Embodied Revolution

I shared a study recently on Facebook that showed TOO MANY young people would rather get infected with Covid19 than GAIN WEIGHT. (A study done by the Missouri University Center for Body Image Research and Policy.)

We KNOW that this culture HATES BODIES. Period. Notice I didn't say "bigger bodies."

It extra hates bigger bodies. The stories it constructs about productivity and worthiness around larger bodies are some of the worst and most destructive.

But it hates bodies, period. American culture is born of a Protestant disdain for the human form and a belief that only in death can we attain any “holiness.”

Every body is TOO -- too fat, too skinny, too curvy, too straight, too hairy, too bald, too sexy, too fem, too masculine, too sexual, too androgynous, too muscled, too flabby, too soft, too hard, too brown, too pale, too too too too too too too...

We are, one way or another, taught to HATE OUR BODIES. PERIOD.

Why?

Yes... you probably guessed part of it... because people who hate their bodies will buy products.

But deeper than that -- people who hate their bodies will bow to the will of anything outside of themselves that promises they might eventually, some day, maybe sorta feel okay about themselves.

In the meantime, people who hate their bodies enact violence on themselves and then that extends beyond their individual body to the larger bodies of family, community, earth.

One way or another, each of us projects our body hate onto someone/something else, and it's how this whole system in which we live works.

So when I say the work we do to EMBODY is SUBVERSIVE and REVOLUTIONARY, I MEAN IT.

When we embody in a loving way, we then act from love and we project LOVE into the world.

Love is already complete. It needs nothing. And it shares all things.

See how that could destroy power structures?

I'm not here, I'm not doing this work, so you can dance a little and feel some dopamine...

I'm here and I'm doing this work SO WE CAN CHANGE THIS FUCKING WORLD. 

Revolution through Body and Movement Subversion

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.”