Building Repertoire of Rising
Enclosure, Extraction, Erasure: The Suppression of Embodied Knowledge in European Dance History, Part III
This is the third and final installment in a three-part series on reclaiming embodied knowledge in colonial systems. Read Part I. Read Part II.
“If you are in touch with your body, your mind cannot be colonized,” Siobhan said as we stood outside the Teach Cheoil in Ennistymon. The early autumn evening tucked the little town by the sea in for the night.1 The former Anglican church turned house of traditional music on the hill was a good place to speak of words made flesh.
“I was reading how Buddhist monks resisted colonization when taken by the Chinese — through mindfulness, meditation, and spiritual practice,” she continued. Siobhan and her husband, David, have built their own home, farmed their land, raised their children, enjoy playing Irish traditional music and have fascinating careers spanning academia, art and psychology. I cherish their insights and generosity.
With the help of my harp, Róisín, I had just given a reading of choreography in crisis: a collection of testimonies, laments and prayers tracing how people move through empires and how these patterns still direct our lives every day. Kind folk of the town, who have tolerated me for years, witnessed this experiment where I asked, “who is allowed to fall?”2 After just finishing my PhD on impact-driven dance — dances born with trauma — I realized that falling was relevant to impact. How do people fall into situations of impact? Are people forced, do they slip through cracks or are they simply not caught at all? No matter what lands people in crisis, dance taught me that recovery can look like falling too, and together in ritual we can let each other crash as many times as we need to into the ground. In African American and Romani families we form rings so that people can move into the center and do just that.
I opened such a circle after the show. Jennifer had jumped into the center of the dance circle to beat the floor, suddenly and hard. The flood of videos we have been seeing on social media showing bombs falling on homes, doors kicked open and lives beaten down found echo in her strikes upon the wood. The well beneath the old church thundered back as we folded that knowledge into our swaying steps, steadying time through the shocks.
Others passed the basket, giving what they could for those caught in war and genocide — in Palestine, the Roma in Ukraine. Some resist by turning toward local farmers, tradespeople and artists for trade. Perhaps all of us, in our own ways, mark the decades of capitalism’s occupation of nearly every second of our lives with art: a choice to remake the world through how we move within it, together. In every story and step, we smelt choreographies cast in empire, searching for new movements that might bring us closer to the world we all long to live in.
Observe Your Rituals
From the time our universe began in explosion to when life stirred in the sea to the first orchestrations of civilizations, we moved into being. Motion became method of doing, knowing and becoming.
As the Abrahamic faiths say, maybe words were there. Maybe they weren’t. Regardless, when we see our spoken inheritance as emergent from movement and a mere notation of that dance and not the other way around, we can command our attention as one with the flight of the stars. Astrologers become sympathetic dance critics of the galaxy. Planets become quantum counterparts on our evolution within universal expansion. Dance returns to being our first language.
As I shared in Part II of this series, it is useful to explore looking away from if not shattering the mirrors of society that are holding us back. In the same way that words can become corrupted, misinterpreted and controlling, so too can images. We all know at this point what we have been told we’re supposed to look like, even within more liberated communities this problem persists. Some escape into sound, smell or taste, but even those are not free from aesthetic, well-conditioned preferences.
What then can we remember most honestly and sincerely? We can notice right now, in this moment, what our real dance is.
What rituals are we really performing?
What is your body carrying?
What are we really worshipping?
Where does our physical labor really take us?
What do we actually sacrifice for love?
Who have we truly become in our secret habits?
How far back does our movement memory go?
If we are to reclaim or discover anew any sense of indigeneity, look first in your own body.
Does your body tend to twist to the left (the past) or the right (the future)? Do you hold yourself steady when you speak to others?
Does your foundation, your pelvis, live closed in pain or open and ready to move in freedom? Do you breathe comfortably?
Where do you send energy within our body most frequently? Is it hot or cold? Fast or slow?
What does it look like in your body when something goes wrong? Is the problem a thing you’re carrying, something you see or a pattern you’re stuck in? Do you practice moving through that?
We can reclaim power and build rituals around them when we take the time to study what we are actually doing. What is our life’s dance really building? We can learn a great deal about a person by what they say. We can learn other things from looking at them and judging their appearance. It is in observing how people move, however, that we are able to truly discern who they are and what they are contributing. I do not know if bodies around words — nations, clubs, resistances, businesses, schools — can birth liberation. I do know that there is no liberation without movement or at least the ability to perceive and imagine it. Why not put movement back in our center? As Dr Finola Cronin said to me while I was locked in the studio figuring out what I was doing: “Dance first. Then you’ll have something to write about.”
Myths as Mirrors
Joseph Campbell, the “comparative mythologist” made famous by the hero’s journey and his support of George Lucas’s Star Wars, once said that “myths are the dreams of a people.”3 If we understand myth as literature, the potency of dreams are flattened and critique stalls the instinctive gestures of souls seeking answers. If we understand myth as the notation of the soul’s journey through the cosmos, mythic time becomes local, and the local becomes mythic. A field of play becomes a field of insight.
For the last couple decades, US American film and television reveals at least three dominant dreams: the religious, the super-powered and the undead. I am generalizing here, but the gritty, real, tragic and comedic Hollywood of the 90s made way after 9/11 for a more mythic time signature of superheroes, witches, vampires, cultists and the otherworldly. What does that tell us?
We are still dreaming, but also slipping out of the confines that we have known. Figures with deep bodily knowledge — witches, comic-book heroes, exoticized cultures — discover that they know pathways out of oppression and danger. Right and wrong take on cosmic magnitude. We watch the apocalyptic undead infected from some zombie contagion ravage the innocent on screen while we fantasize whether we are the one helplessly running to non-existent safety — or if the zombies already got us. We’ve already stopped dancing. We’re already one of The Walking Dead.4
The scene in I Am Legend (Lawrence 2007) at the end of the movie (spoiler alert) a leader of the infected (zombies) throws himself against the glass of the protagonist’s home science lab (played by Will Smith), trying to destroy the people inside who have discovered a cure. As he slams his body into the barrier, his own rage and hate injuring himself, we are reminded how even in our own bodies we can disrupt and destroy the very things trying to cure us and set us free. We are reminded of systems that would rather destroy than allow transformation.
There is a funhouse of mirrors trapping us in our own bodies, in patterns that we know to be wrong for us. De-colonial, anti-racist and indigenous perspectives have told us this before. Our imagination and dreams can gives us clues on how to get out and art can help us find the way. As I shared in the last piece, we can protect ourselves from getting lured back inside the funhouse when we look into the mirrors of life itself.
Mirrors for Life
If we are working towards a survival embodiment and a meaningful participation in a eco-accountable social world, we need reflections around us to let us know what our dance is really doing and its impact on others. These mirrors are often called relationships. In my decade of time spent in Ennistymon, County Clare and a lifetime learning from indigenous communities including those of my own Irish and Romani lineages, I absolutely confirm these are “mirrors” worth having:
Have a relationship with the land you are on including with all that share it with you.
Have a relationship with those who have come before, particularly if they cared for the land you are on.
Have a relationship with those who will come after.
Have a relationship with the world within yourself.
When we get to know our communities we can see ourselves in others, and they can see themselves in us as well. So much can be solved if we just looked at each other dancing while dancing ourselves. What happens when we see each other fall and rise? What happens when we feel the floor vibrate together? What opens in the mind when we sympathize with those that came before or will come after? How can we move with the understanding that our freedoms come with responsibility to everything else sharing space and time with us?
There are a growing number of books that articulate this knowledge, and they are absolutely worth reading if you are not familiar with them or do not have access to a community who shares these values and ambitions. They are rich in concepts of reciprocity, accountability, care, innovation and connection, and are frequently written by indigenous people, and so many researchers pointing the way to what we already knew all along.
Timedancing
Maybe you’re like me. I’m all kinds of “different” and am hardly what most would consider “indigenous”. Growing up in a country whose history depends on pride in colonialism, how can we know right from wrong? What does that mean for the mirrors we wish to hold up to ourselves? My own journey as a human within this has taught me is that there is something more immediate I can do that very consistently pops me out of self-oppression and into the scary world of change-in-motion: tell the time.
In engineering, dance and physics we are concerned with time/space/energy. The tools of our trade are built upon measuring and coordinating place with an eye to how much effort is needed for change and how long it might take. Physics is the study of the universe’s dance. Engineering is our attempt to choreograph that. Colonization is the attempt to engineer more time for some and less for others:
Will bloodlines expand, maintain or die out?
Will land support future life for all, for some or become barren?
Are our evenings full of time together in love or apart in hate?
Is our our memory the playground for our future, or do we stop stretching the arms of the body’s clock into all times? Do we just settle into now, and only sometimes when we pay attention?
Do we feel the cycles of nature, or do we only feel reaction in the moment?
Are we hyper-attuned to respond to all beings not just in this time, but all times?
Do we tell stories through the long night, or does our imagination collapse into apathy and emptiness?
Occupations are not bound by space or energy. They are bound by time. At some point, the energy sustaining it will run out and the hold on land will be released. One of the most rewarding lessons I’ve had from academia was the opportunity to critically ask what it means to be Romani and Irish-American; it was the opportunity to study what it’s like to survive an empire. Even those we lost made it by dancing. Every time I step dance, I carry them with me.
Resistance can look like simply choosing not just to spend your time differently than what you might have been conditioned to, but changing your very awareness of time itself. Then we can see how we are not working to sustain a old, dirty contract with the land itself, we’re working to nourish and be nourished by the world. We go from waiting for the paycheck for waiting for the flower to bloom. We go from being afraid of what they’ll do to us tomorrow to learning what self-defense means right now. We go from survival of the “fittest” to wanting a survival embodiment for all. We go from counting loss to children born.
Dance is a choice to decolonize your body on the land that you are in this moment. It is a choice to create something different right here, right now. What would happen if we all started right now?
Decolonization does not look like war. It looks like people walking away from war towards life itself.
It’s time to break the spells over our time. Colonialism, or any ego-maniac for that matter, never owned land, energy or people. What they try to colonize is time itself — the hours, rhythms and lifespans we are forced to spend under its control. They are only as successful as the number of us who comply. Time magic is extremely powerful, and how we move through it determines the success of “the master’s clock”.5 Allowing your world to be closed in by smaller and smaller mirrors shrinks your timescale too….you don’t need as much time anymore to travel. Your presence gets smaller and more immediate until nothing is truly wanted anymore.
Break the cycle. Learn to Timedance. Keep life moving. Find the audacity not just to hope, but to move into the future not just because you’re going there, but because you feel it there. You express your destiny. You stand in your roots. You love for tomorrow. You find peace because you know where you’ve been and how you got here.
In conclusion, when we ask what happened to indigenous Europe, I am reminded of my friends whose families outlived one empire and still are dancing through its reincarnations. I am reminded of food shared not because it was wanted, but because that’s what care and reduced waste looks like. I see people entering the time-cycles of a fiddle, from the kitchen to the concert to the grocer to the pub and back. I see people leaving the left-to-right of English and going back and forth through the words of ancestors. I see people remembering what can never be taken away.
Whatever the legacies of colonialism and its shape on our lives, I invite you to develop your awareness of how you are moving through your life and how this shapes your own understanding of the time you have spent and have left upon the earth. This careful, quiet process of perception, calculation and action can be witnessed in ourselves. We can release our egos and cherish the precious survival embodiment that sustains us all. We can become natives to the dance of life.
To help you orient yourself after this series, I’ve created a short PDF with prompts to explore where harmful timescales rule your life, what you remember and what you notice about your life’s dance:
If you would like to learn more about how dance can be a method of liberation and force of change in your life, please subscribe. I will be beginning workshops on impact-driven dance and survival embodiment very soon. I am also working on a mobile application designed to support de-colonial time-keeping practices—whether you’re reconnecting with something in your inheritance or learning to sense time differently for the first time.
For privacy, some names have been changed.
To read some of these works, please visit this section: https://newsletter.timedancers.org/s/who-is-allowed-to-fall.
I am well aware that Campbell was not an academic and much of his work is problematic, to say the least. But his insight on and place within America media here I think is relevant.
If you can, watch this first season alone or read the graphic novel. It’s pure movement poetry amidst collapse.
For a great read on how time is colonized, please see Rasheedah Phillips’s Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time.
Your posts are always so thought provoking. Just one phrase there, about memory of movement led me into a spiral, and I'll have to bore you with a story from another part of the globe.
It is a given that Iranian women dance at every opportunity, that is simply our social code. There are regional differences, of course, but even the spontaneous mehmooni dancing has clear urban and 20th century influences. One of the most particular things one can notice, as I have in myself and the hundreds of Northern women I've observed, is a very distinct way of moving the arms and upper body. The port de bras, if you will. It was always a curiosity, until I accidentally saw Georgian folk dances and bam! The arms and upper body moved *the exact same way*! And the sad, sad truth in this is that we are most genetically similar to Georgians and Circassians because of human trafficking. Generations of our matrilineal ancestors were stolen and sold. They lost their names, religion and languages, but the port de bras in their dances remained.