My Life at the Gym: Feminist Perspectives on Community through the Body

2. Kaleidoscope Dances

Kaleidoscope Dances 쮿 31 2 Kaleidoscope Dances Anne Mamary We live in a world of signs. But not everybody has to trade in them. —Zadie Smith, Autograph Man I. Once to Yourself These dances, Morris dances, are ancient and new, transplanted and just born, shoved aside, forgotten, invented, resuscitated, remembered. Six women and silence frame the dance yet to begin. A wisp of hair coils across her shoulder and hankies flutter in the breeze. Six breathing, six in that moment. At her nod, the accordion breathes its fill, and the music sings once to yourself before six dancers surge into motion. Morris dancing, its origins unknown, an organic shoot in rural England, nearly plucked out in the industrial revolution, in modernity’s move to the city, to the machine-life of production, of the planet. Morris dancing red hot in my aching knees, in the arm movements beginning in the very middle of our bellies, in muscles hard as ropes. Only these bodies and accordion breathing to shape the dance, to shape the world, invented, these bodies, in the dance, in history, in movement and loss. We dance an improvised future, letting go, being cut loose, taking liberties with what was not ours, with what is as vital as the pounding of feet on pavement or the hearts in our chests. Time was the movements of the stars and the growing of the fields turned the dance. Time was the planet and our bodies were 31 32 쮿 My Life at the Gym dances before a cyborg future, an electric future. Not nostalgia, rather a new movement; dancing a future where our feet touch a planet not stripped of its spirit for the wealth of a few. Time will be flexible, music and dance moving together, faster now slower, pulsing to the needs of these bodies, our dances here, and those dances there, and dances I will never know there and here. Time will be. II. “Jock O’ Hazeldean” “Jock O’ Hazeldean” Why weep ye by the tide, lady, why weep ye by the tide? A’ll wad ye tae my youngest son an ye sall be his bride An ye sall be his bride lady sae comely tae be seen Bit aye she lout the tears dounfaa for Jock O Hazeldean Nou let this willfu grief be dune an dry those cheeks sae pale Young Frank is chief of Erthington an Lord O Langleydale His step is first in peacefu haa his sword in battle keen Bit aye she lout the tears dounfaa for Jock O Hazeldean A coat o gowd ye sallnae lack nor kaim tae bind your hair Nor mettled hound nor managed hawk nor palfrey fresh an fair An you, the foremaist o them aa sall ride, our forest queen Bit aye she lout the tears dounfaa for Jock O Hazeldean Figure 2.1. Amy Wieber. B. F. Harridans, Cooperstown, 2004. Kaleidoscope Dances 쮿 33 The kirk was deckt at mornintide, the tapers glimmert fair The priest an bridegroum wait the bride an dame an knight were there They searcht for her in bower an haa the lady wisnae seen She’s owre the border an awa wi Jock O Hazeldean Six breathing. Six standing, waiting. Silence, but the dance has already begun. Buttons and reeds, accordion breathing, she gives the sign, a wave of the hand, animation. Melancholy refrain. Six women embody one dance. In one dance, six women move, each in her own way. Tendons and muscles tight, tendons and muscles supple, tendons and muscles held girlishly, held uniquely, each a gift of nature and each unfolding a life’s maps. From the first days of our life a narrative begins whose end we already know. With our narratives we postpone the end by making some touching-up to childhood, love and nature while poetry reinvents us to the bones and star dust. Our body is a book of stories: libidinal body, body of suffering, body of tenderness, tempestuous body, lost and found again body as an origin (Brossard 1996, 6). Six dance a woman weeping by the water, weeping at the bitterness of her body a token of exchange, her father and her bridegroom bargaining, offering her a place in exchange for her woman’s body. Six dance her grief in the traditions of church and family, her grief at being bought and sold, at the body of suffering while she aches for her...