Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Oct15

a body, a landscape

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Screen Shot 2014-10-14 at 9.29.04 AMEiko:  A Body in Fukushima; Photograph by William Johnston

Thirty years ago I took a Delicious Movement Workshop with Eiko and Koma at their home in the Catskills.  It was transformative, life changing.  I had just met them at a performance of Kazuo Ohno  at La Mama in New York.  That performance had blown open my ideas about movement, time, age and beauty.  Working with them for a week pushed me off any dancing vector I might have had into a world of possibility and poetry.  Eiko and Koma have threaded through my life since then, casually and profoundly.

Now Eiko is venturing into the wild waters of solo work at a time when I am doing the same. Her current collaboration  with the photographer William Johnston, “A Body in Fukushima”, is currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in Philadelphia.  At the same time, Eiko is performing “A Body in a Station” in the Philadelphia train station.  Her courage and devotion are  boundless.

Last summer, I performed in front of my collaborator Pam White’s  camera in Bogliasco and Venice, Italy.  One day, we shot in front of some wild grafitti near a church as a group of students sat with a priest.  They never glanced at me.  Oddly, that was both unsettling and reassuring.  Most days, we would set out – me in costume – and then find a spot that beckoned – a series of narrow passages, a garden, a courtyard, a landscape of doors fronting a church.  We let the opportunity shape the material.  I love to improvise to let the confluence of sound and sight and whatever is arising from my own body in that moment shape what happens.  I am interested in the intersection of the performative body in public spaces, and then weaving those narrative, imagistic threads into the work both in the theater and on the street.   And the thing that drives me, has driven me for the past thirty-five years, is a lust for movement, a hunger to channel that volcanic urgency from the body into something that I can share.

I will keep you posted on my upcoming performances.  In the meantime, get to Philadelphia if you can to see the beautiful work of Eiko and Mr. Johnston.

 

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Oct13

the receptive body

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I am no longer swimming.  October, and the nights have dropped into the 30’s.  Lakes and pools are hovering around 60 — too cold for even a quick dip.  Besides, I swim to luxuriate, to open, to lengthen, to receive.  As best I can, I am cultivating a receptive body.

Yesterday in my studio, in my body, I was watching a DVD of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen exploring in movement the relationship among kidneys, uterus, bladder and ureters.  Each one of those organs has a quality of mind and movement that is unique, and the orchestration of those parts is a continually shifting and expanding improvisational dance.  As I moved with Bonnie, and then on my own, I thought about the time it takes to open, to sense and feel in this way, and how doing that nourishes and expands everything else.

What I mean is this:  the receptive body is also the vulnerable body.  The receptive body is also the relational body.  What is missing in a lot of the conversations about vulnerability and courage (Brene Brown) and living your dreams (Oprah) is the body.  The body in the sense of an ongoing, exploratory, improvisational, playful, listening relationship with oneself.

How do we discover that without being a dancer or a yogi?  What is a simple way of entering those waters?  My friend and colleague is the composer Pauline Oliveros.  Her life practice, Deep Listening, is listening to everything all of the time, and noticing when we are not doing that.  Deep feeling, or deep sensing is about attuning to the inner and outer landscapes of the body and its relationship to what surrounds us.

Begin here:  practice the intentional pause.  Whether you are eating breakfast, or diapering an active 21 month old child – pause.  Take 5 or more seconds to notice what you feel with all of your senses.  Do you feel the shape of the keyboard keys beneath your fingers?  The soft warmth of the baby’s skin?  The soft channel of breath entering your body?  The unseen space behind you, the rush of a truck passing by?  Just notice.  Let yourself take that in.  Then go on.  Pause often, throughout the day, an unexpected moments.  Catch yourself off-guard.  Pause mid-action.  As if you were a dry sponge, imagine your tissues – all of them – expanding and opening to the waters of that moment.  Receive.

Oct4

are you sitting?

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And I don’t necessarily mean on a cushion.  I have a practice of looking for moments of intentional stillness.  They can be of varying duration – some momentary, others longer.  One way might be to pause feeling all the fluids in my cells settling and returning home.  Another is to look up and widen my vision peripherally and multi-dimensionally.  Another is to close my eyes and listen deeply for a few moments.  Another is to feel a yielding, deepening contact with whatever parts of my body are touching a surface (chair, keyboard, bed).  I do that until any urgency to change or shift, any impatience or mental busyness is gone.  Then begin again.

With the horses, I find this intentional pausing to be especially delicious.  The weather has been extraordinary in the Hudson Valley — warm days wrapped in light and color.  Before “working” I walk out into the woods on my horse, the two of us taking in all of it.  Sometimes we just stop and stand.  I like to do this until I can feel our shared breathing, feel the inside of me softening to meet the inside of him.  Feeling our skins and all of the moving layers of our bodies within.  During the “working” time, I intentionally pause as well.  I find it helps me to unhinge from any sense of pushing, forcing, bracing or hardening in my body.  I practice being two bodies together, rather than a driver and a vehicle, or one who knows and one who must do.

I recently watched a video of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen teaching, and she talked about how when we touch another person, the cells of that part of the body – our hand and whatever part of the body we are touching – migrate to that place.  That is where we join in feeling and intention.  On a horse, any horse, that cellular harmonizing is what I am seeking.  Then I know that I am sitting.