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GRIMSPOUND
Performance, 30min by Anna Kushnerova & Tim Russell,
Music by Tom Wheatley, Costumes by Jack Davey
@
Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human Symposium, UK
Sentient Performativities curated by Art.Earth
Special Thanks to Minou Tsambika, Jade Willows , Yzabelaah-Samahra Rose, Brian Quin, Henry Everett (photography)
GRIMSPOUND
by Quinn
Emergence is no accident, no cold property, no feudal land.
It is a seed scattered to the leaping winds, upon the vast terrain of time.
The father of thousands is a pilot light,
A lamp crusting forth from the stringy sea.
We settle for no hollow memories here,
No dismissing tales told by molesting spades. No.
We await the rebirth of an Old Soul,
Entombed stone moistened to flesh by a hungry sea,
To thrive again for one hallowed day.
Her enspirited fingers re-collect sensual forms
Her haze-heavied eyes offload the burden of an epoch —
The buried moments revealed in the light;
The wet of youth reveling in the shadows.
Old pots tell us naught of the plowing hearts;
They give us no taste of the lust
That co-lived with dignity rigged to toil
— of the soil, the wax and wane of all worship.
To sip of our past through the Mistress's lips.
To know by the echo of the stones in the round
Grimspound.
______________
GRIMSPOUND is a Butoh dance performance inspired by the late Bronze Age settlement on Dartmoor, UK.
Grimspound is an ancient place marking a land which traverses layers of geological and historical time. Having been home to ancient people of the Moors, it is a place enchanted with story, ceremony, daily lives; enchanted with the smell of peat, sounds of wind, livestock, and ritual song, the timeless rustle of its Spirit world. Grimspound is a remaining form, a topography, it is a phantom, it is a memory, a trace; it is a place in time, in a dream, in imagination.
To develop this piece, I draw from the Butoh dance; taking my Body & Being to meet the place, feel, dance to it and be danced by it. Offering my vitality to this ancient land I empty my body to receive.
How can we dance as prayer, make art as prayer, as offering?
How can we activate our deep listening, our cellular awareness, reaching into complexity of somatic experience, discovering our deeper body artist to create material from an engagement and connection with nature and land, and look at the potentials for physical and creative responses given by natural elements?
How can performance connect us to an unknowable ecology and open space for us to participate in embodiments that could transform our ways of knowing and becoming known?
By meeting the ecology of the other, we modify our bodies while modifying our ideas of our bodies at the same time. How can movement practices create physiological, affective, energetic, and motoric changes to the body to enable an open body, to cultivate a perspective derived from an animistic, magical, engagement with the world, as an antidote to the erosion and disappearing of our relation to nature?
How can we understand the body to melt, breathe and move with the different pulses, energy and memories of plant, stone, sky, rock, earth; become entities, partners, in an unfolding of sensitive engagement, listening, and tuning into the spirit of a place and of things as they are?
BUTO-FU:
Granit Dreaming
Body of Soil across the ring into the Night
Old Lady Dance in the Night Sky
her legs white sheep
She brings back from the Night two white sheep
She feeds one to the Moon
She crushes the bones of the other
She seeds the ashes into her Grass Body
Ash Body
Bosoms are Tors
Well of a Mouth Ring