SuperNova, Darwin and Charmion

This is the material we started as duets (remember?  where the chair is represents where the partner stands?), with material I taught a few weeks back.  I expanded it for Jill for a piece that will be performed this Saturday February 23 at 2PM in Sebring Lewis Hall for the "Flutes out of the Box" concert.  Jill will be dancing with flutist Nina Assimakopoulos.  Come out and see Jill perform!!

I generated the material thinking about the relationship between the dancer (in this case, Jill) and the figure (here the chair) that is commenting on SuperNova from a human perspective.  Nina's poem for her flute piece:
"Crossing time and space through vast empty darkness
Streaming photonic particles captured by my eyes
Exciting visual pigment pulsating through retinal gateways to neuronal circuitry
Delivering ancient fire to my brain
And I see the light."

I have been dwelling on "Why Charmion?"  Last Fall, just doodling and Charmion "appeared" as it were.  Demanding that her story be told.  In my meditation on her, came the made up story about her and her followers and the elephant stories and the Blue Moon gatherings. As with all my work - it arrives and says "work on me" and it is months, years later that I figure out why.

So this movement material was about trying to be in proximity to something that exists in a different time (dimension? zone?).  To be seen, but only as an afterglow long since having burned out.

It continuation of my Darwin work, I quote Elizabeth Grosz from Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power:
"Darwin's model of evolutionary unfolding provides a striking response to various theories of oppression.  Oppression is the result of operations of systems of harm and injustice that privilege the bodies and activities of some at the expense of others.  What Darwin's work makes clear is that what has occurred to an individual in the operations of a milieu or environment (it matters little here if it is natural or cultural) is the force or impetus that propels that individual to processes, not of remediation (remediation literally involves undoing that what cannot be undone) but of self-transformation."

How did it happen that a whole movement of women began to claim their bodies and present them in public spaces (performance) not as sexual objects but as humans/personalities/actors to be paid attention to for what the body could do? And the notion of "what the body could do" was explored by the imagination to take on the impossible i.e. flying through the air.