The lunar new year: narrow streets alive with jostling pedestrians. Lion dancers manipulate a brilliantly colored papier-mache head with flashing eyes and coquettish lashes; human feet extend off the variegated brocaded body. These mythical lions are surrounded by voracious tourists greedily eyeing the spectacle, consuming moments with soft clicks of cameras in dismembered hands raised high above the pulsating mass of shifting feet and shoulders. For them, Chinatown is a transient destination, a daytrip in their week-long New York city excursion. For lion-dancers, this is their moment to emerge from their shadowy practice rooms that boom with the sound of drums and symbols. They saunter down these cement streets with a train of musicians dictating the speed of their steps, and spectators throwing confetti and mock firework streamers which explode in a swirl of color before falling to the ground.
It is night. Spring settles uncertain in checkerboard days of soft wind and biting sleet. A single exhalation of breath: an arm falls, the sternum rises to meet the light. The body begins its journey through space and time, stepping heavily into earth, bare feet with cracked skin sliding.
Underneath the perpetual scaffolding on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard Street, an old man plays the er-hu beside his fortune-telling sticks. He passes the time between visitors by filling the air with the melancholic wail of a bow being pulled across the string that extends off its round snakeskin body. The sound rises over the din of traffic, seeps through pedestrian voices, settling deep into the wrinkles in his face and sliding down the crease that deepens in my sleeve as I open the door beside him. On the other side, silence descends. I am left with the sound of my own footsteps going up the stairs.
Run with me through these hollow streets; we will be flung across the refuse of time, those forgotten moments that lie in the quiet wasteland of our corporeal bodies. If I could fling myself across time, across the broad expanse of your exposed back, into your cradling arms, then I would fly, fast and far away into the distant realm of obscure thoughts hidden inside bones, on the backs of bent knees.
We are dancing about lions, becoming at once the lion, the lion dancer, the human, the mother, the daughter, the lover, the father, the child at play. And yet we are dancing about nothing in this jumble of too many inconsistent images, too many incongruous ideas stumbling clumsily over paws and toes and hair let loose and thrown about. Inside the deconstructed lion head, with its hollow eyes and frail bamboo frame, your face is cast in a grid of shadows. A human figure manipulates the skeleton of a creature, with disintegrating bamboo bones held together by colored ribbons of tape. Behold our muffled conversation, the sinuous exploration of tangling legs and extended hands, but the narrative threads were cut before the knot was tied. And we are wearing raincoats as if to shield ourselves from the torrential flood of memories that stream out of light boxes in the non-existent fly-space of the studio. Within this cage of broken bones and waning tradition trailing heavily behind it, another obscure word falls, another gesture disappears into the concrete sidewalk littered with limp confetti that stains snow a dirty shade of pink.
~~~
Question: what is the objective of art?
to become transparent to self and other, so that you, they, she, him, are enthralled by the rushing of blood through arteries, and airless blood traversing blue veins, waiting to bear the burden of oxygen. The lights penetrate your skin, your clothes, to pull your soul to surface. This is the labour of your everyday journey through the iridescent streets of the airless mind, of the slumping gait of your unstill body.
~
I think dancing is like living underwater, in the crystalline blue salty sea, with the sun beating down upon its restless surface, and rain pelting itself into its airless depths. Dancing is like sleeping with the fishes, a kind of death, a falling out of the human realm into the amorphous surface and space of water. You are the foreign underwater creature, unlike the fish with their air-gulping gills and wide-open eyes. Perhaps performing is the surfacing of the human back into the human realm of surface-life, superficie, exterior spaces. There is something ironic about the fact that I hate water.
~
The ground beneath my feet shifts imperceptibly. I find myself on broken terrain. I have somehow lost my shoes. Not only have I lost my shoes, my proverbial map has also disintegrated into the rubble, with corners emerging in tantalizing and useless shreds, coyly peeking out, dusty and smudged with dirt. In my hands: a fistful of wistful memories, a recollection of some desire wrapped in faded paper marked with faint pencil. It seems I’ve been imbibing a tasteless imperceptible poison along with my unsweetened coffee from a disposable paper cup; how it got there, how it gets there daily, remains an irrevocable mystery. I’m hallucinating a decaying melody that permeates everything from the soft breeze that brushes my hair across my eyes to the plastic in my contact lenses; the landscape is bathed in a peculiar chartreuse light. Now the only escape is to recede, into inside self to create hallowed pockets of space where you endow the chaos, confusion, and pretension of the exterior with singular significance, a sublimity of transcendent flight. We come to the impasse between mind and body, where both seem to have forgotten the existence of the other. Unread messages are collecting at the base of the neck and accumulating within the body’s ribcage. There is much to be said and much more to be done. You reach down, memories spilling out of your hands, as you fill your palms with colored pebbles. You begin walking, your soles pressing into earth as you leave behind a trail of uncertain stones.
