B’fhéidir anseo tá mé saor in aisce. (A study in the possibility of the sensations of home) Beatrice Jarvis Language, Landscape and the Sublime June 29/30 2016 Dartington Hall & Sharpham House, Devon, England
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To hold dust and let the wind take it. to press a cold rock against my lips to stick my tongue out into the rain to get my feet so wet i can no longer feel them to press my spine against a tree to mould myself into sand How to become a part of this earth the metal compositions of blood rust, skin, iron, bone. rot, decay, birth and growth. the gift of pen and paper the gift of a seed. The gift of screen. The gratitude of seeking to understand place through experience. Humans are tuned for relationships. The eyes, the skin, the ears, the tongue and nostril , all are gates where our body receives nourishment of otherness. The landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams, these breathing shapes, our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. The color of the sky, the rush of waves-‐ every aspect of sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was voice. every scrape, every blunder was a meeting – with Thunder, with oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished. As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body. We live in our bodies and so we know from within the possibilities of our form, even If not externalized. We cannot know with the same familiarity or intimacy, the lived experience of
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a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of the other. How do I write about my windswept knees? How do I tell write about the grazes on my torso where the heather cut? How do I write about the feeling of the cold wind between the fern? How do I write about the walk in silence in forest as I dressed only in hay? I lie under the blanket of the forest No one will come here I lie in the shield of heather as a ram inspects my feet I am here I walk up the steep bank carrying my wares Handmade twine as treasure My House I build My body A Shelter I pick potatoes and cook them in embers I will rise with the sun and Fall between the stream and gorse Perhaps here I am free. How can I move more slowly? How can I write more slowly? To write slowly and avoid the chaos of ‘another ledge’ Images fall and rise and fall. They are litter perhaps, they are confetti, they are abundant, and they are crop, sheer, mass, but what are these forms? What appears to the view? Does the image have a use? This is a practice of the ways in which I have sought to become entwined with nature, seeking some deeper connection, awareness and embodiment of the body to land, earth and sky. How to lie on the forest floor and feel quite at home. My work as land artist and choreographer has taken me to very remote and rugged terrain, often experimenting with long periods of isolation and endurance. Perhaps this practice is a test to my own commitment to seeking a home within this earth. Within such climbs I am never quite
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satisfied to simply walk, practicing my routines of the Four Dignities1 as regular training, I have an urge to lend my body and awareness to become more finely attuned to the textures and constituents each landscape I traverse can provoke. How does the body become a living archive of the experience of landscape, and how such experience can be documented to reflect the process of the body immersing itself into landscape to construct a meta-‐narrative of terrain. Can choreographic work emerging from the experience of landscape create an archive of a place? How is the experience of the landscape translated into the actions of the body? How can a choreographer create a process, which enables dancers and non-‐ dancers to actively deconstruct their experience of their environment? Will the outcome reflect the landscape in which the body is submerged as stimulus for the process; or will the product, which emerges, become a personal narrative?? How can site specific performance become a social medium for the study of the political and cultural shifts of embodied terrain?
As Stoller indicates; ‘ To accept sensuousness in scholarship is to eject the conceit of control in which the mind and the body, self and other are considered separate.’ 2 This research takes to it core the symbiosis of the connection of mind and body as the ecology of self and place, forming a cohesive site of collaboration between the two. The body is mirror to all experience, each motion and breath an archive to the experience of the living being. The moving, dancing body comes to symbolise the fundamental essence of embodied presence.
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Carroll. C ( 2014) The Four Dignities: The Spiritual Practice of Walking, Standing, Sitting and Lying Down. Singing Dragon Press. USA Stoller. P ( 1997) Sensuous Scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press. Philadelphia . pxvii