Some Have Influenced Me Profoundly.
I don't really connect myself to the Dancer lineage. I feel that those artist master their craft beyond what I can do, but I see now that there are and have been influential Dancers in my life. As I get older I am finding a long yet loose thread to some kind of lineage. Maybe my teenage angst is finally receding. Now I can except my elders more respectfully.
Maybe the first Dancer was Michael 'Boogaloo Shrimp' Chambers ,"Turbo" in the movie breaking. His sweep piece still sends chills through my body. Ko Murobushi, which a couple of years before his passing followed me on FB...just a lil possibly meaningless accomplishment. Of course my long time teacher/ sages the Tamano's. I learn something new each time just interacting with Hiroko Tamano. Lessons beyond movement. She is the closest I have experienced to a sage in my life. The closest that has changed it. Thank you profoundly.
Yesterday I saw one of these few influential Dancers in my life perform, Oguri. Oguri is based in Venice, Ca and like the others I mentioned has continued to develop his craft throughout his life. Seemingly ageless, something about his and the Tamano’s form that seem to not fear death but embrace the existence of the body, not to destroy it but be in it, sense in it, exist in it, understanding its fragility, and respecting it. Not to say they wish to be immortal...not at all. They stare at mortality and make it their intimate friend, not their over indulgent co-conspirator. This and their soft view on life and movement I believe slows their existence...a stroll to smell the flower on their chest.
I always have a profound experience watching Oguri. Yesterday was no different. In his form I see humanity, its ugliness, its silliness, its frailness and the way trauma can fracture it; transmuting these pieces into something wholesome, and healing. This piece I saw was about death and how our love ones from our childhood become the lovers of our present. How in dreams and memories these things blur, we embrace, this embrace becomes a holding of what was once before, a hope to remember a warmth from the past. We are just children hoping to be loved. Hoping to hold a familiar warm hand. Hoping to have someone there to tell us, it’s ok. To hold us to their chest and kiss us on our small foreheads.
Yet in life we sometimes are alone. Sometime we are scared. Sometimes we are broken. This is life, without this darkness the washing that is love would not feel so sweet.
I wonder why memory, for me, is so fresh in soreness. This lesson of memory as a warm fire, is a new one for me, it is something I am learning.
Thank you to my elders, thank you to the people I love.
My darkness finds home in your light.