Notes from confinement: on silence and altering states [by Tracy Danison]

C'mon, c'mon let's merry go, merry go, merry go round! (Boop boop boop)
Merry go, merry go, merry go round! (Boop boop boop)
Merry go, merry go, merry go round!
I say let's merry go, merry go, merry go round!
I say let's merry go, merry go, merry go round!

Merry-Go-Round (1968), Wild Man Fischer 

There were said to be too many new joggers, so at some point they forbid us to go outside between 10 am and 7 pm, except for shopping.

At 8 pm sharp, my neighbors are at their windows and on their balconies, clapping, calling and pounding pots and pans. Monsieur le Président de la République, Emmanuel Macron, begins a pretty fair speech at 8.02 pm. He thanks everyone for their tenacious civic solidarity and the police for its vigilance. Macron says we can look forward to phased liberation from confinement beginning 11 May. If all goes well.

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier performs her 1917th one-minute dance. She began the project in January 2015 as “poetic resistance” to barbarity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper massacre. She’s put together a site, Danses de confinement, which has so far put more than 500 minute-dance contributions on line.

Today a year ago, I walked out of the Châtelet Métro station, looked up to see Notre Dame burning. I had no idea stone could burn and so fiercely too. It turns out the place was a thousand-year-old pile seasoned oak.

Valentine Nagata-Ramos, is a dancer and starting-up choreographer whose Cie Uzumaki dance troupe brings together manga culture – Uzumaki, “Spiral”, is a horror series written and drawn by Junji Ito  – hip-hop, feminism and her own unique background and presence.

Valentine has been putting her social media house in order lately and seems as cheerful as usual. If dates for Fall 2020 hold up, it looks like she has good prospects for her BE-girl dance project, which was rolling along sweetly before they banned live performance.

These are gorgeous lingering evenings upon gorgeous lengthening days, pretty warm and dry for April.

Karine tells me she just met Marek walking with his handicapped boy. They live just behind her little house. Marek’s a child dentist. Father like son is enjoying confinement. It’s very positive, they say. It makes everybody realize everything is connecting. Connected? O! Sorry. We’re all the earth, we mean.

At some point in the fuzzy-tough week before Macron’s speech – that would be toward the fourth week of confinement, Holy Week, Pessach, what have you – the WhatsApp streams of funny videos, neighborly sentiment and ironies suddenly dried up.

Somehow or another in there, Silence just fell over all our little worlds.

I think the Aspidistra crash landed – remember Orwell’s image for the “everyday determination of everyday people” that keeps a body going in face of petty cruelties, hard work and dog shit on the sidewalk? I think it experienced a mechanical failure; Men in Black have discretely wheeled the partially burned carcass into a secure revetment.

I got two messages before Silence fell.

The first was a short video from Sina Saberi, my choreographer friend currently stuck in his home country.

Like most performing artists, Sina’s been trying to distract himself from the fact of severely unpaid hours imposed by the world-wide public health emergency. To fill in the moments between renewed anxieties, he’s been learning how to use a video editing app to help him develop a project he’s been seriously toying with for a while. He wanted to show me the fruits of this labor.

The second message was from Ludovine, lioness apostle of the solitary walk and the breathless run, whom I loved upon hearing her whiskey voice, who moved to a new and charming country village a day or two before mandatory confinement began.

Ludovine had heaved a sigh of relief that 15 March when she got her key and shut her new front door against all comers – Ooouuff! What joy to be rid of people, especially the nearer ones, she messaged then.

Ludovine now confesses that the sparkle of diaphanous aloneness has dulled to featureless loneliness. I understand now, she texts, that I must hold whom I love in my arms – without it, no space, no horizons, no nothing.

Sina’s short video shows an uncertain dervish small on a distanced stage flailing and staggering into twirling swirling twirling swirling. He writes that the dervish is part of Basis for being,  a choreography project that looks at dance as an alternate state of being, part of a “biography of being”. Basis aspires to be a mirror that enables experience and desire as being.

Watching the dervish find his whirl swirl on the tiny screen, I recall a chance meeting with the Venerable Nyanadharo, the chief of some Buddhist forest monks living in a homely monastery at Tournon-sur-Rhône, in the Ardêche. Don’t ask.

Vénérable told me that turning, staying awake and fasting, among other ordinary human practices, constraints and habits, are sufficient ways out of standard consciousness – other consciousness is as common as skin, he said. Like for yoga, what matters is intention. Vénérable insisted on that.

It’s not necessary to dine with a notable forest monk to get this point, however. Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s daily one-minute of dance, Valentine Nagato-Ramos’ BE-girls, too, take the conscious-altering power of dance for granted … Come to think of it, Isadora Duncan didn’t invent modern dance, she rescued dance so that Sina and Nadia and Valentine and Ruth Childs and Amy Swanson and … you and I, could continue to use it.

That’s why Silence fell, then, why the Aspidistra crashed to earth. Confinement is a sufficient way out of standard consciousness. 

Silence marked a paradigm shift: sometime between Ash Wednesday and Easter Monday, even my lioness friend Ludovine realized that we already are connected. What we see as we press our noses to the windows is really what our desire enables. Experience should enable us to change it.

What now?