#1 St. Marks

The first time I danced at St. Mark’s Danspace Project in NYC was a solo I made called the 5th Season, for Dancers Responding to AIDS. The 5th Season was very slow and very quiet and very short. Mostly on one leg. I wore a leaf green or sage green (depending on the light) velvet boyshort one piece leotard-ish thing. I was not thin. I had thighs. In that outfit I felt fantastic.

It was a piece about waking up. I started it in the woods of Western Massachusetts, on a 12-day winter meditation retreat. I was on a midday break. I went into the forest by way of the door that went out from the kitchen and the tearoom. Down wooden stairs from the porch and across the frozen grass and onto the trail. A few hundred feet in there was a huge frozen puddle snaking between a wide-spread family of pines.

I stepped onto the black ice with the bits of brown pine needle stuck below; day before yesterday it had been a slumpy ocean of muck. I could tell the sun was planning to fade, even though it wouldn’t be dark for another few hours. The tall pines were all around me. A few birds calling.

The retreat was in silence. I had my own room, off on a corridor at the far side of the main house. We didn’t read, speak, write. It was all sitting, walking, meals, the cleaning job. I loved this silent world and walking out into the woods or around the farms without commentary or discussion. I’d met a dog. He accompanied me around the road that looped past the ponds and meadows. He ran alongside me, angled out into the fields, shadowed the edge of the road. Busy but friendly, no need to talk.

The birds liked to discuss. Blue green gray brown flashes of chickadees flew in and out of the branches. I slip-slid along the ice, listening to them. When the ice stopped, I followed it back to where I’d come from. Back and forth on my 10-foot rink, ice bumpy and creaky, the air full of pine. I stopped and looked up to the sky, past the height of the trees. My feet slipped away from me. I didn’t fall but I could have! I started to turn, pirouettes, twirling inside and out. It was breathtakingly risky. It was me as a 10-year-old kid. It was just playing around. It was dancing.

I am a dancer. I am a person dancing in the forest. I am a choreographer making a solo about being alone. I am alone in the woods starting to make a dance by standing on a small pool of ice and practicing turning.

It was quite the day in the forest. “Who are you?” People would ask and after that day I would say “I am a choreographer.”

My last time dancing at St. Mark’s was with Clarinda Mac Low in 40 Poems for 40 Dancers. The singers gradually trailed off into silence and then it was just me, and light and the huge high space, the surround of the balcony, the feeling of the people to my left, to my right, behind.