, and a mop that gets shaved termly. To the restless, fidgety, fist-pounding young man who needs to ‘f*ck em up’.
Maybe I will do it in white-walled, strip-lit rooms with a guard at the door and a Samaritans poster on a notice board. Or maybe in an unheated community centre on orange, plastic chairs drinking orange, plastic coffee. Maybe one day in a woodland. But that seems unlikely.
There probably won’t be dresses and gold headbands. There probably won’t be an awful lot of touching. It probably (definitely) won’t be that sexy. I hope there’ll be bare feet. But maybe not until after the woodland.
Am I ok with this? Am I arrogant? Will I crave fairy-glamour? Will I recognise in practice the importance I feel about it right now?
I feel like I’m in exile at the moment. I have learnt that exile is preparation. So I’m thinking. I think I’m preparing. Also, I made myself a hat.
I recently came across the website of a group of beautifully ritualistic, open, sensual, gold-headband wearing, bare-feet tip-toeing, loose hair-flowing, spiritual, joyful, sexy female humans who want to humbly and gently bring that spiritual, sensual, seasonal, open, communal vibe to all people. It looks great. The photos are smiling and a lot of vegans who live on boats and in warehouses, and have Tate membership cards will connect with them and love it.
But I can’t afford a Tate card and really love cheese. It is all true, right, good, fundamentally human and beautifully important. I celebrate it. It is necessary. But it brought back to me my thought of the last few years. It is not me. I need to roll up my non-costumed sleeves.
I want to have the grit to introduce ritual to the kids with teeth knocked out from a fight. The 12 year olds with Mum in prison and Dad off with a new family. To the 14 year olds with court dates. To the kids coming into school stoned and hungry. To the teenagers and young people who don’t give a fuck about how to use a dictionary; who come to school to get lunch and leave. To the Dad with 19 children. To his youngest child. To the overweight, medicated kid with long fingernails, and a mop that gets shaved termly. To the restless, fidgety, fist-pounding young man who needs to ‘f*ck em up’.
Maybe I will do it in white-walled, strip-lit rooms with a guard at the door and a Samaritans poster on a notice board. Or maybe in an unheated community centre on orange, plastic chairs drinking orange, plastic coffee. Maybe one day in a woodland. But that seems unlikely.
There probably won’t be dresses and gold headbands. There probably won’t be an awful lot of touching. It probably (definitely) won’t be that sexy. I hope there’ll be bare feet. But maybe not until after the woodland.
Am I ok with this? Am I arrogant? Will I crave fairy-glamour? Will I recognise in practice the importance I feel about it right now?
I feel like I’m in exile at the moment. I have learnt that exile is preparation. So I’m thinking. I think I’m preparing. Also, I made myself a hat.
12/10/16
I want to be open.
I have practiced for years being open to the moment, to the present, to catchings of light and alignments of spaces, to the exactly right movement or pairing. To that snippet of conversation; to poetry in text or speaking or shape. To receiving whatever comes with reverence and space.
But in this job… probably being open is the most wonderful thing I could bring… but I just have to close. I have to close. I have to toughen and seal up and let the fucking ugly arsed bitch, cunt, tramp, sket, j-bag sail over me along with the pencils, pens, chairs, desks, firedoors, fists and pool cues. Along with my displays that I’ve stayed after school to make. That my boyfriend has cut out. Along with the shut up, you’re boring, who asked you anyway? You’re so annoying. Do you know who I am? Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me. Move away from me, through gritted teeth. I hate you. But then I’m tight. I’m tight. I’m self protecting. And then I realise I just-about-nearly-haven’t-quite managed to stop myself from telling an 11 year old kid that I want to stab them in the eye and they’re saying they’re going to report me. And it’s 8.45 on a Monday morning. There’s 29.5 more hours of that shit to come.
And really some live piano, singing and spinning in a space would work a treat for me. To rest me. To soothe me. One day I will come back to that.
01/10/16
Densely fitting cycle
There were so many houses. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Side by side by side by side along ribbons and ribbons of dark road. Lights on in some, not in others. Two doors sharing a porch; private paths leading up to private doors. Some houses with shoulders hunched down, squatting over food, around a fire, in an age old act of domesticity. Some hidden behind hedges. Some flattened, unremarkable. Pebble-dashed or added to with boxy plastic porches sellotaped onto the front wall. The road curving downwards and upwards and around and here’s a junction and there’s a sloping corner and over this road and around that one going on and on and on, passing them smoothly, in flight, I felt like the whole world was houses and suddenly I had an inkling of what 8 billion might be. Imagining all these houses and multiplied in all the parts of London and then in all the cities in the south and all the towns and cities and villages and hamlets in England and the UK and all the flats and apartments and even bigger cities and farms in the whole of Europe! On and on and bigger and bigger. Add New York to that, people living in warehouses, and Japan! Whole families crammed into bunk beds and 10 square foot cupboards over endless avenues of blocks and blocks and blocks and then adding onto that illegal settlements – the shanty towns of the Philippines, stretching mile after mile along train tracks and canals under motorways; and surrounding Mumbai – bigger than the city itself as you fly into it, and the favelas in south America. People and people and people and people and people. And homes. Countless. People living in offices; and car parks; and schools; and refugee camps. On space stations and in caravans or boats. People living and living and living without any home. Millions of them sleeping on streets or cardboard, with families or not, in tents or prisons, war or peace. With ‘for sale’ signs in the garden or no house outside which to have a garden in which to put a sign. People with bricks around them or corrugated iron or plaster board, or tarpaulin, or breeze blocks or goat skins. People 30 storeys up, 30,000 feet up or sleeping underground, willingly or waiting to escape. Places with an address, or places unknown, unnamed. Whatever you call a house and a house and a house and houses and houses and houses forever as far as the eye can see and the leg can cycle into the night sky. Forever, houses, clamping down onto the skin of the earth like they belong there.
Densely fitting cycle
There were so many houses. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Side by side by side by side along ribbons and ribbons of dark road. Lights on in some, not in others. Two doors sharing a porch; private paths leading up to private doors. Some houses with shoulders hunched down, squatting over food, around a fire, in an age old act of domesticity. Some hidden behind hedges. Some flattened, unremarkable. Pebble-dashed or added to with boxy plastic porches sellotaped onto the front wall. The road curving downwards and upwards and around and here’s a junction and there’s a sloping corner and over this road and around that one going on and on and on, passing them smoothly, in flight, I felt like the whole world was houses and suddenly I had an inkling of what 8 billion might be. Imagining all these houses and multiplied in all the parts of London and then in all the cities in the south and all the towns and cities and villages and hamlets in England and the UK and all the flats and apartments and even bigger cities and farms in the whole of Europe! On and on and bigger and bigger. Add New York to that, people living in warehouses, and Japan! Whole families crammed into bunk beds and 10 square foot cupboards over endless avenues of blocks and blocks and blocks and then adding onto that illegal settlements – the shanty towns of the Philippines, stretching mile after mile along train tracks and canals under motorways; and surrounding Mumbai – bigger than the city itself as you fly into it, and the favelas in south America. People and people and people and people and people. And homes. Countless. People living in offices; and car parks; and schools; and refugee camps. On space stations and in caravans or boats. People living and living and living without any home. Millions of them sleeping on streets or cardboard, with families or not, in tents or prisons, war or peace. With ‘for sale’ signs in the garden or no house outside which to have a garden in which to put a sign. People with bricks around them or corrugated iron or plaster board, or tarpaulin, or breeze blocks or goat skins. People 30 storeys up, 30,000 feet up or sleeping underground, willingly or waiting to escape. Places with an address, or places unknown, unnamed. Whatever you call a house and a house and a house and houses and houses and houses forever as far as the eye can see and the leg can cycle into the night sky. Forever, houses, clamping down onto the skin of the earth like they belong there.
08/07/16
Turbine Hall. Rosas.
I only found out about an hour before the show. About an hour after the end of my week at school. I missed the beginning and was gutted to have missed the stage being set – the performers introduced and all the circles drawn. The audience was already semi-settled – settled into their viewing of the work but not settled in space, always ready to move.
I sat down to watch and delicate warmth tip-toed through my chest and over the top of my back. Such warmth, satisfaction. Such a feeling of home, of being drawn in, of familiarity and excitement. A feeling of remembering dance.
As the piece continued, in silence, the ‘timing’ struck me as immaculate between the dancers. Because it wasn’t really timed, it was sensed, of course there were rhythms and rehearsals but mainly there was pure communication between body and body, peripheral and sense. The casual bodies in white clothes and trainers so grounded, so calm, so knowing of themselves and so sensitively tuned to the presence of others around them – both performers and audience.
What is dance for?
Well… I have a few little thoughts and a few obvious statements but watching this beautiful journey of tension and dynamic, stillness and alacrity, communication and openness I knew one thing: it can be for knowing your self. And when you know yourself, really, in your gut, in the fibres of your muscles, when you can think with the outside of your forearm or the immediate curves underneath your toes then you can be open and responsive and beautifully communicative with another person.
I felt in retrospect the atmosphere that I had come from, that I’m in every day from 8 until 4: fear. Not knowing yourself. Having no idea about any part of yourself but having to prove who you are in every moment. Proving who you are by your trainers and your hat and the way you kiss your teeth or the best put down or gang threat you made that day. And I KNEW, again, something important about dance. Watching that body of dancers communicate silently and so energetically was a glimpse into a utopia that our communities long for.
As a teenager doing UCAS I couldn’t decide what course to choose. I had visited my grandma who had been a nurse through the second world war and explained that I couldn’t decide between dance or nursing. Unexpectedly to me she didn’t hesitate. ‘Dance! After a long days or weeks at the Middlesex, the other nurses and I would go down to the West End to watch a performance and it would make everything better again!’
I don’t actually know if that’s what she said… I can’t remember now but it was along those lines. She did one of the hardest and respected jobs we recognise in society and could have encouraged me to follow in her footsteps but she valued dance highly. She valued dance more than I probably do even now having been in it for over a decade.
I remembered her on Friday because Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography for Rosas absolutely soothed my soul, softened my tension, it brought joy into my throat and tears into my eyes. I bit my lip as I watched it and my eyes were wide, my mouth covered. It was pure joy. Pure joy and beauty. And it was the truth about humans. Not fear. Not unsettled. Not insecure. Not anxious. Not self-hateful. Not aggressive… settled, calm, open, communicative, sensitive, receptive, generous, wise, confident, grounded, beautiful, relational, truthful.
And even the audience, of artists and art-types, of people who go to dance performances at the Tate Modern, they were being themselves, such a variety of colours and skirts, shoes, collars, bags, hair, trousers, layers, tailoring such a lot of people expressing themselves in such gentle ways.
It just felt such a relief to be amongst people who didn’t feel afraid and aggressive. I felt some of the potential of what it could mean to be human and it was beautiful to me.
Turbine Hall. Rosas.
I only found out about an hour before the show. About an hour after the end of my week at school. I missed the beginning and was gutted to have missed the stage being set – the performers introduced and all the circles drawn. The audience was already semi-settled – settled into their viewing of the work but not settled in space, always ready to move.
I sat down to watch and delicate warmth tip-toed through my chest and over the top of my back. Such warmth, satisfaction. Such a feeling of home, of being drawn in, of familiarity and excitement. A feeling of remembering dance.
As the piece continued, in silence, the ‘timing’ struck me as immaculate between the dancers. Because it wasn’t really timed, it was sensed, of course there were rhythms and rehearsals but mainly there was pure communication between body and body, peripheral and sense. The casual bodies in white clothes and trainers so grounded, so calm, so knowing of themselves and so sensitively tuned to the presence of others around them – both performers and audience.
What is dance for?
Well… I have a few little thoughts and a few obvious statements but watching this beautiful journey of tension and dynamic, stillness and alacrity, communication and openness I knew one thing: it can be for knowing your self. And when you know yourself, really, in your gut, in the fibres of your muscles, when you can think with the outside of your forearm or the immediate curves underneath your toes then you can be open and responsive and beautifully communicative with another person.
I felt in retrospect the atmosphere that I had come from, that I’m in every day from 8 until 4: fear. Not knowing yourself. Having no idea about any part of yourself but having to prove who you are in every moment. Proving who you are by your trainers and your hat and the way you kiss your teeth or the best put down or gang threat you made that day. And I KNEW, again, something important about dance. Watching that body of dancers communicate silently and so energetically was a glimpse into a utopia that our communities long for.
As a teenager doing UCAS I couldn’t decide what course to choose. I had visited my grandma who had been a nurse through the second world war and explained that I couldn’t decide between dance or nursing. Unexpectedly to me she didn’t hesitate. ‘Dance! After a long days or weeks at the Middlesex, the other nurses and I would go down to the West End to watch a performance and it would make everything better again!’
I don’t actually know if that’s what she said… I can’t remember now but it was along those lines. She did one of the hardest and respected jobs we recognise in society and could have encouraged me to follow in her footsteps but she valued dance highly. She valued dance more than I probably do even now having been in it for over a decade.
I remembered her on Friday because Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography for Rosas absolutely soothed my soul, softened my tension, it brought joy into my throat and tears into my eyes. I bit my lip as I watched it and my eyes were wide, my mouth covered. It was pure joy. Pure joy and beauty. And it was the truth about humans. Not fear. Not unsettled. Not insecure. Not anxious. Not self-hateful. Not aggressive… settled, calm, open, communicative, sensitive, receptive, generous, wise, confident, grounded, beautiful, relational, truthful.
And even the audience, of artists and art-types, of people who go to dance performances at the Tate Modern, they were being themselves, such a variety of colours and skirts, shoes, collars, bags, hair, trousers, layers, tailoring such a lot of people expressing themselves in such gentle ways.
It just felt such a relief to be amongst people who didn’t feel afraid and aggressive. I felt some of the potential of what it could mean to be human and it was beautiful to me.
31/12/15
So I’m sitting in the cubicle with my pants around my knees thinking ‘You Idiot’.
You knew it. You knew it was the wrong decision, that stability and ease is never the choice to choose.
That the only choice is open and unstable. Is watching, observing, regurge-ing.
Piecing together what those moments mean about life to all of us.
That time for observation is it
That space for watching is it
That who will watch and tell and realise if you don’t
Who?
The person who was braver. That’s who.
What are you going to do?
And I’m feeling violent about who I am – shave this, cut that, because I am frustrated.
But frustration needs to stay to be answered, but in real ways, with real attention. With the real, unquestioning flow I gave it a decade ago when it never occurred to me not to.
I refuse to calcify but I’m in the fearful place of walking that way. What decision will I make? Which one will make me more afraid?
So I’m sitting in the cubicle with my pants around my knees thinking ‘You Idiot’.
You knew it. You knew it was the wrong decision, that stability and ease is never the choice to choose.
That the only choice is open and unstable. Is watching, observing, regurge-ing.
Piecing together what those moments mean about life to all of us.
That time for observation is it
That space for watching is it
That who will watch and tell and realise if you don’t
Who?
The person who was braver. That’s who.
What are you going to do?
And I’m feeling violent about who I am – shave this, cut that, because I am frustrated.
But frustration needs to stay to be answered, but in real ways, with real attention. With the real, unquestioning flow I gave it a decade ago when it never occurred to me not to.
I refuse to calcify but I’m in the fearful place of walking that way. What decision will I make? Which one will make me more afraid?
31/05/15
Hush now.
Hush; still.
Cease that empty noise making,
that repeating of the other’s repeat.
That chatter that zaps through space in an instant
and has scrolled to oblivion after 4 inches of life.
That sharing, that farcical ‘social’, that ‘like’,
that round and round of images, ‘number 10 blew my mind’
The orbiting of celebrity voices
surrounded by sheep, the baa-ing like earth-shaking
The world does not need more
The world does not need more
The world does not need more
The people need less
noise.
Hush now.
Hush; still.
Cease that empty noise making,
that repeating of the other’s repeat.
That chatter that zaps through space in an instant
and has scrolled to oblivion after 4 inches of life.
That sharing, that farcical ‘social’, that ‘like’,
that round and round of images, ‘number 10 blew my mind’
The orbiting of celebrity voices
surrounded by sheep, the baa-ing like earth-shaking
The world does not need more
The world does not need more
The world does not need more
The people need less
noise.
27/03/14
And I smiled as I spiralled open in an arch, reaching to our blue-sky gods of Space. of Moving. of Tribe. before whipping it away to a spin.
I’d arrived with tears swallowed tightly in the top of my throat, covered in Crush and Rush Hour. covered in Tightness. Grey things, industry and consuming. Covered in the fear of that being the start to everybody’s morning every day and the end to their evenings every night. What will that do to the soul over time? Shrink it. It will cause it to cower in a corner, fight for its seat and cower - averting its eyes. I find myself being purged of this.
In that room, still full, more so with the sharing of each individual’s magnanimous Soul, cushioned and held and swept around by the sea and air of live music. The Beat, moving The Tribe. Age and time and ancient days have not ended. They are here in this rectangular white studio full of people’s Joy, people’s Movement, people’s whooping in pure elated Love for Moving. For spinning and accenting a flick (O Breath!), for going to and fro, to and fro, ravelling, unravelling, kicking, flicking, ending the phrase, spinning, and turning, arms lifting us, legs travelling us, spine spiralling, eyes seeing everything they can see, everything they could ever want to see, and the mouth open, breathing, accentuating movement with breath, with rhythm, with the thing that is Life.
I let out a ‘whoop!’ with bubbling-over ecstasy of movement, others in the room pick up the vocal ice-breaker - no talking has happened in this place. No words. Just moving. Continuous moving. We are the Sea. We are the Air. We are the History of People.
We dance Capoira, Flamenco, Classical Indian, modern contemporary, all together. We are One. We are movement. We sweat, we smile, we move, we breath.
We are the History of People.
And I smiled as I spiralled open in an arch, reaching to our blue-sky gods of Space. of Moving. of Tribe. before whipping it away to a spin.
I’d arrived with tears swallowed tightly in the top of my throat, covered in Crush and Rush Hour. covered in Tightness. Grey things, industry and consuming. Covered in the fear of that being the start to everybody’s morning every day and the end to their evenings every night. What will that do to the soul over time? Shrink it. It will cause it to cower in a corner, fight for its seat and cower - averting its eyes. I find myself being purged of this.
In that room, still full, more so with the sharing of each individual’s magnanimous Soul, cushioned and held and swept around by the sea and air of live music. The Beat, moving The Tribe. Age and time and ancient days have not ended. They are here in this rectangular white studio full of people’s Joy, people’s Movement, people’s whooping in pure elated Love for Moving. For spinning and accenting a flick (O Breath!), for going to and fro, to and fro, ravelling, unravelling, kicking, flicking, ending the phrase, spinning, and turning, arms lifting us, legs travelling us, spine spiralling, eyes seeing everything they can see, everything they could ever want to see, and the mouth open, breathing, accentuating movement with breath, with rhythm, with the thing that is Life.
I let out a ‘whoop!’ with bubbling-over ecstasy of movement, others in the room pick up the vocal ice-breaker - no talking has happened in this place. No words. Just moving. Continuous moving. We are the Sea. We are the Air. We are the History of People.
We dance Capoira, Flamenco, Classical Indian, modern contemporary, all together. We are One. We are movement. We sweat, we smile, we move, we breath.
We are the History of People.
Nevins 17/06/11
That lightness arrow came from nowhere
on my left
and it blew my fucking mind.
It opened the space to move on.
I will never leave you. Nor forsake you.
Cool. Let’s go then.
That tiny wedge of perception pushed
the block ajar.
On the sofa in that turquoise, naked place,
with the not-my-hair of my discovery
the ceiling was lifted.
And stuff flooded in.
Stuff. Life.
Wetly, fully, seeping and leaking and flooding
into my head and my eyes and my understanding
in a way that I knew then and have known now created a
Grand Canyon
of light and wisdom and thick, golden arrows of STUFF
between what I see and what my whole life had seen.
And the only crossing can be for their ceilings to lift.
No.
To fall.
To crash down on their heads like a rich and wet flood.
Of generosity and life and overwhelming, overpowering acceptance of
not absolute.
To crash on their ears and their foreheads
and bits of plaster that hold poetry to stick on their eyelids like so much law;
and dust that is unconditional human generosity to make cake of their hair;
and beams that are breaking-down-boundaries to create and topple in front, behind, beside them
until their roof is gone.
And he has not left them.
But that box and constant boxing, that temple
THAT TEMPLE
has been destroyed by golden arrows
of light and wisdom,
of experience and people
of the history of this whole planet.
He hasn’t left them because he was only passing by.
His being is wherever he ever wanted it to be and it was always
and is and always forever will be
bigger than that fucking ceiling.
That lightness arrow came from nowhere
on my left
and it blew my fucking mind.
It opened the space to move on.
I will never leave you. Nor forsake you.
Cool. Let’s go then.
That tiny wedge of perception pushed
the block ajar.
On the sofa in that turquoise, naked place,
with the not-my-hair of my discovery
the ceiling was lifted.
And stuff flooded in.
Stuff. Life.
Wetly, fully, seeping and leaking and flooding
into my head and my eyes and my understanding
in a way that I knew then and have known now created a
Grand Canyon
of light and wisdom and thick, golden arrows of STUFF
between what I see and what my whole life had seen.
And the only crossing can be for their ceilings to lift.
No.
To fall.
To crash down on their heads like a rich and wet flood.
Of generosity and life and overwhelming, overpowering acceptance of
not absolute.
To crash on their ears and their foreheads
and bits of plaster that hold poetry to stick on their eyelids like so much law;
and dust that is unconditional human generosity to make cake of their hair;
and beams that are breaking-down-boundaries to create and topple in front, behind, beside them
until their roof is gone.
And he has not left them.
But that box and constant boxing, that temple
THAT TEMPLE
has been destroyed by golden arrows
of light and wisdom,
of experience and people
of the history of this whole planet.
He hasn’t left them because he was only passing by.
His being is wherever he ever wanted it to be and it was always
and is and always forever will be
bigger than that fucking ceiling.
