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147 ❰ 7 ❱ So Much to Remind Us We Are Dancing on Other People’s Blood Moving toward Artistic Excellence, Moving from Silence to Speech, Moving in Water, with Ananya Dance Theatre OMISE’EKE NATASHA TINSLEY, ANANYA CHATTERJEA, HUI NIU WILCOX, AND SHANNON GIBNEY I undercurrent, undercurrent, wave, up, stretch, out: arms move like this, and feet are toes and ball and sole and heel against the floor solid to the bone and then it isn’t. pour one, two, three, four until water covers in quick rivulets and feet splash, leave curves of toes and movement that dissolve again. on the west bank of the mississippi, where slave women jumped ship to land in the love of their own kind, ten brown women are dancing together and i’m one of them. at rehearsal we’ve been dancing through eleven twelve one two o’clock and first my muscles thawed clumsily and now they’ve dissolved, warm lava ropes under skin and i’m not thinking half moon leg bend to come up arms undercurrent undercurrent wave. listen, i’m not sure you heard. on the west bank of the mississippi river, where slave women jumped ship to land in the love of their own kind, ten brown women are dancing together and the name of the piece is duurbaar, unstoppable; duurbaar, a meditation on water and women and how both keep going and create ways to the horizon when you think none is possible. ten brown women dancing, don’t just look, listen: odissi footwork jumps and plants and raises so you land strong and every cell of skin kisses earth and connects with her to make sound, because why should brown women land quietly when our own feet can be drums? in april i saw these women perform and when they turned their bodies into music i knew i wanted to do this. and, here i am. here i am, training and my body doesn’t know this movement, struggles like legs walking through water before they lift and swim, my brown body 148 Tinsley, Chatterjea, Wilcox, and Gibney is small and angular and wants to curve perfectly like a creek over rocks or the gold of an earring against a neck. so i come back, and back and back to rehearsals, glaze eyed almost trying, and one day i learn the whole of a dance with the company and i realize: they are brown women and i will be water with them. duurbaar, water as women’s way of moving through the world and water as the world’s way of moving through women. the first act is cremation at the river, water as the cycle of departure and loss; the second act is tsunami and womb, bursting ocean as the violent eruption of energy and life; the third act is water bearers and the shouldered fullness of pots once empty, the work of carrying dreams and healing. yes, the work. this is the act i’m learning as we move on stage all hips and push with brass water pots and let them splash in small amounts until finally, backs to the audience and torsos curved like crescent moons, we pour the water over our head one two three four five six seven: exquisite, ananya says, as it overflows and we become all liquid and the light honeys us even though we can’t see it. we dance, then, in the spilled water and she’s right, it’s beautiful, all the legs through the wet like play and love making shapes new each time. so filled on the west bank of the river the vessel overflows but that isn’t the end: because to dance in cascaded water is work, moving legs so we glide without slipping, trying to find footing in a new element without losing the beat. women! ananya shouts. women! move more! torsos! remember this is not a ritual but we must make it ritualized, making meaning out of the everyday work of women’s lives. your body is a surface, don’t be afraid to let water and hands run over it. women! brown women, landed. II When I landed in New York from Kolkata, India, in 989, I came with expectations , unfounded in any reality, that I would find myself in the midst of artists from different aesthetics and cultures, who would be enthusiastic about working together to find resonances and create “something new.” Nothing of that sort happened and...

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