Anya Gallaccio came to the beginning of our practice this week. She’s working on a sculpture to go in the garden of a school for disabled kids in Brussels and wanted some images of live bodies at this point in her process. She watched Eric and I dance and took some photos. The conversation, her presence. So much influence. We weren’t “sculpturing”, but I was definitely feeling Eric’s body as a sculpture and letting my body be one for him to yield into.
I’d met Anya once before when Eric and I performed this section of Bigmouth Strikes Again on World AIDS Day in 2011, but had never seen her work.
Eric and I told her a bit about what we’ve been working on with lush. Then we all talked about what the word “lush” evokes in each of us. I’ve mostly been working with lusciousness and drunkenness. Anya started describing lush vegetation, hydration, fullness…I started getting images of thick, dripping ferns. Something about fertility, fruitfulness, flow…I could feel the fluid in my body. A healthiness. An abundance. Physical and overflowing.
After she left, Eric started describing a cube filled with plants. The hydration/moisture thing had me picturing mist in this cube. We were launched into the familiar process of blurting out our ideas, letting them bounce back and forth between us, and then slipping the parts of the dance that have already begun to show themselves in and out of the ideas like placeholders, even if only for a moment. We can say ANYTHING when we are in this state. It’s a fertility, a fruitfulness, a flow…I could feel the fluid in my body. A healthiness. An abundance. Physical and overflowing.
Then, back to work. We decided to revisit some whole body sound thing to learn more about the drunkard lush. We did this:
On the way to the car after rehearsal, Eric told that Anya uses a lot of organic materials in her work. When I got home, I looked up images of her work online, I was stunned. Her work looks like the wildest, lucid dreams of the ‘cube filled with plants’ I had imagined a few hours earlier.
