Moving With Woman

moving with Greta Berlin’s

Woman

A record of a movement session during Sandra Reeve’s Ecological Body movement workshop, held in Dorset, England in June 2009. Photographs and Sculpture: Workshop:

Greta Berlin Sandra Reeve Suprapto Suryodarmo

Information: Greta Berlin Website:

http://gb.c8.com/biography.html

Sandra Reeve Move into Life website: PhD Thesis: Ecological Body Website:

www.moveintolife.co.uk www.moveintolife.co.uk/EcologicalBody www.theecologicalbody.blogspot.com

Move into Life Network Website:

http://moveintolife.blogspot.com

The body is so supple. Supple, lithe and proud. Supple, lithe, proud and dead. I’ve just been told she’s dead and the cause is apparent, though not obvious. I cannot take away my attention from her feet. I am trembling. Am I making myself tremble? Generating a palpable strength of feeling that will demonstrate (to me or others or both?) my capacity to resonate with this lump of black metal [grief]? Nevertheless I am trembling. She is very black. Her mouth is curling. {The photo shows her mouth to be not-curling; at the time it was curling. OK?}

Not just her lip but her whole mouth. Curling down in a gazed moment of outrage. Do you see? She is outraged and I am there. Here. How can I learn not to take it personally? Or how can I learn to take it personally? This is my training. I am curdled into imagining that my mother, feeding me, looked down – perhaps only once – with a gaze of such unbridled outrage that I, in that instant, assumed the mantle of shame for all the acts of anguish ever perpetrated by man upon woman. So that, were I a tree surgeon, every branch removed would be a breast hacked off.

{Do you see? There. Her breast hacked off. I’m certain it was done ever so exquisitely, tenderly, by a woman surgeon even. But the result is her breast hacked off.}

She stands perhaps two foot above me. Taller than me. Was she Dutch? In my curdling, I/we cannot look up at a much taller woman, two foot taller, without feeling ever so slightly Freudian. Her height makes pity impossible. Let that be a lesson to you, objects of pity. Don’t overextend yourselves. {Later I learnt about this tendency to overextend in movement. That’s why I’m always hurting myself. What is this “Oh, I must just stretch everything until it really hurts”? Tell me.} Looking up I see rage and pain and pride and contempt and absolute determination. In the detached space that surrounds Woman I can only quiver. All a-quiver. I never knew her. She is an object that induces a slight aspen quaking. Shaking like a leaf. I want something. I settled on her almost immediately. Though she is turned away for decency’s sake I have been watching her. With my trained male gaze.

Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').

There is something compelling about the way she stands – her feet planted squarely, weight balanced, her intention is clearly to stay. Sublime. Burke on the sublime: ‘that which has the power to compel and destroy us’. Like mountains. Or a big sea. Or a malignant lump in the left breast. I have largely resisted the inclination {a sloping, leaning, tilting word that I like better than ‘temptation’. I think I don’t need Mephistopheles to tempt me. I can just lean almost effortlessly into that which I disapprove of. It’s alright Ma.} largely resisted the inclination to plan what I might do with her. Jesus, did you hear that ‘do with her’? Except for one idea – I have had the notion to take off my shirt and to press my heart against her chest, there where her left nipple once was. It seems an outrageous act, even in my imagination. I start to imagine people’s possible responses. I remember this habit of drifting into imagining what people will think. It seems incompatible with the way of moving I am studying. I stop planning. My body has continued to move with minimal consciously directive intervention. When the time comes, I approach her cautiously, as I might approach a bull:  on the diagonal, so as not to get kicked  quite visibly, so as not to startle  from behind square, so as not to confront.

Her chin is dense. Those feet prevail. Her dress is cut on the diagonal. Asymmetrical. Fashionable. Very fashionable for a young woman dead of cancer. Dead with cancer. Dead from cancer. Dead anyway. There is some stillness. And questions. Children? Hopes? Loves? Fears? Piece of cold, black metal you move me. Greta, what have you put into this piece of cold, black metal? Greta, I am cold in the sun. Greta. I want something. Remember? I told you. I want to take Woman’s arm.

I take her arm. It is surprisingly fragile. My moving can accompany her fragility. With her arm I can be tender. It does not intimidate like the whole of her. Or, rather, I am not intimidated. With her arm I can be tender. Though dismembering her for my movement purposes seems doubly inappropriate. Before I know it, I am stamping, slapping, flapping, grounding my feet resolutely like hers. Like big, wet fish. {In fact, this is how I started. Stamping and flapping. But I have only just remembered. So it reads as if I started with the mouth, chin and arm things. I did not. I started with stamping and flapping. I remember how the tears began to boil. My tears. They were hot, not wet. Desert tears.} I cannot match her feet. They are huge. (Big feet mean a big penis. Greta’s sculptures have vulnerable penises. Able to be wounded. My feet are small compared to Woman’s feet. SHUT THE FUCK UP.) With every footslap I feel myself falling short of Woman. Could she footslap, she would footslap to make the gates shake and the metal doors clatter and rattle and clang rustily. I peter out. I subside in standing. Actually I am better at standing. Well, stronger. I feel more able to match her. Why am I trying to match her? Yes, I can try to mimic her, echo her, mirror her. Like that I can feel my way through moving (en tatonnant, feeling my way like a blind man with a stick) into how she might feel. No, through moving, I can feel my way into how she makes me feel.

Or I can simply talk to her in moving, through moving and, in some way I’d prefer my children didn’t challenge me to describe precisely, she can talk back. She can talk back. That’s better. Now I can go lower. Sink down. Squat. Sit. Lie. Nine postures. Lifting down. Settling like dust in water. {Like sediment in honey.} Down here, I don’t need to see what it’s like to be her any more. I can see what it’s like to be me beside her. That seems more feasible. More do-able. I am smaller than her. Younger. Much younger. She is thirty something I suppose. I am seven years old this autumn. I am lighter. I am not sad. I am a little frightened. There’s the memory of shaking. Not sexy like kundalini shaking. But related. Somehow alive sexy.

Now I can feel Prapto moving behind and alongside me. Good arriving Suprapto. (Actually, I can’t feel him. I can see him. I can only see him. Perhaps another year I might feel him.) He seems intent. I start to worry about what he is trying to get me to do. Of course. I can’t begin to imagine. Obviously I am getting it wrong. Already. I become aware of the trees. Shaking slightly. Middle distance. Jump out, drift slowly back. Trees. Ground. Dust. Woman. Breast hacked off. Prapto. Invoke tree. Tree. Ground. Dust. Breath. Standing again I become more aware of that excised breast. Amputated breast. {I Google ‘amputate’ to check if it only applies to limbs. It’s OK, it applies to any body part surrounded by skin. But the Google search says: Meaning of rehabilitate, amputate, protrude, shirk, unfrock, knit, askew, relent, burlesque, guttle Guttle - is to eat greedily, raven or pig. That’s raven as in ravenous, not as in Tower of London. I’m sure.} Then I attend to the remaining breast. The breast that is left. The right breast. The outstanding breast. It is desirable. Dear God. Giving it too much attention seems disrespectful to the flat side. I consider touching the great flat scar with my fingertips. In the name of art I could do anything. Instead I step behind her and find her real vulnerability. Remember, she has no penis. The wound is to her spine. The open wound. Her backbone is exposed, open to the weather.

I touch it without hesitation. Finger it. I trace its lumps (as her not-extant breast must once have had lumps) and its contours with interest. Tenderness comes. Compassion. A wave of love. Not overwhelming. A warm wave, sloshing. No threat. To touch her back like this is entirely intimate. And, since it uses fingertips and crosses the divide between our separatenesses, it is erotic. About 73% erotic, at a guess. I drift into swaying body. I sway into drifting mind. Now Prapto is really here. I can contemplate Woman again. I am glad of Prapto. Glad of Woman. Standing back, it’s drawing to a close. I can settle. Watch and settle. Rest. Can you rest, standing Woman? You help me to rest. Can I help you to rest? Do you want to rest? Do you want to lead a campaign to remind those with body shapes and features that deviate from the norm that they don’t need plastic, silicone, reshaping, remoulding; that they are good to go as they are? Can I help you lead? Or rest? Perhaps I can be quiet now, waiting for Prapto to finish. There is settling to be done. And all the time there is Greta – intermediary. Bringer of shape to feeling; bringer of feeling to wire and metal and stone and plaster and paint; bringer of life to dead Woman; bringer to the boil of everything that seethes and swarms. She is watching. Probably. A wave of (imagined?) connection between me and Woman and Prapto and Greta and the trees and the others with me – at last I feel them: as if I had been walking along the beach for a mile without hearing or seeing the sea. Become aware first of your own body structure, then of the environment and finally of the others in the environment. Phew.

Finished. I’ve finished. Thank you.