One last invitation to December 1

and thoughts on curious experiments

Image by Pablo Koury

Dear all: 

I write to you from a magically rainy morning. 

A sky so gray it appears as though today wasn’t sure about getting started in the first place. I love these mornings, when the Earth reminds us to turn inward, to be a little softer, to lessen our grip on the peripheries of our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical bodies. 

I write to you with an update on performance practice, and the offering that I will be sharing this coming Sunday, December 1 at The Rockaway Hotel (108-10 Rockaway Beach Drive, Rockaway Park, NY) from 12p-3p. I would love to see as many of you there as can be. I understand it is a trek and that I’ve chosen a difficult day: the end of the holiday weekend, the beginning of Art Basel week, and a slow crawl towards the completion of a long year. It is my goal that this time together can be nourishing, expansive, and can root us deeply into the invisible realms of creativity, compassion, and care that can anchor us through whatever it is we might need anchoring for. 

For many years I have been collaging together the practices that I have decided to devote my life to: movement, choreography, ritual and ceremony, ecological relationship, herbal medicine, community building, theatrical play, somatic connection, science, and healing. 

Although I aim to always point my arrows toward gratitude, we are in the time of year where we create a chorus through our collective naming of the things that we are grateful for, and I will write from this place too. The last year has supported a big evolution of my work and practice. There is nothing I have ever wanted more than to be fully devoted to the work that I am meant to bring forward on this planet. Since I was a child, this need consumed me like an omnipotent itch. I haven’t always made good on maintaining that devotion, and there are times when the chaos and confusion of my external realities have sent me down a wayward path, but the fact remains: I am always happiest when I am deeply and ferociously working. And that work has many manifestations. I am grateful that my work is a place of flux, a place that is responsive, a place that is in ever-evolving dialogue. Throughout the last ten years I have created work in psychology and neuroscience laboratories, in the ocean, among communities of women who are healing from sexual violence, in theaters, shopping malls, and cemeteries, in mountain villages with populations so small that there isn’t even a local grocery store. So what of all of this exploration? 

Increasingly, as technological convenience rides the human consciousness and begins to shape the way we think about sharing, offering, and committing to a depth of research, we are looking for quickly-understandable identities. Identities that fit into a slot, short and sweet, that can be easily named and mentioned to alert another as to who you are, what you might be about, and how they can evaluate you based on their own standards of judgement or social and professional circles. Contradictions are rarely, if ever, welcomed in this space. But what is creative work if not about mining the contradictions? And so, along the way, I have asked about the presence of the contradictions in my own practice: Is it truly possible to merge opposites and find alchemical gold? If my work is about ecological well-being and ecosystemic relationship, how can I also present work inside of a theater (one of the most energy-consuming structures on the planet)? If my work is about human memory and sensation, how can it also be about the lives of the more-than-human? How can I be a choreographer and also an herbalist? If my work is about spirit how can it also be about the body? If my work is about the neuroscience of trauma recovery how can it also be about the ancient ritual traditions of my ancestors that had no access to mapping the biology and chemistry of the healing process? Everything a paradox - all of it, a wonder. And so, for a long time, I have tried to slip into this identity and that identity: this Sunday is the first time that I feel I am fully committed to bridge-building between this multitude of identities. To taking the big scary risk of sharing a work that might fail, and of asking a community of people to meet me there in that space. I am nervous to share this work, and I am also excited for us to dive into the deep together.

I have always thought of work as a site through which to ask the most urgent questions that bubble up from the wellspring at the center of my body, and from the bodies of those I collaborate with: audience and performer alike. Those questions always change, are in flux, are adapted according the needs of personal collective time, and are also established by the Wheel of the Year: the natural cycles and elemental stories that draw us out of linear time and into a more subtle perception, where we yield our bodies to the stories of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. We ask them together, because I do not believe that questions can be asked individually. My questions affect your questions, vice versa, and morph as they intersect with the questions of the person down the block from you, etc. This is a practical consideration, but it is also a spiritual one: everything in the physical realm has its invisible counterpart. When I started making work in my early twenties it was because I wanted to apply the scientific method to dance performance. What would it be like to test hypotheses, ask questions, try to locate “Truth” through the variable groups of collective bodies? This is what I think I will always be exploring through performance practice.

Please do join us on Sunday. There will be many offerings: This is a ceremony, and will be conducted in order to establish reverence and relationship with the ocean. We will ask our questions about uncertainty and impermanence, and see how the water might reveal some curious possible answers. Cycles, change, beginnings, endings, and continuations will be present with us. We will practice our bodies together through collective movement practice, we will engage in various water-related rituals, we will participate in an interdisciplinary discussion led by myself, climate change ecologist Alyson Lowell, and choreographer and performer Claudia Hilda. We will walk to the ocean for a short movement and vocal offering, throwing our dancing and song out into the ocean. This portion will be sung by Samora Pinderhughes and Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson, with movement by myself and Claudia Hilda. It will be cold, so please do bring your warm things - we will be outside for only 20-30 minutes, but as we will be by the water, be prepared to sit with a bit of discomfort: it is part of the invitation of this practice. There will also be some very special herbal medicine apothecary items available for purchase at the end of the event, and as I work in very small seasonal batches, this may be your only chance to bring some of these medicines home for the next couple of months. 

Please visit this link for more info, to RSVP, and for a beautiful trailer created by my friend, and an incredible filmmaker, Pablo Koury:

https://partiful.com/e/UXyX1sUdQgXrtWxBt2gi

I have many friends working on this project, and it always astonishes me what can happen when community is called upon, when we remember to rest in the larger web, and when we open our hearts to the mystery of connection. My work never happens alone, and is meant to point to the spaces of recognition that we are never alone. All of us alive, together.

I can’t wait to see you all on Sunday.

With care + gratitude,

Amanda