Paea Leach

Part 3.1
I have been here, in Townsville, for 9 days. I came from Melbourne, from Naarm. There, I live on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung people. I came to do a residency. To be in situ as a dancer artist. I came to shift tempo and situation and alter conditions. The point of such things like this is to see what happens. This philosophy of just see what happens, is a rare gift given ‘the world’ is product driven, outcome crazed. So, I came to do a residency. I landed with the intention of observing, documenting, feeling-into what came up, given I am in an elsewhere. And, given everything that has happened in the last year or so. If the body is a conduit, a holding zone, a sponge... how is it now? I came here, also, of course, to dance. I have had a wide experience while here. I have had more conversations with real life people than in the last year. There has been no zoom and no interface between bodies. I have not been separated from anything. I have not been in any breakout rooms! This has been deeply moving and alive making. I have listened and related. Thought about place and places beneath the place. Considered how we orient kinaesthetically. How we map make, meaning make, comprehend. And how we fail to notice, feel, orient and care. I have been, essentially, collecting kinaesthetic data... recording a sensorium of place. I have been here for 13 days. Perhaps, I have just arrived.

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On Sunday night, one week after landing, I saw a performance. You may have been there. You may know then that the title, in language, means ‘we have arrived’. Or something like that.

The day after the show I woke and had three strong conversations with a woman who is 50, a woman who is elsewhere and is 70, a man who is maybe 50. These conversations happened after dancing in the dirt and night to baker boy, watching a small fella called Preston be a luminous brolga and five days after dancing, solo, for the first time in my long dance life to didgeridoo played live. Given all the steps and moves done in my lifetime, it is rare to do and feel something in the realm of dance that is new. Like shiny glimmering, never before encountered, radical new. And, of course, it was not shiny new - it was ancient. New, only, to my bones. It was also exciting. Something cracked open in me.

When practising dance we often speak of the ever present now - now this, then this, then this. now, now, now. The working paradigm accepts and embraces that we, our bodies, are always changed and nothing is ever, or can ever be the same. The flux itself is a type of newness. But, the newness I felt last week was not that kind of newness. It was felt - not conceptual. I couldn’t defy the rhythm of the didgeridoo and It took me a long time to be able to get to vertical - earth and sky and horizons. It occurred to me mid dance that I did not need to work against the sound - In fact, why would I even want to? Answer... Because the brain that wants to undercut rhythm or defy the obvious is a contemporary art high brain thinking brain. It wants to, in my case, abstract or tease out the feltness of the dancing into fragments and multiple differentiating velocities of sensing. Or I always want to make the dancing complex to say it more simply. And of course there is endless academic talk of the problems with words like organic, natural rhythms and, the biggest offender, ‘desire’. There is a lot of cognitive noise.

So, going to ground for the longest time before finding the vertical seems the only answer.

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Later the same day I walked around the upstairs studio and began to write a thing. I had been trying to write something like this, for a while. Something without flourishes and linguistic acrobatics. Words with their feet on the ground - ones we can all understand. “Tell it like it is” she says: reduce the noise.

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Life in Victoria in 2020 was real and strange and sad and enduring and fear filled. The year and the conditions asked things that felt hard and offered little reprieve. Compression became a real and enduring bodily state. Sometimes there is no dancing and sometimes there is no writing because writing too, comes from the body.

Sometimes there are no cracks. We were waiting in the dark. Collectively there was no breathing - literally. We have all been arrested mid-flight mid-life mid-thought.

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In 1915, post-war, Virginia Woolf wrote “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think”. Dark - as in inscrutable not as in terrible.

The past is also dark. Inscrutable. Terrible at times. The past before the past - Te Kore - the void - the long dark night of the long dark waiting of the long thought and the long breath is black.

A darkness of the deepest dark.

So yes, Things have been holding on. Fiercely. Darkness.

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Dance became a concept or something that happened alone for months in bedrooms and kitchens, along furniture surfaces and with children and dogs underfoot, on verandahs, next to kitchens and parents cooking meals, between chairs and in backyards in the freezing winter.

Dance was happening on the tiniest world stages. A series of ‘sensoriums of one’. And But the Dance, however reduced, felt like a refuge - a survival port - a life raft of feeling and breathing.

Dance was a something, the only something that shifted the dynamic of days that folded over each other. Dance was a survival tool. Medicine against the medicine dominating news headlines.

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I know survival in 2020 meant so very many things. And 2020 amplified just how inequality across the globe. I acknowledge I am speaking of a type of spiritual and corporeal survival - not actual, life endangered in real ways survival. Not in that way.

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This is the first time in more than 18 months I have flown somewhere. Elsewhere. I enjoy it. I remember myself differently. I wonder if, given everything, the way I dance is different. Am I changed actually? And if so, how

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The week I began my arriving in this here - the text I wrote began: “I am in the milk looking for the gold” ... It continues to obliteration and violet horizons. It postulates on the nature of alluvial gold deposits in the earth and body both. It is a sweeping and poetic rending of time. 2020 truncated onto a page.

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But this place and brief moment in the fabric, as it were, of time, has been making its way through me. The earth and the sky and the horizons and - importantly - The difficulties. I am reminded, because of all the things that have fallen into my sensorium since being here, to say things more simply. Shift cadence, reorient temporal sensing.

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I sensed questions rising, like: What if this place and this time, because of the time that has been, because of parameters and conditions that have changed radically - was asking something different of me? Feet down, eyes steady but soft, I go to ground, I listen. I feel into the new questions. It is always harder to stand still as a dancer than it is to dance at velocity. A week later after feeling myself newly affected, I began to think of the potential of words to obfuscate, cause roadblocks and unhinge understanding in unhelpful ways. Perhaps, I thought - I have been languishing in poems and poetics as a way to not say anything - directly. Perhaps that has been necessary. It feels dangerous to say things directly. Since I have been here, something has happened and I am changed. My waka, my canoe, slid ashore in the mid of night to a soundtrack of curlews and frogs. It has taken me 42 years, 4 months, 6 days and some increments of minutes and seconds to arrive in this place. Here. Talking to you about things. Dancing a bit. Sharing a bit. Laughing at my earnestness and hubris. Realising that telling it like it is, for me, a sensorium of one, can be its own kind of medicine.

Part 3.2

I have been thinking for a long time about silence and fury. I know, as we all do, that there is a glut of history - of things that happened, largely irrefutably - that have been silenced. Here, as everywhere else. Shame guilt & the mother load of everything. Much has been trodden on. Many have been trodden on.

And now we have things like epigenetics - science that measures cortisol levels to understand the physical reality of intergenerational trauma. Bodies leak into bodies leak into bodies leak into bodies. Everything is overlapping. Cortisol is released as a hormonal response to fear by the adrenal glands. Affect is cellular. If we are 75 trillion cells - if - then - Imagine that.

Adrenals adrenalising: Small, potent, historically exhausted glands. Related to survival.

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I am aware of the potency of this time. Life and death shifting at speed, on unceded lands. We are in an epoch, yes we are! - 360 degrees - stand by! Be ready! culturally, socially, sexually, personally. The buildings are burning and people gather in deserts celebrating & watching the internal collapse of –

ALL the ivory towers. Ivory. Into an obsidian void? We are - are we - falling into darkness. Maybe baby, maybe!

But... it does not have to be terrible.

We are a steaming compost of humanity. A beautiful terrible dark mess.

I am aware of the potency of this time.

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Staying with my body is a way of meaning making that is not normative. It is a way to survive yes. I have said that. But more than that, movement has become vital medicine for these times. Where we – all - are - is being called a pluriverse by some academics and artists. A new world where the old ways are disintegrating.
Perhaps gold and violet hues will emerge from the darkness of this pluriverse?
Perhaps here, as the middle unfixes and binaries dissolve, we shall find ourselves, teaming compost heap of humanity and history that we are, floating in the milky middle...looking around with curiosity.
Darkness does not have to be terrible.

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As a mother, dancer, artist, human, artist mother person maker I ask:
How do we continue to dance and work and make? Why should we dance on? How do we dance on contested lands? Should we? What is our role and what are our responsibilities?
Despite the empire that is neoliberalism and despite preferences and reverence for cognition over feltness, despite a favouring of empiricism and quantification.... we dance on.
Should we? Yes, she exclaims we should!
We must.
Just not in a vacuum, not in a non relational field. What else would we have without the dancing?!
Life on Zoom is what we would have. Horrid as Enid Bolton said. Horrid as my 6 year old says.

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I have been here in the doing of dancing, thinking from this POV toward the world that I am a part of and have moved extensively through.
I have come to think that the work of dance and the thinking feeling that is movement moving, is concerned with distillation.

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In “Hope in the dark”, American author, climate activist and feminist, Rebecca Solnit, asks -
“who, four decades ago, could have conceived of the changed status of all who are nonwhite, non male, or nonstraight, the wide-open conversations about power, nature, economies and ecologies?”.
Solnit is not naive, she talks about hope as robust, not lacking, not a poor cousin.
Hope as action filled with agency, not a soft and pale coloured wish With unicorn horns and a positive reinforcement t shirt With words painted in gold glitter. Not that NO!

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Hope is something you do. You put it to use, you make hope useful. Dance is something you do, you take the everything and feel it all and then you put it to use. Distill it, again and again. thus it becomes a useful doing: away from the noise.