A shadowy, human-shaped hallway.

My first proper show since Pablo was born. Luckily I was too tired to get exceedingly nervous -- will people be comparing my dancing, my body, my ideas to pre-baby times? Am I delusional in my sense that my body is looser and psychically more open now that baby is here? and the classic: am I delusional in trying to be a dancer in the first place. My husband is extremely tired of this last question. It is the evil twin of the good question that keeps one honest as a dancer: Why am I doing this? But not asked in a desperate or cynical tone, instead from the standpoint of curiosity. Why am I doing this? Why does this dance need to exist? Why do I need to dance it?

After reading a lot of Einstein and Bergson in the last couple of years I am of the opinion that not much exists on this planet that does not have need to be there. Nature is very economical and practical in its creativity. Man pushes towards excess and production.

So I stepped on stage in the post-partum era. I walked as a strange creature into a downpool of light and tried to submerge into the world of black floor and light pools. For 9 minutes I forgot I was Pablo's mummie. Well, almost. Those things flicker around in the back of my brain even if I don't sense them consciously.

At the end of the piece, back in that downpool, lying on the floor staring up into the source of the light, my hands on my belly, I felt the flickering, lingering presence of baby. There he is, little bits of his energy still, like lightning bugs in my belly. Scar tissue taking flight, sparking. There he is!

Before the show opened, I felt confident in a new wildness and abandon...I watch the video from this show -- always dangerous -- and I doubt it all. But I don't doubt that this piece needs to exist and I need to dance it. The judgement I lay down is purely stemming from years of not-so-great training and discouragement and my own timidity -- a crutch to shy away from success. It is the habit formed by a scared little girl that I've never quite been able to banish.

What rises above this? The growing sense that I am not a creator, but a vessel. A shadowy, human-shaped hallway through which ideas and emotions can slip, flinging limbs and heart in a pattern that might resemble language.

I'm sure I had more 'deep thoughts' to write here, but I am distracted by the systematic and comedic dropping of toys. Pablo reminds me not to take anything too seriously, except curiosity. He says, take curiosity very seriously.

under glass: at an exhibition

Underglass
Black hallways are rooms in basements
Beneath the clothes and jewelry
Of old days
And jade dancers mocking window
A pigeon cannot see the darling crumb
His eyes lost to concrete dust
Prokofiev broke off the retina
Like a bow beneath remorse

Loaves of bread planed
By snapdragons, their mouths gape
Too soft now to bite at the news

Now alone in a room of dead
Birds, shoes, purses
Ghosts of giggling children blue with
No sound of oppressive observation
No watching this funeral please

Kitten mummified; the ribbons of immortality
Unwrap in spirals of time-edged
Long ago
The diamonds continue in an upward path
Whiskers still feeling the edges of time

The door warns you of this impending sense
The walls whispers in their
Flagrant subtle colour
The bowl gathers the words in a bind, a spell
To protect a foetus
From 1900 to 1960 they embalmed Egypt
In a forgotten camera the waters stir

Say hello to spring for me in the ink used to
Keep fresh the dead
And to letter the posters
As circus rings turn to fire
Arterial, chemical
Solvol removes the clots
(The Frigid Fluid co. of Chicago enters quietly
But slams the door behind and quickly
Paints it red. I have lost Pablo
To infinity in a bottle on a paper
Advert while an elephant chases
Its partners tail the blue cloud descends
Clashing with red
The world stains itself purple my nails are
Full of purple
My eyes are full of purple
My veins exhume and expire the purple.)

Under glass crystal purses, slippers, balls
Echoes from fragility cliffs
Magnified lucite grins, leather cracks and a smile
Metal grapes are welded to the rhinestone vines
But what could you hold in a see-through purse
 the embalmed foetus, the purple ring – the fire?
Shadows on ghost faces, my face in a glass lid
The nonexistent component I am not in a bell
Jar I am a shadow – my earrings
Mimic grapes and fairytale remnants
As though they know something – earrings animate, girl still.

I take off my shoes to feel the tingle in
Hardwood floors, dead objects speaking in
Vibration
Subway passing under – like dead worlds six feet below
I pushed the door lightly and it took over for me

Baby boots, pearls and glass buttons
A bra partly anticipating –
The nipple shield of sterling silver on guard
The aesthetic of inversion
The corset binding tighter tighter
Ti – ghter—ti—the diaphanous within is pinched
Swan Lake’s surface broken 1897
The silk unwinds and the nickel drops.

Cornucopia of chemists’ darling bottles
For headache, Flesher’s Tonic
No sip from the glass – the tiniest one
The size of a plum
Purple in thigh and eye
Toenail to eyelash the seeping begins
We must remove the clots

Lethal baby bottles
Microbes swim in silken drink
Green blue pink turquoise
Etched
As Shrry glasses from grandmother white-haired
With tar chair, black glasses
Small bookcase of must and a river
Along the garden

Dog skulls point teeth at me --threat and idiocy
Their eyes absent they do not know where to bite
I am safe for the time that eyes and light mean anything

Albino house mice bring me small skulls
Red squirrel muskrat white, flashed taken to ghosts
Before birth

One small skull floating in an infinite sea of black velvet
No refraction of light
Densest sea


This gibbon skeleton clings to the tree but the tree is also dead: little rib cage like mine
Imprisoning air
His knees are giving out
One long pelvis and headless
He is almost dead, speaking to me
The light strikes me from behind and
my ghost is blinded by the red edge of my hair
An aura
I have no eyes
Mammal skulls 0-58
Bats and chipmunks

A child says ‘look they are sleeping’
He is too old to be fooled he appeases
And scuffs the floor with sneaking shoes
Tiny jaws separate from tiny head plates
As if speaking difficult words both
Buried under this black and purple backdrop

The small brown bat skulls translucent
Second from end slightly askew
He looks at me out of the other, empty, eye socket:
The rebels always manage to find me, pass on the message from

50 years ago

a baseball cap digs at the glass box
its courtisan asks ‘why is this all here’
she missed the writing on the wall. Must have.

This is no school house no temple mood whiteness
Stillness the final sleep
Underglass

Snow geese eyes slam shut
You must sleep now – subway quakes will fell you quick as a blink
Days not decades ago….feathers fresh clean
White from transformation transfiguration
Migration to a white continent
Duck billed platypus on white wood
Skeleton crowded waiting for the last supper
Rib cage sucked in – waiting to exhale

This bird had osteoporosis
A girl laughs in that stupid way people do
When afraid
Holes in the understanding
Mesh bone pieces slip through blood drips
Purple into marrow and erupts with lava
Core of Earth eats at the centre of creation
Bartering, dealing and wheeling and reeling
Fascination

Snowy owl my father the owl named for
Him the Christmas fire the sharp beak that flew through a dream of mine.
Behind eyes all lilac and ears closing to sharp
Women and their colonial thoughts erupting
From juvenile nubile mouths

The turtles come up for air, salted, dusty, old, tired, rippling, listing through the water

The tree swallow twined his straw and white feathers and spilled the
Plowed snow over
Ghost eggs. (the turtle returns to salt sea,
Crying.)


The swans lie head to the side, a pair of shoes
Of pearl and feathers, a last gasp
The ptarmigans cry towards me; eyes rolled back into their heads, beaks pointing
To the ceiling ptarmigan of sky, thurnder gods
12 ptarmigans

pheasant peacock, sparrow, finch, gliding
on their backs all white as snow
one red glass eye
he arches towards me
weeping blood.
I don’t know this
Blood of red speak to me in purple
Sparrow, I will carry you
Home in my pocket where
It is warm as prehistoric oceans

They hide their delicacy and wrinkles, their stitches
All willow and one rock
White of heart and eye
A woman in ivory pantsuit an dflowered shopping bag
Does not feel on the brink of a glass cage
She stares into the (pitiful) boxes seeing one red
Eye “how clever”

The right, yes, hooded hides just such an eye
Every night

The canary’s feet are tied together – white string
He has been kissed by orange
Many lips of sun beneath that hood
Sensory organs gather by the nose and spread
Out – a grid search for vulnerability
I see
Ivory pantsuits are dangerous, bulls eye
For bow and arrowed walls of brown-purple
Purple-black, black-brown the eye
Of such an alluring first love a Paris

The evening grosbeak brings faint green and yellow
Dusk to the room fooling the death mash
Fooling all ‘ovary on left testes on right’
It quietly waits recognition or relief from
Humiliation
The bottles of circus perfume
Embalming the two-in-one
Night

The walking skeletons have lost their beaks
(blind mice tailors)
circle circle circle chasing each others
spines like elephants in the centre ring
blue from exhaustion
funeral of sense
you can hear the quack of bones float by

albino porcupine supine, nose to nose
paws beneath chins staring into love forever
sniffing

lepus articus fluffs his fur over his shoulder
glancing back as Holly Golightly
ears forward, whiskers out

albino beaver on the island of his skull
oatmeal-coloured, ears buried in the wreckage
tail flaps behind him like a smile


Coprolite white 50 million years old fossil dung
Too much noise “You can’t shoot that
With a shotgun” Dad days to son
The room is filled to ceiling with death
The shotgun could not part
Its mass, walk away

Sit. Good dog. Skeleton guarding eternal

Kissin gnoise too much I cannot say hello
And goodbye a proper burial exhibition
Some “tsk!” from behind
Old man with red eyes and a cowl of night
They steal my goodbye time, these angels of
Subways and museums.
They steal my silence—white

The arctic hare calls ‘follow me’
Bone and sinew tethered to one another
Two teeth remain, fierce
Closed eyes, sewn shut, bulge
Tips of ears black. He heard the sneaking
Hood and red eyes before his fall
He was dipped in a bit of fire
Or perhaps his own speed

Reconstructed wainscoting, wallpaper, doors
Nothing remaining white and priceless

Air hissing from a small hole – cybercrickets
Scold for my wondering
A blue flash in the corner – new ghost – the shuffling of feet


I return to spring – white and charcoal
Hissing psshing no eyes to look
Tiny blue cups trimmed with flowers overflow
With midnight. Angel-twins a wooden doll
Black hair – I used to have her. I
Am not sure where she has gone
Death in a cool calm fashion may be sewn her
Eyes
Satin to feather
Hawk to ptarmigan
Enemy to enemy – I still lie here underglass
My purple skin is white
Was white all along
I am stuffed, sewn
Guarded by dog skeleton
As they yell “are you
Supposed to be quiet?”
Mute Cygnus olor; eyes open ears hut, black marble I see
I shake the glass, glossy in places and very old
I kiss him goodbye the guardian
Of 650
To be dismantled in two days
The walls I have fallen in love with
Will collapse
Me beneath this cage – rib, glass
Pearl, crystal
Violet, lilac
Time stands
Not still
But almost.

In their eyes
Myself
Small, fading
Towards the stairs


(a response to Spring Hurlbut’s exhibit “The Final Sleep”)

Post-Pregnancy thoughts

I never lost myself while pregnant, though it was one of my biggest fears. I always felt very much me, even more than usual perhaps. I did not feel occupied by the fetus/baby. I only felt his personality, his desire to move -- but do we interpret these moments through our own frames of reference: I felt his particular desire to move because I am a dancer and do not sometimes, refine the kernel of an idea if it means stopping moving for a moment?

I do wish I could have corrupted that part of the physiology that obliterates the memory of being pregnant and of labour. I remember labour -- what it felt like, details of the pain, the attitudes of nurses and doctors and anaesthesiologists. But I have little recollection of the sensations of pregnancy. This makes me sad. I remember looking in the mirror at my belly in a yellow t-shirt at Canadian Children's Dance Centre during a rehearsal with Peter Chin about a week before baby was born, but I remember this as one remembers a scene in a movie or a play....perhaps because I was looking in the mirror.

It is sad because the pregnancy was largely pleasurable, pain-free. The baby was snug and rather content most of the time. Only the last week or two were uncomfortable and that was because of the heat and swollen feet. My belly and baby were still fairly comfy.

I am lucky to have videos and photos of my dancing, pregnant body -- but even still these are 2-dimensional reminders of 3-dimensional sensation.

Sweetly, whenever my heart rate really gets going, I can feel the pulse of blood in the vena cava which bears a distinct resemblance to the kicking of Pablo as he swam his way into position for the big drop.

Now that he is born, I am finding myself recognizing, appreciating and sanctifying (?) the non-physical, sweat-free aspects of the creative process. Type A personality balks a little at all this, but at the same time cannot deny the intense ( and Type A Lucy loves intensity) usefulness, the reflectivity, the deepening that this time allows. It is what I've written in every grant application ("I need more time to develop my work to its deepest artistic potential") but the first thing to get cut from the budget once it demands its inevitable trimming. This is integral, this time, this non-physical part of determining what it is that I have to say that is worth saying. and it is important, now and then, to bring reflection from the recesses of creative process (the unconscious subway-riding part), to let it sit way out in the light, lazy as it may feel.

It is not.
My greatest fears are to be misunderstood or to be perceived (self-perception included) as lazy.

A major principle in the work I've done with Theatre Rusticle is perpetual motion. To find it in perceived stillness. That old saying that still waters run deep needs to be looked at again. If waters are running, even deeply, they are not in essence still, though the appearance is of inertia....

An Interview with dance-theatre artist VIV MOORE

Viv's new solo show "Worcestershire Saucy" open this Wednesday Dec. 2 at 8pm at Factory Theatre in the Studio Theatre space. Tickets are $15 (CADA, Student) and $20 (general). Reservations 416 504 9971 www.vivmoore.com

Anyone who has seen Viv on stage knows she is a rare beast, the kind of artist you want to be on stage with and the kind of lady you want to have a beer with. She has been a role model for me for many years now and though I don't drink beer, I have had the immense pleasure of being on stage with her in several different shows. She is a relentless scene partner who gently dares you to follow her when she makes an audacious move. In my years of knowing Viv I have not seen her in a solo performance. I can't wait.

Here are a few questions I asked Viv about her upcoming production.

How did "Worcestershire Saucy begin? What was the initial idea?

In 1999, I created Bogie Woman for fFIDA (Paula Citron Award). This was the start of my re-claiming my Music Hall, eccentric dance roots. The same year, when I returned to England to live by myself, I was taking a course with Gaulier in London (England). Together with my intense dislike for his way of teaching and his disregard of humans at that point in his life, I developed a frozen shoulder. So much pain meant I couldn't carry on with anything physical, so I started to work at the Royal Opera House Box Office, which was great but left me feeling creatively dull. I began to research my roots in terms of clog dance and customs and traditions that I had disregarded in the past. When I returned to Toronto 8 months later, I joined a clog group (Half Crown Clog) and began playing with the mixture of traditional and contemporary. Over the past 10 yrs I have developed ideas and realised that I needed to really say something.



What has the creative process been like -- when did you start, how have you developed it?

I started in September and it's been rich. Lying on the floor, crying, then standing up and crying, then more lying on the floor, then exhilarated discoveries - you know, the usual creative process. I was in the room by myself for 3 months, then I asked Dave (Wilson) my now-husband to come in. He knows me like no-one else, and I asked him to tell me what he saw. He's been a wonderful support - always is.



What made you decide to do this solo show? (When was the last time you did a solo show?)

I have never done a solo show. I decided it had to be a solo show, because there was all this STUFF and I needed to get it out there. It was a DO IT NOW thought, one that I knew there was no backing down from.



Will the show reveal anything to us about the secret Viv Moore?
Yes

This is the awesomeness of Viv. She is equal parts mystery and complete honesty. No matter who or what she embodies on stage, there always seems to be this essential Viv-ness, the enigma and the openness.

What are the influences for this project outside dance and theatre?

Butoh, stage combat, English Music Hall


How would you define dance-theatre?


I have no new ways of defining this. Integrated movement and speaking, all at the same time, coming from an image-based world of movement.


What is your ideal day?

Sleep in till 10; have breakfast cooked for me by my personal chef; buy several very expensive articles of clothing that have been specially chosen for me by my personal couturier; take a light tea; have a 2 hour massage by my personal masseur; eat a very nutritious dinner made by the very same chef; sleep in a large 4 poster bed in Grindelwald. You don’t believe me?


What is your favourite colour?
Mauve


Favourite city and why?

London, England. It makes me cry every time I am in it, because I miss it. The smell of it, the feel of it, the news of it. It is in my skin and bones and every sinew.

Go see this show. As her promotional materials state: You will be amused. And I bet, moved.

For the last time...

If just once more someone tells me that my career means nothing now that I have a baby, I may have to resurrect my idea to move baby and Dennes to Big Sur where we live like curmudgeonly hermits until California breaks off from the continent in the big earthquake that begins the rapture.....or whatever.

I proudly push baby in his stroller to the studio after the last iteration of the "career means nothing" vibe. And I endeavour to make my career mean more now that baby is here.

I have two things to leave to this planet -- my baby, my art -- and hopefully both will be lasting enough to leave something to the planet in turn....

Generosity

A couple of things have happened in the last year that have caused me to doubt the value of generosity. I have, or my husband has, been taken advantage of, played, suckered in the course of wanting to help. But a book, recommended by the incredibly generous dance artist Peggy Baker, has started to pull me in off the ledge after yesterday's biggest disappointment when it comes to generosity and being taken for a fool. Yesterday I was ready to cancel a co-production with three other artists (who have nothing to do with my heartbreak surrounding generosity), I was ready to move husband and baby to a log cabin in Big Sur California and become a family of cranky old hermits who threaten trespassers with a really big stick.

The book is Lewis Hyde's "The GIft", and though it sounds like a book on witchcraft or a feel-good treatise on artistic talent for would-be artists, it instead dives into market versus gift economy models and is saving me from the corrosion of my belief system, melodramatic as that sounds.

Now I learned many years ago never to give help, money, resources with any expectation of return. I once worked for someone who was constantly giving me things, things I didn't need or want, then reminding me of the gifts given as a tool to manipulate an obligation to her. That, to me is not true generosity, that is more like capitalism. Investing in something in order to get product from it later. All fine and well but don't call it a gift.

The idea, that Hyde puts forth in the first chapter of his book, is about the energy of gifts and generosity, that the flow needs to continue. Someone who receives a gift should pass along a gift to someone else. It's a bit of that cheesy pay-it-forward concept, or the ripples in a pond image, but when you relate it to the creation and sharing of art, it makes sense. If you are creating for yourself, no matter what the form, without a sense of your audience you are stopping the flow of art's economy. That economy is built on the ephemeral value of art, on the intangible, the emotional, psychological or intellectual stimulation. It is built on the things we can't buy in a store. And we need those things. Deeply.

In another book I read recently, which I can't remember the name of at the moment, a philosopher was talking about people under extreme environmental, financial or political duress and that the cornerstones of their societies become food, shelter and culture. Think about North America and Western Europe in the 1930s -- through the Great Depression we had one of the most verdant periods of film and music and literature, among other art forms. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is one of my favourite examples. Everyone was writing a novel in the 1930s the way everyone has a blog or a website now.

At any rate, by the end of Lewis Hyde's first chapter I am dedicated not to becoming a miser but to choosing where and how I let that generosity flow -- both as an artist and in the broader context of my life. I will continue not to expect a return, but I will not allow things to be thrown back in my face -- the struggles I have had this year have stemmed from sharing, opening to those who believe themselves entitled, have placed their needs above mine, and above many others around them. It is hard when this happens between artists. When I can help someone with talent that is not being seen or appreciated it seems important to do what I can to facilitate the exposure of their artistry, but when their dissatisfaction with the whole artistic environment becomes expressed through a deadstop of that flow of energy -- well, I just find that sad. And then to have it thrown back at me, as though I didn't do enough, while we are all struggling to let our lights out from under a bushel...

That's what I'm done with....after all my rambling above, I am simply done with a random flow of generosity. I'll stick with field theory for performances -- let it out everywhere and let it stick where it sticks --but on a personal level, one on one, I will be choosing my channels more wisely, though not less frequently or with less fervour.

The good end to yesterday was another reminder of this flow of gifting....A friend passed along some baby clothes from someone who had passed along some baby clothes and as I washed and folded and put away these new gifts for Pablo, I showed Pablo all the clothes that he has now outgrown and put them in a bag to be passed along to someone who will pass them along to someone until they find where they are needed.

I should have just gone back to my own beginnings when I felt so betrayed by those I shared with and by my own beliefs. Until I was about 5 or 6 I don't think I had any clothes or books that weren't secondhand. And sure enough my mother would go through my closet and take out the things I couldn't wear anymore and together, we would drop them at the Salvation Army or Goodwill.

Hey, it's called Goodwill for a reason.

Ritual

My friend Monika Berenyi just sent me a film she made about what ritual means to us in the 21st century and it got me to thinking.....

Ritual is connected to the theatre for me, the practice of preparation and comfort before stepping on stage. It has never meant anything religious to me; I wasn't brought up going to church and such. The theatre is like a church for me -- not in a flakey or spiritual communion kind of way, although I suppose there is a bit of that -- but in the sense of community and transcendence it brings, the pursuit of humanity, transparency and meaning in life.

There is nothing authoritarian about my ritual or my comparison of theatre to church. I do not bow down to God, Allah or "the muse" while in the theatre or making my preparations. You can't bow down to the pursuit of meaning, transparency of humanity. If you bow your head and close your eyes you can't take part in the chase.

Bowing the head and closing the eyes happens the land of dreaming for me, equally important and sacred, in a non-religious, non-ritualistic way. I do not prepare for or coax out the dreams, they wash through when they need or want to. Then they are filtered through into preparation for taking to the stage. Perhaps the filter is the ritual. Little dream images slipping through holes in soft cheesecloth....

www.monikaberenyi.com