From a remarkable student who understands this work so deeply, Donatella, speaking to me in a note and shared with her permission:
“What you do (movement art for the purpose of returning to the roots of movement as instinctive ritual, emotional catharsis, self exploration, physical improvements to biomechanical issues, and trauma bodily effects) is a complete subversion of the institutions and cultural ideas of “dance.” Especially considering your body and age inclusivity. By your nature, you are not a dancer; you are a movement artist, subverting everything wrong with the current culture around dance and women’s bodies. Your practices don’t damage the body, rather your practices heal the body. You teach the core essence of “dance” forms such as Butoh, Modern, etc., yet you don’t instruct people on rigid techniques and leave them to try to fit inside that. You don’t impose a body standard or an “ideal.” You don’t police the body of your artists. You embrace them and teach them that every single body is built to move and feel joy. You don’t kick people out after an imaginary age where they’re considered no longer palatable. You fight to keep people moving their whole damn lives so they can be in their bodies, experiencing physical life to the very end. You subvert everything about most of the things you were ever taught as a dancer, because fuck that.”
Reading that… it’s everything in my heart about this work and said in ways that I would never have been able to say it.
When I say this work is revolution, I am not speaking in hyperbole.
Daring to love ourselves just as we are? Daring to show ourselves when the culture says only certain types should be seen? Daring to take up all the damn space? Daring to do all of this in a community of women who only hold one another up, never acting toward one another in the ways we are taught from grade school?
When we dare in these ways, we come to know our full power.
And that scares the shit out of “them.”