meaning and meaningless

In the path month I have had the opportunity to watch women legends perform: Deborah Hay at a small venue in Seattle and Nancy Stark Smith with Peter Bingham in Eugene. I loved watching these mature women’s bodies move. I was inspired by their grace, their stories, t heir power, their, beauty. I was inspired by women who dance rather than retire. My heart ached at the beauty and power of their movements, at the swish of the long braid, at the flutter in a voice.

Watching Deborah Hay was like being a voyeur into a life I could not understand. She showed us everything of herself. She narrated a life in abstract. In the first performance she was dressed in a conservative satin suit, using the entire stage and moving from place to place, telling a story. I kept searching for the meaning of the dance but not understanding. I kept feeling like she should be naked, that she had exposed so much of herself that she shouldn’t be wearing any clothing. It felt like she had let us in to glimpse that deep place where life cannot make sense and all our struggles to put meaning on it are moot in the end.

And then after a short intermission she showed us a video of a dance titled Beauty. The dance was of a beautiful aging body moving quite slowly around the stage. An audience member came onto the stage, Deborah stood in the back center, back to the audience. Standing very still Deborah had the woman undress her and leave her clothing in a neatly folded pile. This wasn’t about overt sexuality, it was about being 100% exposed and letting the beauty and the absurdity of the human body out into the daylight. A second film of the same dance played, but in the second film she had on a ‘blade runner-esque’ costume. Deborah read a libretto about Beauty as the films played. She drew a map of the dance and the meanings she was dancing. She exposed her heart and thoughts and still I did not understand, still I felt like voyeur.

Nancy Stark Smith and Peter Bingham performed with Michael Vargas and improvisational pianist as well as with the lighting artist. Their dance was titled Baseline. They performed trio, duet, solos, parallel solos. The pianist was another dancer, sometimes performing alone and sometimes a equal part of the dance. This life was more understandable to me. It was the story of people coming together, dependent upon one another, then falling apart, standing alone, struggling with finding grace alone, coming together again. Relationships that mature through periods of struggle and separation. This dance brought the meaning of the story to relationship for me.

And perhaps that is a story for my life as well. I need, I crave those moment alone. I ache for the illusion of silence. I ache for the stillness of those moments in the morning before anyone in the house arises and I have the illusion of seclusion. And yet the seclusion only has meaning for me because I know it is an illusion. My family is always here tugging at my awareness. I know that I am not alone at all. No matter how far away I am from my family, the strings of this attachment pull on my heart. I cannot find rest from that call and so I return and reengage in that dance. Right now, as I try to finish this piece of writing my husband is coming out of the shower and will soon come to tell my his plans for the day. My 8-year-old hammers on the bins of Legos and other toys that fill this family room and I ask him to quiet down. My 11-year-old tries to sleep in the room next door and I try to protect him from the noise of his brother. There is no real silence in my life. There is no being alone. And the meaning of my life is construed in these relationships to which I return again and again.