Performance, 30 minutes, mud, river water, wild garlic, 1 sheet paper, candle, drum.
I gather materials from the garden, in domestic vehicles. I create the space, I prepare for the ceremony by drumming and calling in the 'Grandmothers'.
I listen and I obey.
I hear them in the air, in the trees, in all the objects around - they are everywhere and in everything, unseen and yet sensed. They communicate with and through my body.
I start by rubbing mud on the insides
of my body: inside my legs, the souls of my feet, by lower belly, my neck, the insides of my arms, the palms of my hands and across the right side of my face.
I wait and I listen.
I create a mound of mud on the paper and then I lie down on top of it and rub my back into the mud. Then I turn my back to the audience and I pour water into mud and I squelch and I kneed and I feel and I listen. I feel all my ancestors who tended to the soil, who knew their belonging to earth. I feel the pain of the disconnection, this loss of contact: of body knowing belonging and place.
I sit on the stall and feel the authority of the voices behind my back - my ancient ancestors - stretching back and back and back - to a time before the culture of patriarchy started to severe and cut and separate. I feel this absolute strength of body being here. Then I stand and feel the absolute vulnerability of body being here - excruciating vulnerability - exquisite vulnerability. Somehow the strength supporting the vulnerability and vice versa.
Then I know I have to give voice to them, I have to submit / let go/ allow expression to come through my voice (I say my voice, and to be honest - it was and it wasn't (mine)). Full bodied round sounds coming through then very high unstable keening cries full of grief and remembering and knowing. Turning to voice over my shoulders, right then left, over my shoulders to sing to my ancestors who are singing to themselves through my voice.
A deep honouring, a deep prayer, a ceremony of healing. I place myself before them as a daughter, as woman, as human - and I make myself available. I feel a 'stretching' that gathers, consolidates, 'pulls in', to include more here - to include them - a 'collective'. A soul sense that is profoundly intimate and yet more-than the singular / encapsulated/ isolated sense of myself as an individual.
A river running through my voice, a river of life and death, an expanded presence, here and not here, of this world and not of this world, not born from this culture.
Comments