Creative Liberation

Hiding in plain sight

Circle formation in a dark and dense theater on an alternative school campus built in 1928 with the side doors open as cut out peepholes to other nearly realms where children, deer, toads, insects and ancestors freely came and went. I cling to the memory of a 5 year-old shouting “There are people in there!”, calling us by our flesh-suits, witnessing and declaring. We were asked to think and talk about security, maroonage, sanctuary, fugitivty and approaching what is forbidden.

Joy James, the focal point of this shape we took, I saw model listening with an articulated embodiment, chest forward, eyes closed, mouth slightly ajar. At the beginning of the week, I told the story of how we encountered a trickster at Four Quarters last summer and a fairy who taught us how to disengage from the fool. This edge of the world wisdom followed us as others recalled it throughout our time together as well as something else I said about slowness as a practice is an invisibility cloak.

Ayasha talked about a movement resilience rather than a defensive one, pirating and sailing ways to fortify liberation as a somatic passageway of going rather than wartime. The conversation swirled into a cacophony of tapestries embroidering sacred suggestions, non-verbal acts of underscored playwriting, gesturing energy through and saying more with the body in sounds, clicks and twitches than can be done using mono-expression, maybe something like quantum dialogue.