The world, right now, seems to me to be such a harrowing, haunting place.
So much, that has for too long been the case, has been brought into such sharp, hard focus.
The abhorrent abuse of power, of people, of privilege.
Dominant norms.
Death and grief and loss
of lives, of loves, of agency.
And the all too ready rush to deploy a language of war and…
Return
to some ‘new – never was for some – normal.’
Amidst all this violence
and vulnerability.
How to have hope.
How to be
Hope
Full.
To sit with this, to listen and un/learn and to act.
To care hard.
To care harder.
And to talk…
about Love and Dance and Scotland…
What to say?
I can talk about love… about all the things I have heard but did not see. All the ways in which folk have shown - so vibrantly - for who and how and what they care. Overheard of a morning on a hill, over a wall, on a phone, beside a bus stop, in the shop behind a mask, in the ether.
I can talk about sitting online with artists all over the world and listening to them talk about how it is there and in their head and their hearts. About what they love about what they do and what they loved and have lost. Or never had. And what we’ve not. About how we protect and appreciate, really appreciate, what we’ve got, what we can and should share. Life. Live-ness. Touch.
And so I can talk about dance. How we as dance artists work with, tune to, nurture, live-ness, life, touch. Noticing and playing with the patterns in the world around us, how they are made, how we can shape and change them and how they can shape and change us.
How for many of us our work has always been about working with the ways we can be together, differently, how to think and feel through all kinds of movement, what it is to share space and to cultivate careful touch.
I want to talk about that, to advocate for that, the ways we return to careful touch. For me it is at the heart of what we do, why we do. Dance can hone this.
Over the past months I’ve noticed the need to sit with things and how Covid-complicated conditions have prompted many folk to return to their bodies, to daily practices at home, to pilates, to aerobics, to daily dances, to yoga, Feldenkrais, Franklin, to turning upside down, heart above head, shaking it out, to whatever you can do on a mat, in your rhythm, at your rate, on your terms.
Honing what it is to quiet, to listen, to self, to need, to intent, to others, our environment, for breath.
To home in – this, our practice of homing
Scotland is home.
Today it makes me think about leadership, about leadership as a behavior, a way of being, as a practice of honesty, of integrity, of listening and un/learning, of stepping back, sitting with, stepping up, stepping aside, being along side, behind and with.
These are some of the things I feel we might need in the months and the years that are to come - as we sit with all that’s been undone and begun - hope and listening and leadership and movement and care-full touch.
I believe they are here at home, in love and dance and Scotland.