Return To The "Norm" Form vs. Reflecting On The Now
Autumn begins with words that start with re : return, renewal, rebirth, remembering, reorganising, reflexion. Here we touch upon Return and Reflection.
The arrival of September signals that the end of the summer is here. We return to work, school, structure, a new productive year. If you happen to descend to the Stockholm’s subway, the Tunnelbanna, an ad for a radio station picturing a young Whitney Houston welcomes you back to the day-to-day or is it the so-talked-about “new ordinary.” While at the same time trying to detect if the photo comes from the era of “I Want to Dance With Somebody” or the “Bodyguard,” I stand in awe of Whitney’s aliveness radiating through her smile on the large formatted photo questioning: have we all just arisen back from the dead?
On the other hand, the cycles of nature, being consciously aware or not of them or consciously suppressing them for the higher cause of progress and productivity, point into another direction. Harvest is coming in the Northern Hemisphere, we need to prepare and slow down to survive the arrival of the winter. Stores full of imported goods, thank you globalisation, freezers filled with food in shapes we could never imagine, fight and confuse the cycle, as if saying “we’ve got you! Suppress those primal instincts for survival, return to the safety of the civilisation that we built, focus on growth.” And yet corona showed us that the “mainstream” didn’t quite work. Nevertheless, the pressure is on this September.
Being off the productivity grid for years, September always comes like a punch to my stomach as I witness everyone returning to their awaiting seats and positions. An awareness that life in society has a beginning and an end, somewhat linearly, because death does come at the end after all, brings on the seasonal blues and a real need for meaning. Some of us thrived during corona as it cracked the system and brought on what really is important (friends, family, community, ok maybe also Netflix) but mostly the importance for us to step into our own power. The systems, the people whose approval we so eagerly sought proved to be merely human, sometimes even life threatening.
As the different ideas about life cycles clashed within me making me sleepy at the end of this summer, a call to adventure came in the form on an invitation to a nature reserve just outside of Stockholm for an art in nature project entitled “Exploration Of Now,” a collaboration between the Culberg Dance Group and Kultivator. A myriad of reasons why not to go with a dear friend, Karin from Wild Ride AB, rushed through my head: I need to take my child to school; after a long summer vacation, I just needed to sit down and come back to myself, I need to finish the interview with Tarantula’s artist of July that is already late (succumbing to the schedules of the productivity cycles), I need to prepare to hibernate, etc. When I solved the only physical problem because a child has to go to school by law, there was room for nothing else than to say, yes!
Twelve hours after the invitation, I find myself on a beautiful sunny day in Karin’s car. Pulling out of the city, our heroine’s journey for the day begins with leaving puffy “only-in-Stockholm” kind of clouds, may I add perfect, as a trail behind us. We smile as we identify with Thelma and Louise, but the minute we say those words out loud, we remember that they never return. At that moment, we still don’t know what we are escaping from.
A deeply spiritual person with an on point understanding of life’s natural cycles while “almost perfectly” navigating the societal matrix, hence a person I admire, Karin, starts the conversation in the car with a whiff of the state of the world. The chaos, the depletion after a long summer, the heaviness of the news of the Taliban entering Kabul. The initial gut feeling upon hearing the news just doesn’t go away. The thought that the witch-hunt has begun while in the West we are continuing to try to achieve our goals, and just meander looking for meaning, is unsettling. Can we really continue in this manner? Can we really pretend that the new normal is normal? Can we still just focus on what we want for ourselves personally?
Conversations swirling, Karin and I cross suburban roads, and ride around roundabouts and down highways before we park in the Orlången nature reserve that is clothed in the verdure of a late summer. The chatter of our brains ends as we exit the car, breathe in and feel the strong sun caressing the backs of our necks, the roots of our hair. Suddenly, down the path bordering with the forest and the fields, there is a catalogue, a map, artist scattered around nature to be found. Immediately we feel as we are part of something larger.
We walk to the paddock and came across the slim body of an Egyptian dancer Mohamed Y. Shika about to start his short program called “Encounter” with a beautiful adult horse, Ferro (the horse from the get go absolutely owning its own power). The piece started with an introduction by the artist stating that this is his first collaboration with a non human being. We were taking it all in as we were standing surrounded by beautiful fields, definitely not the form that we classically associate with theater. This performance was based on the moment by moment, on spontaneity. Even my own judgment expected it to be a “dance performance,” further stating that after many rehearsals with the horse, of course that Mohamed and Ferro will be able to dance together. Otherwise, why would this be called art, a dance or even presented to us? Obviously, I’m guilty of putting things in little boxes based on what once was.
After the first few synchronized steps between the dancer and the four legged beauty, a short moment when the horse acknowledged the audience that so badly wanted a Disney performance (remember the hippo in a tutu?), the horse took a few more steps and froze on the other side of the paddock, turning his back to us, the audience. Oops. The dancer very calmly moved around the fenced area hoping to get his collaborator to respond. The horse had other plans.
500 meters away, a herd of cows was calmly grazing the grass, The audience was looking at a horse looking at cows. The dancer was on the side not wanting to produce a fake outcome. What dawned on me was that we were part of a performance within a performance. It was funny, it was relaxing, a reminder that there was no space for forms, schedules or final products quite yet. We were breathing with open lungs deeply in awe of this non human creature that just stood there following his own intuition and cravings. It was beautiful.
In the booklet that accompanied the performance, Mohammed writes about his experience with Ferro: “It might sound obvious, but I realised that horses are strong beings. They weigh about eight times as much as an average human. It’s impossible to enter a game of strength with a horse because the horse always wins. This really puts into question the use of physical force and demonstrates the necessity of exploring new ways of coexisting, communication and connecting.”
As the advertisers and heads of departments rush us to go back to what once was normal, why not instead invite imperfection and experimentation, call onto the spirit of the horses and step into your own power as we first get over our collective trauma. Then, we can make a first step back into the day-to-day and hopefully build a new, just and sustainable way. And while we are at it, what about leaving a little bit of room, blocks of white, in our planners for magic to also happen?
Tips: If you click on the underlined links, you might come to magical places.