Dance dance dance

I have been learning of late. Inexorably learning, which is why I haven’t been writing. I have been too slapped in the face by Learning New Things that I’ve not been able to write about it. I am sure everyone experiences this, in some way, sometimes your duty to [write/reflect/make sense of things] gets overtaken by your need to exist and live a normal-paced life.

I have learned of a dancer named Martha Graham who probably invented contemporary dance. She was an all-out American who was born in the Victorian era and lived through the 1960’s Free Love movement and them went on to teach the likes of Madonna. She basically lived for a century and her autobiography about dance called Blood Memory was so damn dramatic, emboldened and atavistic that I had to keep putting it down on the coffee table to take a breather.

Martha Graham dropped quotes like this, quite easily:

"A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful."

“All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”

“The only sin is mediocrity.”

So, I’ve started working at a dance school. I can watch students do mid-air acrobatics and a hundred push-ups before I’ve finished my morning cup of coffee. Dancers are something else. They have honed self-discipline by working-out (they call it “conditioning”) every day, but not pushing themselves too far to avoid injury. They have hyper-spatial awareness because in a room full of swinging galloping bodies no one ever slams into one another, nor even grazes another's hair by accident. They have immense physical control because I’ve learned from watching ballet that it’s actually the slower movements which are the hardest, rather than the back flips (who’d have thought?) Not shaking when you extend a leg way above your head like some slow-motion bucking horse is the height of balletic beauty.

Energy as you enter a space

Performative qualities

Musicality

These are all new concepts to me. I just didn’t know how hard it was to become a top dancer, and as a commoner, I do think it’s crazy. You work yourself so hard and then your career is so short lived. But can you imagine being able to fling yourself in the air with abandon and to sail through it with grace? No way. 

Also, all of the classes are done with live musicians. Pianists and bongo players. When I watch a class through the studio windows the rhythm being beat out by the instruments and the stamping of the choreography is felt and seen. The musicians work with the dancers to play with tempo and carefully arrange different movements. For me it’s the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing Live Art. Living art? Because the music is materialising through the dancers’ bodies, or the dancers’ movements allow the music to take on a new life. Music and dance are inextricable, and they likely co-evolved together.

There’s a dance paradox, I think, which is that dance is universal. It’s probably the most universal physical activity. Children do it automatically when they hear something they groove to, and it’s more easy to grasp the concept of dancing than say, football. But then, if you come to a conservatoire you see dance as the most elite, peculiar and physically demanding activity people have ever done. So, what’s this disconnect between dance like we do it in our knickers in the bedroom Vs. dance as it’s shown on stage at Sadler’s Wells? 

Martha Graham

Busy busy end of the year

Even though I had the month of December off it feels like I did more in it than ever before. It was probably due to the lack of routine, which makes every experience feel novel, firing off synapses at a more rapid rate than my dull-wired brain is used to.

Therefore, I have a newfound respect for my nomad comrade friends gallivanting out there in the world, meeting new people and speaking many languages. I raise my glass to you!

I travelled to Manchester to see my friend’s play A Christmas Carol, which was a total festive treat. I was fending off a cold at the time, so I think spending a day in the cavernous cold space of the Manchester City Library with its grand oculus finished me off. I had a fever for two days and lost about two-weeks in a fug.

The best thing about this time of year is that friends who live abroad or far away come back through town. I got to host many a Christmas meal; some more successful than others. All I can say is if you intend to cook a Korean feast but omit all the chillies (due to a spice intolerance in some of the guests) then what you get is a very very salty meal. Yet we popped open about five bottles of champagne to celebrate various things I can’t remember clearly anymore.

Me and the dog went on a day trip to West London: what a charming world! My writer friend Eloise took us to a pub with a roaring open fire. When we entered there was a man reading a real newspaper with a brown speckled Dalmatian sitting calmly at his heels. I ordered a mulled wine which came to £9.50! The Fox & Pheasant could never become my local, but we can all dream.

I tagged along to a friend’s family walking tour of London. It had been organised by Una who was visiting her UK family with her American husband. The tour guide, Terry, didn’t know how to pitch his material as the majority of the walkers were familiar with London and this country’s archaic/feudal system of property/land ownership. 

I learned a lot, like how Westminster Abbey is a called a Royal Peculiar because it doesn’t belong to any parish thanks to the way the old kingdoms were sliced up in Britain. My favourite factoid was why the Australians call the English poms. It’s an abbreviation of Prisoners of Millbank (POM) as many convicts were transported to Australia in the 19th Century from this Thames riverside prison, which no longer exists.

After seeing friends and recovering from flu, I set out on an epic journey to Orkney. My family up in the beautiful remote isles hosted Christmas, and me and the dog trundled up there by train to Edinburgh > train to Aberdeen > ferry to Kirkwall. An overall journey time of 18 hours, however, the strikes and the storms did not get in the way! A Christmas miracle. 

It was a quiet time spent with books and going for walks – weather permitting. On Boxing Day as the heavy clouds rumbled across our island, I took the dog for a walk, but when we reached the crest of a hill it started to hail. The hailstones were as big as salt crystals, so I ran to a stone house and sheltered against its wall. ROLO jumped head first into a bush. I peeked at her from under my pulled down hood as we got pelleted by ice. Her small gingery tail, shivering poking out from a hedge. 

A Christmas seal sighting

  

A Christmas Carol

It is December. I wake up to frost on the ground, crunchy underfoot. The sky is an icy blue and the low intensity sunlight is amber. It is beautiful out there; fresh, cold and bright, but unfortunately, I am ill and should really stay inside drinking multiple cups of tea. My soul wants to be out there though.

I went to see A Christmas Carol, probably the best story ever written. Dickens was a genius but the thing that strikes me as surprising each time I watch it (adapted for stage, film, etc.) is that it’s set in London. A big city. Where lots of folk intermingle and bustle about wearing shawls and striking matches. 

It surprises me because of the familial feel to the narrative. There is this old miserly man and his nephew’s house is over there and his clerk’s house is somewhere walkable with a giant turkey. When they enter a flashback with the help of the Ghost of Christmas Past, I’m pretty sure the Fezziwig’s ball dance is held in the city of London, which is also where Scrooge & Marley’s investment offices are. Everybody just lives on top of each other. Also, Scrooge has never left London, so he was born and will die there, wow.

I’ve heard that Victorian living conditions were pretty bad. People living in slums, raw sewage flowing in the streets, outbreaks of cholera, but then there were also the magical inventions of industry like gas lighting, which helped Scrooge see the illusion of Marley in his door knocker. Then there’s the climatic epoch that Charles Dickens lived through known as the Little Ice Age, which enchanted him and made us all believe in a snowy white Christmas. 

I bet a frozen Victorian city was so much nicer for its well-heeled inhabitants because all the waste in the streets would freeze and the noxious smells would lessen. That probably added to the magical Christmas feel Dickens was talking about. But how about how cold it got? I’m chilly in a centrally heated house wearing several layers under a Berghaus fleece. I bet a lot of people froze to death or lost a limb during the Little Ice Age in London too. 

Xmas Decor

We’ve put up the Christmas decorations. It makes me happy. 

The Horror Nativity is out again in the fireplace, it’s like a menagerie of eerie and monstrous figurines made from lurid plasticine that we moulded one sad Christmas. There are two red and green balls hanging from a nail in the kitchen. One lonely Santa hat sits on a shelf looking like a leftover prop from an office Xmas party. I think the look is almost complete. 

Let’s shine the light on Groot for a moment. The pot plant who has had many manifestations over the years he has been in our lives. Abandoned and picked up off the street somewhere in Victoria. Re-homed in the flat Groot grew taller and was re-potted one Spring in Vauxhall. 

During Covid Groot decided to grow even bigger, probably because we were indoors all the time pottering about and watering him maniacally. His roots got all entangled and made a bird’s nest around the bottom of the pot. That was the summer when everything was closed. I remember going to a nursery garden to ask if they had any discarded plant pots I could forage. We picked one that looked more like a bucket with holes in and carried it back to the flat. Voilà Groot got an even bigger pot.

When we moved house and got a dog, I found out that Groot’s species was poisonous to pets*, but we couldn’t give him up. So, we moved Groot upstairs into the bedroom where dogs are not allowed.

But when Yuletide comes around it’s Groot’s time to shine! 

He is hauled back downstairs in his upgraded edgy stylish pot (which looks a bit like a burnt bird cage) and given pride of place. We wrap a wiry set of fairy lights around his tropical-looking foliage and hang a single ornament from his branch of a dachshund wearing a Santa Claus outfit. Groot marvellously plays the role of our Christmas Tree.

*ROLO is wholly uninterested in Groot even when he’s looking so great as a Christmas tree.

Halloween Monday

It was a Monday night. We were sat around a dinner table and outside was a downpour. The rain had been incessant lately. I couldn’t remember a time when the rain was so constant in England, but then I had a terrible memory. However, indoors it was very nice. Emma had cooked delicious chicken stewed with segments of orange – but she didn’t serve herself any of the citrus because she said she had a difficult relationship with fruit. Today was in fact Halloween and the roasted vegetables and soft cherry tomatoes in the dish were meant to give an autumnal vibe. We questioned whether it was more of a Halloween spread because it contained pumpkin? Emma didn’t think so. She reminisced that when she was a child during this holiday ex-pats from America would give the children ghoulish foods like eyeballs made of lychees, which coincidentally was where her suspicion of fruit stemmed from. 

The delicious vapours from the kitchen wafted out of the patio doors, which were open a crack and at its base sat my little brown dog who was looking mournfully out at the sodden garden. She was afraid of everything: at the commuter trains passing by upon raised train tracks, at the fireworks going off for Divali, and at the prospect of getting wet. I asked whether the house got any trick-or-treaters? Another guest said they overheard a dad outside warning his children not to knock on this door because, ‘Emma wouldn’t like it.’ Last year her partner had appendicitis on Halloween, and so Emma had to go to the hospital and left a pile of sweets outside the front door with a passive aggressive note saying, ‘Don’t knock sick person inside but help yourself to sweets’. This probably gave her the reputation of being someone cantankerous.

The rain was not letting up. We were now on to desserts of freshly oven-baked chocolate chip cookies (crunchy on the outside, chewy at its centre). We tried to remember what our first ever Halloween costumes were. Annina and I were obviously vampires; unoriginal yet very in keeping with ye olde traditions of All Hallow’s Eve. Char who heralds from the States went as Mickey Mouse aged four. Emma dressed as something not as good as her younger sister and remembers feeling petulant about it. Aidan had a costume made of leaves to dress as the literary version of Peter Pan. The last guest remembered how he went to a church gathering instead called a “Hallelujah Happening” where they were discouraged from dressing up as anything to do with the devil, so he wore an orange t-shirt.

Orkney holiday & St Magnus Way

Dark stillness. Clambering off the ferry along the jetty you can hear large waters slapping against the hull of the big ship.

Granny is waiting with eager open arms when we arrive after midnight. My dad came to pick us up in Donkey, the name he’s affectionately given to the coffee cream coloured car with a dented nose.

You awake and the scenery outside the window is bright blue glass, the sky is shale, and the light is golden champagne.

I had expected there to be lashing rain outside, but the barometer in the corridor is hoping for light winds as I tap it gently hopeful too, its hand ticking further away from thunder.

We walk the St Magnus Way from Evie to Birsay.

St Magnus Way route marker

I have the disposable camera that Noemi gave me to take photos of our trip to Orkney and snap one at the bay of Gurness. (The un-real tropical blue of the shallow waters cutting into the verdant green of the hillside won’t be captured on film.)

St Magnus was an Earl of Orkney in 1106. A pacifist in comparison to his contemporary warring Earls and Fiefs and because of this, his cousin Earl Haakon, ordered him to be killed on the island of Egilsay across the bay. Instead of being beheaded like a common thief the axe struck a blow in the middle of his head splitting it apart. 

Legend says that the ground where his blood was spilled turned into luscious green pasture. And Gurness means green headland in Old Norse. His hallowed body was carried along Orkney in a procession and the pilgrimage is said to follow this route.

There’s an ancient Orkney tradition where the body of a deceased person is not allowed to touch the ground, so there are many attested resting places (large stones) for St Magnus’ body dotted all over the island called Mansie Stones – however – none remain, and the evidence is patchy. 

The way I like all pilgrimages is to follow the scent of something sacred. You don’t want a historical route with coordinates and information centres. That would give the game away – why would you want to do something so ordinary and official? No, I’m chasing saints! Mixed in with folklore and miracles. 

At Grugar we disturbed a colony of seals basking in the sun, as we dropped down on to the flat rocks strewn with seaweed. I watched them scoot off inelegantly in their blubber suits making a splash. 

Grugar by the roost

Across a turbulent stretch of tidal waters called the “roost” there is the uninhabited island of Eynhallow, which in Old Norse means Holy Island. The ruins of a medieval stone church remain which people say was once a monastery.

Orcadians also say that the Finfolk used to live there. These nomadic sea-dwelling sorcerers who were prone to abducting mortal men and women to become their Finmen and Finwives. Two stories relating to the Finfolk of Eynhallow piqued my interest.

1. This small island was one of the invisible islands of Orkney where the Finfolk resided. The island was said to have been eventually consecrated and captured by a vengeful farmer named the Goodman of Thorodale, after his bonnie bride was stolen infront of his very eyes by a strong dark Finman rowing out on a boat. Thorodale had to go through a quest of labours to gain the sight to see the invisible island. After nine full moons of waiting and watching the sea, he saw it one morning and rowed determinedly to the mythical island carrying bags of salt with him, chucking it at the demonic sea creatures and mermaids who appeared to protect the island from him. They failed. He succeeded and Christianity prevailed banishing the Finfolk from their home forever.

2. In 1990 a boat with eighty-eight tourists embarked on the island to look at the ruins of the church. When it was time to return only eighty-six tourists got back on the boat. The police were called and there was an air-search, and the coastguards were notified. The two missing people were never found and the crew were blamed for miscounting. However, the crew were sure there were eighty-eight people who got on the boat and so, it was assumed they were Finfolk returning to their own holy island home. 

What makes you feel alive?

Dirty orange fug outside the train window with rain streaming down the pane. We made it on to the train! Running through a crowded Edinburgh Waverley, near-missing tourists laden down with shopping bags and wheelie suitcases. Aidan runs ahead pulling my dog at warp speed, her head hits the dangling lunch bag of a woman on her way to work. I shout “Sorry!” as I bounce past, my top-heavy rucksack titling me sideways. 

“You can appreciate the weather today – we have had some significant delays – this is a limited stop start service.”

The train is packed but the torrential downpour outside and the dampness inside combined with the air conditioning gives the interior a cool and still air. We are all sardines contained in a metal can shuttling towards the Scottish coast. 

The windows are steamed up. Outside is an impenetrable mist that tints the whole day lilac. 

Like falling through a static splash of a log flume.

Speaking to a friend who had impulsively bought international flight tickets for a crush, I asked him, “Why would you do that?” The answer was forthcoming. 

“Because it makes me feel like I’m doing something. Like I’m alive.” I nod comprehending this feeling but not having ever impulsively bought flight tickets for love. 

Making it onto a train just in time – 

Leaving the city behind. 

Blowing out all my grimy city snot on to tissues; scoffing the store bought sandwich; running my hand through my hair and scraping dandruff off my scalp;

Gets me closer to feeling free