mountains and trees
how to be me. how to be you. we were talking about this after rehearsal last night. in a blue lit bar in Macarena, three women who are not from Spain, who are mad for flamenco.
For each of us, madness and flamenco are their own metaphors. we express these metaphors differently in our lives, in the way we look at the world, in our camino.
how to be me. how to be you. for me, the need for stillness after movement is so strong. i love, after a day of dance and movement, to have a morning as still as the sea after a storm, a sea that has spent itself, for now, of big movements. the waves come and go, the breath comes and goes. there is no striving, no planning - you sit and listen to wisdom words and there is such peace.
how to be more of myself, more whimsical, more inexorably myself, more free of culture and nurture. not to break with the world. the opposite. in fact, the more you are you, the more you connect.
I ask, what is the opportunity in this audacious dream? what is the opportunity in taking such a big step? because when you take big steps, the tectonics shift. plate tectonics. i love that word in geology. I love geology in general, as a concept, side by side with loving the processes and the knowledge. I mean, I love geology in general because it is an analysis of landscape, you pay attention to scars and understand what made them. And I also love knowing the names of rocks and stones and their properties.
Plate tectonics. The move of continental plates. the ground under your feet shifting, moving.
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that explains how major landforms are created as a result of Earth’s subterranean movements. The theory, which solidified in the 1960s, transformed the earth sciences by explaining many phenomena, including mountain building events, volcanoes, and earthquakes.
In plate tectonics, Earth’s outermost layer, or lithosphere—made up of the crust and upper mantle—is broken into large rocky plates. These plates lie on top of a partially molten layer of rock called the asthenosphere. Due to the convection of the asthenosphere and lithosphere, the plates move relative to each other at different rates, from two to 15 centimeters (one to six inches) per year. This interaction of tectonic plates is responsible for many different geological formations such as the Himalaya mountain range in Asia, the East African Rift, and the San Andreas Fault in California, United States.
Source: National Geographic: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/plate-tectonics
“how major landforms are created as a result of Earth’s subterranean movements.” - I love the subterranean movements best.
The crust, the earth that you are, is always moving. imperceptible and persistent. And also that the subterranean movements produce such massive changes on the surface. The Himalayas for goodness sake. Mountain building episodes. That’s another phrase I love. At some point, there were mountain building episodes. That.
Something parecido is happening with this audacious dream. A mountain building episode. In the same way that the first performance of The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects was one mountain, so this next incarnation, here in Spain, with Coral, new choreography and what it is requiring of me - in dance, in fundraising, in putting myself out there - is another mountain. A shock of subtarranean movements pushing upwards, breaking through into the shape, unmistakable and true, of mountain.
I also love that what is under the plates is a “partially molten layer of rock called the asthenosphere.”
Then there are the old trees. I went looking for them last weekend, near the Plaza de España. My friend Wei came with me. I was searching for words. I found them first in a scene made of tile, made of sea and colonization in front of the alcove showing the province of Alicante, then in a tree of memories and then on a bench below a cacophony of parrots. In a well tended garden, below a lone tree, I found mudras and at the end, below a profusion of white flowers, I found a few sentences for whole story. Then I named the whole experience Garden Mudras en the plaza de España and made a video of it. Oh love, everything is possible, one tree at a time, one memory at a time, one mudra at a time, one mystery at a time.
