Dance Program: Her Body Is a Minefield - a vignette
by Florence Amunds
copyright 2024
Visiting academic researcher, lecturer, I’ve traveled to this far north city to live and work at the university, reading, searching, lecturing, writing, running labs thru the late Summer into a beautiful and then stark Autumn, the long dark Winter til Spring and ending with a short Summer term.
It's cold gray windy early autumn, early morning, the first really cold day without autumn's lining of golden warmth, the other side of the late summer with just its first pleasant invigorating hint, the slight delicious edge of autumn chill; no, now this day is thoroughly cold. It could snow but I doubt it will. Too early. Doesn't feel like rain either, too dry. I am relieved with the break as it rained on and off the last ten days and now just the low clouds remain. This wind is cold and bites. Reminds me of many other times. Too many. Need to clear my head.
I've been awake since 4 a.m. Not jet lag, I've been here too long. Just woke up thinking and done sleeping; so, starting early. I go early to prep for the day's meetings and class, where I lecture, and work. No one out yet, I'm alone on my long walk across campus, groves and bowers, lawns, gardens, buildings, ancient and new. Mind clearing in the wind and cold, I wrap my coat and scarf tight and seek warmth, breakfast in a cafe in the tall modern building on the sprawling wooded park campus of old mixed with new buildings on the edge of the city, surrounded by old forest.
I am told before I come, in university orientation books and materials, reading on-line, and again on arrival by tours and more books, that the campus was planned and built in a past age from an old estate and it's park and buildings, long before the World Wars, far outside the city to be its own place, separate, somewhat isolated and insulated from the old town; still, the small ancient city, now grown with commerce and advance and the inevitable community around the university have grown toward each other and joined. The university maintains its park setting against the ancient forest and most of the old buildings still stand, gardens too, structures renovated and remodeled over centuries to fit university needs, offices and halls and classrooms and laboratories fit to the rooms and buildings, all enshrining the architecture and all of what can be preserved and restored, truly ancient stone and brick, grain-end-on wood flooring from what must have been enormous and ancient trees, bare and natural and oiled panel and moldings, doors, balustrades, cabinets and tables, all built for the ages.
The new building and inside, its cafe, are spare modern stark white stone, concrete, metal, glass, warmed by glowing golden lights and blond wood and early morning sun's first and last thin amber rays at the morning’s southeast horizon before rising behind low cold heavy clouds.
The lower levels of the glass and white stone and concrete building are two large lecture halls that convert to live theater halls, dance and theater studios, music practice rooms, one of many exercise gyms and some indoor courts for racquetball, squash, handball, volleyball and half-court basketball, of course the cafe. The remainder of the upper floors are classrooms, offices, smaller halls, laboratories and a handful of smaller specialized libraries and archives.
I avail myself of all of these and spend the most time in my office, in the libraries and laboratories and, of course, the music rooms, each with its piano.
Reading a single page left on my table, light blond wood, bare and polished, almost glowing, atop a stone base, a page left on each table in the cafe, announcing an interpretive dance production and performance made by two young women, dancers, developing choreographers, now auditioning dancers, support from a young artists grant, performance in the Spring, one choreographer with four or five names and one with two.
The two young women are here. Announcement pages left on every table, they share coffee, fruit, pastry and talking while waiting for their dancers and time. I wonder at us, warm inside, eating fresh fruit, tropical and from high summer somewhere, in this place and season.
The cafe is up one level, overlooks the lawns and the high open foier through glass windows on two sides and half the tables extend out onto an open balcony walled by a short low row of pale stone blocks topped by bright polished wood rail.
Only the three of us and the prep and wait staff in the cafe, making all ready for a busy day. The muted clack of plates and cups, the forks, spoons, knives make their own quiet rhythm as they are wrapped in cloth napkins by deft hands, the smells of bread, pastry, steam, fruits and preserves, ground coffee, too early yet for the morning’s press of staff, faculty and students who will begin to arrive in about two hours.
Both young women are somewhat tall, long hair, pulled back and bound, one blond, one with dark hair, both quite fair. Each carries a large bag slung over one shoulder almost mirroring each other, each slides it onto a chair before turning and sitting, crossing legs, elegant, simple, unconscious but practiced, the moves of dancers. I wonder which is which.
Young mothers, with children already, are their age. More and more, students and young women and young men wait to marry, if at all. Get an education, start a career, get established. Better or not?
I look like I'm reading, or hope I do, book, folder, notebook, all open and pen at the ready. They don't seem to notice me. I doodle and idly flip pages as I half listen. Talking is loud and free. I wish I ever had such confidence and freedom in my own voice and body. Did I once, ever, even when very young? Thinking of the bodies of dancers and their voices, free, strong, supple, clear, energetic, melodic.
I know I’ll go play some Chopin or Bach to clear my mind, restore my focus, get into the lab early before my lecture and completing my day with writing and answering messages.
The dancer with two names asks the one with five names about her five names and her family, sorry she never asked before as she remembers now seeing it on the flyer they distribute. Now I see, the blond is a little taller and has the five names, the girl with black hair and eyes has two names.
Two names always meant to ask about the names and her family. Each is a family name from a deep and broad and old family, both sides. Five names tells of each name, each after a grandmother, aunt, matriarch, ancient storied ancerstal heroine. Roots, they call it. She says she got five mainly because she was the first oldest daughter in a few generations and so the accumulated names came to her. She laughs. Old family traditions! They build up and then fall on an infant scion who gets to carry them around for life. She has a cousin, a boy, fourteen now, with eight names, all the accumulated monikers of those generations without a firstborn son and so, he shows up and gets them all, clearing the slate for his son and the oldest boys after.
Two names says she knows of some of them, five names’ family, says it must be wonderful and help her feel safe in the world, a good deep firm foundation of good people of good character, reputation, influence, interest, yes, roots, home and family.
Five names says that yes, it is and it does; one good thing is always people to go to and a place to go, family to visit and places to stay for any occasion, all over, homes, apartments, villas, cabins, a few estates and farms, “places,” “We have a place there,” and family there to share, or occasionally time to go stay somewhere alone when no one would be there, yes, that part is good, having a large family.
Yet, it can also be difficult, in its way, stifling and limiting and constraining, heavy, carrying all that ancestral history and responsibility around in just her names with their expectations and demands and high standards and the duty and debt to former generations and their sacrifice and privation and hardship and how she should be. Everyone knowing her by her family and what they expect of her and trying to make and presume a connection from which sibling or relatives they know, have known. It can be a heavy lot.
They pause and drink and we all watch a lone doe outside cross the dormant grass and walks, stop to sniff at trees and fallow planting beds that will be bare until Spring, walk on around the building toward the forest.
Five names answers her friend and herself again, that yes, it has its advantages and security and also has burdens and costs to belong to such a clan. For one, she shares, lowering her voice only in affect, leaning in, with such a large family we all know closely some heart tearing tragedy, young death or accident, illness and disability, robbing hope and potential. "I had a sister who died when she was just six. Broke all our hearts and I know my parents' never fully mended after."
…
She tells of also having some bad seeds who everyone knows and all shake their bowed heads in sadness and shared responsibility and shame when they're mentioned, yet all rally and welcome them when they return in good or ill, to mend ties and ways or to break them and damage trust and hope yet again. It can be good to have such a wide and deep family to celebrate and to mourn with, joys multiplied, burdens shared.
It's made dancing and choreography a true ordeal, "Dancing?! A dancer?!" Five names has heard that so many times she hears it in her sleep, in her head, and dances the more fiercely and turns up the music or just the music and the count in her head, dances until she can’t hear, to drown it out. She feels a drive beyond talent she may have to prove she can do it and she will. Answers that maybe it could be nice to just have your own name and a parent's and be free to be and become you, unbound to the family and the long heavy past and weighty histories of high standards and great expectations and so many old and young eyes on you.
…
They talk of family and histories and try to conclude something but leave open the question in many metaphors and analogies as this: Which is better, the ship without constant anchor, without lines chaining it to the dock and the land, free to fly before the wind across wide open seas and oceans to the horizon yet exposed to the storms and the vast deep; or, the ship overburdened with cargo and stores and expectations all too precious to risk open seas, encumbered by investors, outfitters, owners, shippers, merchants, too dear and important to sail too far from shore or harbour, staying close in with the land with the mass of sail or volume of engines and crew required to move it, even requiring tenders, tugboats or lines to steady it and keep it sailing safe and steady and well. They muse on these poles for a while with loose images and new similies with the same theme.
I think they, unknowing, reveal their heritage as the children of long ago north seafaring folk and by genetics or the current newly proposed explanations to cover the territory of the repository of memory and knowledge, missing from neurology and physiology, the new labels of epigenetics or morphogenetic fields or whatever constitutes ancestral, cultural, social memory, what turns it off or on, latent or manifest, they speak in language and metaphor of the sea and the age of sail. Somehow neurology has so far failed to find in neurons, cells and chemicals and a multitude of interconnections where or how a memory is stored in the brain. In the mind, yes. That’s certain. But where is it physically? Can’t say. It must be somewhere. Same with consciousness. Where is it? What is it? Can’t say. But it is.
Surely it is more than genes and connected neurons and which proteins and chemicals we make when, that gives a little boy the same gait and winsome but wise, if nearsighted, gaze and crooked smile and cocked head as his grandfather, the same liking for wind and open skies, the same clear singing voice, the same talent for empathy and understanding of animals, especially horses and dogs, a way of picking up a stick, flapping it against his leg and boot and then carrying it and waving it all day as a pointer, a scepter, a fly swat, a horse crop, a back or foot scratch, drawing in the dirt, a sword, then casting it aside at day’s end with a certain careless elegance.
The girl with the eyes and voice of a great-grandmother or aunt she never knew and that clearly come from neither parent, her way of singing and the swing of skip and arms and hair, the turn of her hand and then wrist when brushing or running fingers in her hair, smoothing her clothes, her singular grip on a pen or any tool, the curve and tilt and flourish of her handwriting, her rhythm of stirring or kneading, her talent with flowers, a garden, a love of all birds, her smile and bright joy in them, a phrase or cadence all her own and ancient also, her ease in falling asleep and sleeping soundly amid quiet or commotion.
There must be some medium and mechanism beyond our science’ ability to see and measure that transmits these things that are "in our blood," deeper, "in our bones."
How many of the things we see and recognize in each other or those we think are all our own, even who we are, are passed to us from parents and theirs and generations back?
I feel deep memories of my own mother, grandmothers, even father and grandfathers, ages and generations back, and I think of each I know or knew and those I know only from an old photograph or stories and half memories of my own, those overheard or told to me. I realize again that some of my own memories are not mine alone but are the stories shared and overheard, yet many feel like mine, as if I was there, some as if they happened to me, seem as if I was impossibly present.
I wonder between the half sentences of these two dancers, coded conversation pieces that betray they know each other very well and long enough for this kind of private abbreviation and spoken shorthand between them, if I could see and know their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins... who would I see in each of them, the root of familiar, their words, their gestures, a smile, a glance, the affinity, attraction of a certain scent or food, the unaccounted aversion for a place or thing. Who would I see?
Who of my own family shows thru me? Where springs my love of certain music that I never heard my parents play, never was exposed to before that I know of and yet when I first heard it I first heard a new language I already knew, entirely new to me and yet so deeply familiar and deeply moving, feeling it in my body, in my blood, in my bones.---
Where does my own longing for the sea come from? The knowing, the first time I saw the sea, that I had found a kind of home? The deep feeling without words that if I had been a boy in the age of sail anywhere near a port, I'd have "run away to sea" finding even the slimmest chance and never looking back?
That I know of, my mothers and fathers haven't lived near the sea in four or five or more generations, many never seeing it at all and no sailors I can find anywhere on the family tree. Only a few were passengers from Old World to New. Where does that come from? How far back? How deep? How does it get in there? It is surely deep. I do "feel it in my bones," so deep that when I hear or read this phrase, this love of the sea is what I recall.
I had thought, I remember, to make this trip in late Summer across the Atlantic by ship with all my research and gear, traveling with trunks as out of a past age, longed to do it, looked for passage to a near port city, but no, too long and the timing not right and far too expensive, the logistics just would not align, not this time. Another trip, another time. Another life?
…
Two names says that her family is small but close. Her mother was raised by her own single mother, two names’ grandmother, who had come from a big old deep-roots family. Grandmother married grandfather who was raised by his single mother, great-grandmother, and "had no roots." So, three generations of single mothers, each with one child. Alone together. None remarried. Adrift in the world but for each other.
Two names tells the story of grandmother marrying grandfather much against the broad disapproval of her family. He was a very good man and treated grandmother as his queen. But, the family objected. She loved him. That was all. Why not one of the young handsome eligible sons of another old family? No roots. No Roots! Yet she loved him.
They both sigh at the same time, in the same way, on the same note. They both dissolve, laugh long together.
She loved him. Grandfather was a police officer. He was killed on duty when grandmother was pregnant with mother. He was struck by a speeding vehicle while stopped to help a family that had broken down on a long remote road. He and one of the family's children, a girl, were struck and killed instantly.
Grandmother never really recovered from that, but went on, raised mother, gave her best to give double with her love for grandfather given to her daughter in the place of the love of a father.
…
Grandmother's family reacted as though his death was to be expected and the result of marrying "that man with no roots." So, she separated from her own family, distanced herself from them and went her own way, working and raising her daughter on her own, as she could, refusing help and never asking. Two names and her mother and grandmother are close, stay close.
Two names doesn't know her own father. Her mother says she doesn't know him and they leave it at that. She says she finds men and boys alien and strange, incomprehensible, unimaginable. Why would a human be that way? And yet, they have their use and a strange fierce wild raw power and a fearful attraction she feels she may not be able to resist if one comes too close. She asks five names what it is like to have brothers. Five names confirms that they are aliens and adds that they may not be redeemable, might not be fully tamed nor truly domesticated but will always remain irremediably wild and feral. “Who said, ‘irreducible rascality’? That is it!” Yet they can be admirable when working and playing and adorable and even irresistible when strong or brave and when sleeping or wounded … or in love! They sigh together and laugh again together.
They talk of boys and men.
They talk of women, of strong mothers.
Five names says she has seen two names' mother and grandmother each at different times hug her and say she's proud of her. With all her big clan, this whole huge family, five names has never been told anyone is proud of her. Two names reaches out. They embrace, hard and hold, near tears, eyes and mouths redden. Two names leans back and takes five names’ shoulders in her hands, says she is proud of five names. The embrace again, hold. Five names chokes, swallows hard and says, "Thank you."
They talk of absent or busy fathers - Is there a difference? Must be, yet both abandon their children and families and leave empty holes, wounds and scars, the absent father who leaves and the absent father who stays. Is there any parent who doesn't leave wounds and scars on their children? Some known but chosen, some unanticipated and unintended. Perhaps all unintended, some where there was, or seemed, no other choice. Maybe one of many things that sets humans apart from the other animals.
Five names says that maybe no other animals - but maybe some primates, though - "worry" about any of this, none seem to know it at all. Envy the animals and all other life. The burdens of self consciousness, of sentience. So called Enlightenment.
Two names wonders, are the enlightened ones, the masters, free or more burdened by the light? Is this why old souls and the wise stoop with bowed heads in age and wisdom? Is this what Jesus really meant when he says, "My burden is light."? Many prophets and sages, even the Athenian gadfly, biting at the horse of state, spoke of their messages as a burden.
Once clear comprehension of what is true, and especially what must be said descends or distills, it is a burden to be delivered in travail. Light a thing, conveying knowledge and sight and understanding to eyes and mind and not a description nor measure of weight, light itself the burden, the comprehension the weight?
Five names envies all the other life, all too busy just surviving, eating, building, migrating, and living and reproducing and some raising young - others just let them go. The animals never worry nor wonder if what they do is right, damages or hurts another life or their offspring. They just live and do and be. They don't even "do their best," they just do, they just are what they are. Even in death there is peace and a wholeness with life. Five names says, "Most days I am glad to be human but some days I wish to simply be like a plant or animal and not think or wonder or worry if I'm doing it right." Two names knows just that feeling and thought.
………
They both agree that they've shared a lot more than they intended, didn't talk about the auditions ahead at all. They both thank the other for sharing and listening. "I feel so close to you. As close as family. Closer.” "Me too."
"Well, let's go." "Long day ahead."
They stand and embrace. "Thanks! Needed that!" "Yes, me too."
They pay, gather up to go dance and find the dancers for their production and create. They leave walking with the easy light gait of youth and the grace of dancers. On with a day and lives full of wonder and worry and hope and dancing.
As they leave I feel I've intruded. Unknown, unseen. I should also say, "Thank you! Thanks! Needed that!"
I finish my breakfast and reading and wonder more and I think I should write this down to remember and ponder later. Who has any better life or family or advantage or result, two names or five names? Who knows these things? Who can say?
