Tag: 2020

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Small reflections on 2020

Swadhi

2020 has been bizarre, uncertain, full of change, and difficult for so many. My dancing feels inconsequential among all this.

Nonetheless, this year has taught me some things about myself and my relationship to movement and the world. My journey through dance has continued and my ideas have evolved somewhat. I think that’s worth noting, at least for myself.

So here are a few small reflections to close out this strange year.

1. Isolation, energy, and further thoughts

I have been surprised to discover that I, an introvert, not only miss social activity, but feel worn down by its lack. Nowadays, I’m most awake when chatting with friends on a video call, or even just sharing an elevator with a neighbour. Of course I’m familiar with the thrill of a live audience – the rush that enlivens the limbs – but I never thought to connect this to the ways energy is produced and sustained in quotidian movement and social performance – the way a face twitches, tenses, lights up – involuntarily energized -, for example, in the presence of another human being. I realize now that we draw energy from one another, not only when performing, but in everyday life. I am so curious about the nature of that energy, and what it might say about how dance relates to other social acts.

2. Dance is the thing that feels like being alive

The global shift to digital modes of performance, practice, and instruction has left me thinking a lot about what counts as dance. Having watched performances online and even choreographed a piece for livestream, I have clarified that, for me, dance is so much more than a visual medium. What feels like dance to me (whether as performer or as spectator) reverberates in the body – the music and energy is immersive – an experience that is a challenge to replicate through image alone. What feels like dance to me is something more immediate.

Of course, this definition is very personal, defined through my lived experiences as an able-bodied woman. Perhaps a definition that might better fit across various experiences is: dance is the thing that makes your body and heart feel charged, buzzing, and alive.

3. Practice makes peace

It’s been interesting to see how people have managed with the built up tensions of Covid-19. Lots of people turned to baking. Others took up gardening. I did a bit of both – and like many other dancers, I found special comfort in fostering a practice of fundamentals – daily stretching, basic technique and choreography classes, running drills of the first 12 steps of Kandyan dance… There’s often so much pressure to progress and produce new things; this year helped me discover the joy and peace of practice for its own sake, something I want to carry forward.

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Happy New Year, with thoughts on ritual cleaning

Swadhi

With the flurry of cleaning that traditionally marks the coming of the new year in my household, I began to think about cleaning as a ritual act, evident across so many cultures. Perhaps the most well-known in the western secular world is the tradition of spring cleaning, with possible roots in the Persian new year tradition of kahneh tekani (“shaking the house”); Jewish Passover traditions; Maundy Thursday altar cleanings, foot washings; and so on. The Japanese similarly have a new years’ tradition called o-souji, a weeks-long deep decluttering and dusting.

In the context of Sinhalese performance, cleaning is a highly significant, carefully ritualized component of most ceremonies. Ritual practitioners of the Dewol Madu Shanthikarmaya, for example, will often practice abstinence from meat and alcohol leading up to a ceremony, and wear fresh white cloth. The ritual performance space, the ranga bhoomiya, is not only cleaned but further festooned with fresh flowers, gok-kola (palm leaf) artwork, and lamps; this extensive preparation is a communal activity that often engages an entire village for weeks, in an overspilling of human effort. During the ceremony itself, the ritual space is regularly refreshed with kaha diya (turmeric water) and anguru dummal (charcoal smoke).

In the Sinhalese ritual context (and I suspect this to be true of most religious rituals), the aim of cleaning and decorating is to create beauty as a divine offering or bribe, in order to attract the beneficent gaze of gods. In other words, it is believed that the pleasant appearance, fragrance, aroma, flavour, and sounds of a ritual ceremony attract divine interest, just as they attract the interest of humans.

There is indeed a kind of duality at work in ritual cleaning, then, and in ritual overall, in that it is something done both for the benefit of gods and for the benefit of humans, and these are inextricably entwined. In the ritual context, the cleaning of outer space is a means of purifying the inner space of mind and spirit as well: a kind of ritualized therapy.

The persistence of cleaning rituals, even into these secular times, causes me to consider the therapeutic, mental or emotional effects of cleanliness and order to be of some significance in understanding both human nature and the development of ritual. Plenty of animals, after all, have a natural instinct for cleanliness and order. How many of our rituals, how much of dance and art, have root in our animal instincts?