The Intimacy of Movement as Offering

A Response to Prompt Challenge: Verbalizing the Intangible

Photo by Jovi Waqa on Unsplash

To engage a movement practice in which our intimacies of self, of relations, of unions, and of mundo expand out and deepen. I’ve been a movement artist for fifteen years. From contemporary to freestyle to martial movement to cultural practitioner work, my body holds the memory of movement of hundreds of different forms.

After the many long years of movement, the remnants of injury small and large, and the growing list of limitations of an aging body, I am often asked — why do you keep dancing?

The answer, all these years later, sits easy upon my tongue: because I feel like that is when my ancestors can most breathe.

To move, or “dance” as it were, can be an emotionally, spiritually, and politically transformative force to and in society, particularly as it relates to self autonomy, grounding, and healing. Beyond our perception of choreographic movement, there is embodied work, which is a movement practice that asks us to explore the intimacies we hold within ourselves and with our world and all our relations. It is a practice that asks for cognizance and presence, and through it, our relations to these three things begin to deepen.

What I’d like to express and have a hard time expressing is the level of intimacy bodies in communion, rendered outside of the sphere of the erotic, one can experience. It is to hold relationship beyond the language limited by the tongue; the body, itself, becomes soulwork becomes invitation becomes language itself, and as one experiences it, solo and communally, one deepens.

Because it is difficult to explain the depth of feeling this encapsulates, I’ll try in poetic form.

we journey together to center,
the marae — our home. fenua
expansive, nonosina gracing
sky as moana mother laps to shore,
witness arrival her healing waters.
once, when we returned.

the pahu, elder of ocean trees
striking song; we hear his call
he calls for offering, movement in
community, gathering as one our
body our memory our ancestors.
once, when we returned.

chanting old tongue woven
— upon shared waters. not enough
of time or violence has passed to make
the young forget. we call in future
ancestors, and move as they arrive.
once, when we returned.

the movement is ori. aroha,
offering self to sky, to land, to sea.
we salt sweat who we are, we know
who we are // water cousins,
brothers and sisters moving as one.
once, when we returned.

rain warming grace upon us
blessing upon blessing, because
we arrived to ourselves, and
our ancestors, and our young,
finally, to home, all of us together.
once, when we returned.

Ori is a movement I am cultural visitor to and practitioner of. In that moment, though the marae, the sky, the land, the waters were not my own, the act of honoring in time with so many others that have been called home was an intimacy unto itself, and a memory that has marked my life.

Inspired by: poetry prompt, are there experiences you have trouble verbalizing into words?

Mabuhay, I’m EA and I’m new on Medium. I’ve been here for one month to be exact! Please get to know me, & allow me to get to know:

More of my writing? : #DecolonizeYourBookshelf & Who Fears Death?

I’m also slowly exploring, but I absolutely lived for this:

More of good writing!: Cries from Our Forests: Listening to Eriel Tchekwie Deranger