Free Your Body Folsom Style

Free Your Body Folsom Style from Mano Sipowicz on Vimeo.

For photos of the Folsom Street Fair you just have to Google it or follow this LINK  It was a photographers paradise of exhibitionists.  This video is my pg version.

I have to say not knowing anything about the political or spiritual culture of s&m, being clothed and dancing in what i would call a somatic sensation based style in contrast to what i was seeing around me... i started to feel like my expression in some ways was more threatening to some of the observers.  Even though i was clothed i felt exposed and with out a costume compared to those completely naked.  I understand this was totally my experience and i did not ask any of the naked ones if they felt like they were wearing a costume, was this their authentic self?

I found myself appreciating the art of s&m as a perfectly beautiful expression of the spirits sometimes felt experience of being in body as imprisonment.  And i can understand the desire to fully express that to its extreme.

Saturday night in San Fran: From Ocean of Water to Ocean of Women

I danced with a woman named Katrina from New Orleans.  Her eyes were wide and rolling and a smile so big I kept waiting for her tongue to role out like Kali.  She taught me to use the wall to find stability and cool stillness that turned into poses and then spine and hips pushing off the wall into undulations.  We united in our quirky maturity riffing off the beats into new rhythms that only the deaf could hear.

I wrote the above in the wee hours this morning and just now found on my friends blog by coincidence a further description of my experience last night.  (To see the full blog go  HERE)

"Last night out dancing in a rangy bar I watched M and saw how an open heart and lack of judgement can change a room and make things happen, small roads unfurl like ribbons from the heart, touch people and the inanimate, charge it up, over at another table a woman I know was surrounded by her own personal entourage who had the aura of gnats lit only by the woman's blue shirt, you could hardly see them, they did not dance, the woman holding court, she'd returned from Haiti very serious and tightly wound in a way I recognize all too well, an ego clench, it's hard to be in a small room when you've been in a big world and that's an unfortunate thing. M dancing. M dancing."

my response:  "Sometimes i wish i could keep someone like you in my pocket and be able to pull you out, push a button and you could give words into all that is felt.
It is a rear night to have one of my roads out cross another and collide to blossom new roads i didn't even no existed. Last night was one such night. I am reminded of a song someone sang to me this week, "the world explodes around me with love".
Small rooms need the big rooms to enter them."

Pussy Cat Pussy Cat Where Have you been? Waves of Breathe

     I can not separate the sounds coming in through my ear from the vibration through this giant rock I have wedged myself underneath.  I can’t see the waves, I feel them inside of me.  A deep rumble louder and louder like a train coming, thump as it hits hard surface, my bones. Haaaaaa as the wave exhales and receeeedes hssssss grrrgulll out threw the sand.

     Being wedged in this rock was like condensing my five day experience on the beach into a concentrated dose of medicine.  In that moment I panic. I birth myself out from between the rock so my body has the freedom to respond to all sound vibrations.  

Pussy cat pussy cat where have you been?

To the ocean to visit my Queen.

Pussy cat pussy cat what did you do there?

I crawled inside her to become her air.

   

Coming here I touch Home,

I touch essence of Self that is not separate from Creator. 

I breathe with That which I am again

I rest in That.

Being held by rock, drift wood, sand, wind, and the warm flesh of others….

I finally rest at home with others

in my self.

   

     Waves coming in and going out, waves in my body as breathe was my theme.

Slow smooth waves, quick hard to catch waves, waves that spiral into tide pools and holes in rocks, the stillness between the waves, the undertow below the surface, the waves that are there constantly even as I wander away and forget them, waves that keep coming back, receding and coming forth, expanding and contracting, going in, and out, alone and with others.

     Twenty years ago I new this place as a twenty five year old.  A long slow inhale, an undertow current took me far away from this place.  But I am finally understanding that the current always returns, inhale is always followed by the exhale even in the movement that is my life.

    The experience at twenty five was different.  At forty five I have discovered that the expression of intensity can be subtle and playful as well as big and dramatic.  I know longer feel a need to cling to stories of my identity.  On my life’s journey I have traveled deep inland to the places of no ocean or sound.  I know from those places there is nothing, nothing to hold onto.  And I know I can choose to decorate myself with the clothing of any identity and it is not who I am. 

And this too is not who I am.

            Exhale   

    I role out on her tongue

    Wet and slimy

    I slowly rise in the puddles of crystal light

    The breeze dances me

   

    Pause into stillness and wait

    To catch the inhale

    I tumble down, bones folding on top of each other

    Tongue curling back into dark wetness.

    “pa” soft wind

    “pa”

    Soft lips opening for a glimpse of light

    “pa”

    Soft jaw closes   

    Wind rushes in

    “pa” open

    “mmm” close

    head sits gentle on top of spine

    bobbing like a buoy on the oceans undulations

    soft spine, soft jaw, soft lips

    kissssss

    “pushhh”

    blow spout

______________   

The experience out at Sea Ranch CA for 5 days was so rich.  I look forward to seeing how I integrate it all.  I wanted to get it out and share some of it quickly here while it is still fresh in my body, and before I enter the wild of this San Francisco city.  HERE is a link to Jamie McHugh’s web sight if you are interested in knowing more about this work called “Somatic Expression.”

I met Jamie 20 years ago while studying with Ana Halprin at her Tamalpa school.  Jamie was somewhat fresh out of Ana’s school back then.  It was beautiful to experience him now as he has integrated Ana’s work and other forms into his own unique form.  Which is hard to even really call a form because his gift is in the way he can simultaneously hold the container for all of us and give such wide breath for all of our unique journeys of unfolding, contacting, expressing our Self in body and nature.

Valencia St, San Francisco

Somewhere on Valencia

Clarion Alley off of Valencia

 

 

Friday night in San Fran

after diner my family dropped me off at the lesbian bar.  Drank a few margaritas and watched the women, think i was the only one wearing a white blouse, sort of a black punk 80’s thing seems to be going on here.  Discovered a lesbian bar isn’t that different in San Fran than Santa Fe, a single woman drinking by herself doesn’t get approached by other lesbians.  I had to do all the approaching.
a band of drunk 21 year old dykes escorted me threw the streets to a dance club - felt like the blind lead by the blind.  Time was altered during that walk, felt like three hours went by, but it must have only been an hour.  Don’t think I have roamed streets like that since my teens.
One of them, the cutest Mexican hipster from East L.A, gave me a sermon about the latest theories of love "opposites don't attract, got to find someone made of the same essence."  As she talked I just wanted to kiss her, her eyes exuded such innocence.  But she was “in love with the one.”  I couldn’t mess with that!
Became “lesbian mom” to two 19, maybe younger, also drunk, pretty gay boys.  They were all hands on each other, just met tonight; one was “celibate because he had already gotten 3 girls pregnant”.  I explained that I didn’t think he would get his latest friend pregnant and then checked their pockets for rubber; the celibate had his pocket full of them (not really a celibate in my experience if you’re walking around prepared).
Finally met up with a friend of a friend, a woman closer to my age, wow.  She took me for a lovely walk threw the mission and then over to Folsom, some gay male bar with a wild drag show, and made lollipops on the pool table.  Didn’t stay long enough for it to harden.  The quote above the table said, “how many licks does it take to get to the center of something.”  Exactly!

Saw this at the SFMOMA, sort of how i feel lately, that's Andy Warhol by the way

sneak peak of more RED to come

So many shades of red to explore ~

Amy Greenfield

      Finding Amy Greenfild’s work is like discovering I’m not alone on an island, there is actually a historical context for my expression as a dancer on video.  She has been doing this since the 70’s!  I am humbled and inspired.            

     These two pieces reminded me of something I had been thinking about. My aesthetic as a dancer in any medium seems to be about my body in relationship.  The primary word being in.  I am someone who needs to get in the water, needs to hug the tree and if there is a hole in the tree, then I will get in it.  I want to feel with my whole body what ever it is.  I had to walk threw the glass that fell in my living room. Years ago when I had a mace can in my purse, I decided I had to smell it…
Amy in these two videos fully explores being in the mud and in the currents.
     There is a way that the medium of film seems to be able to capture not only that the body is in something separate from itself, but it can also show the times when the lines become more blurred, those moments when I am not separate anymore but the other is now in me, I am not moving it, it is not moving me but some other union of movement is happening.
     Amy has named her blog to perfectly express this, “cinemabody’s blog. “  Here is what she says about it.
“It’s not cinema about the body. It’s cinema which is the body. And how the expression of the body as cinema can give kinesthetic vision to all that we can’t see and generally regard as separate from the body, but which I see as coming through the body – Cinema Of The Body And Spirit.
     At some point in the Tides video, the footage turns upside down, Amy on the top of the screen and the ocean under her.  To me that captured the moment when one is playing in the ocean long enough and all of a sudden you are the ocean, who’s on top who’s on the bottom; like in those moments of love making when my lovers nipple is in my mouth and now it is also my own nipple, one body undulating in the same river.  We do have these experiences in our lives; how thrilling to see Amy capture that.



Element from Amy Greenfield on Vimeo.


TIDES HD from Amy Greenfield on Vimeo.

To see more of Amy's video's follow the Vimeo link or uTube her.

To see Amy's blog go HERE
And HERE is the blog that inspired my search for more about Amy