THE SONGS IN MY POCKET

In this solo walk I move/soft-shoe/dance into the moebius-like loop of Richard Serra’s massive, sculpted steel structure, Sequence. As if charting the high walls of the cosmically aligned Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, I attempt to navigate my own interior first and then bridge into the interior loop of a loved one suffering a serious medical condition. The audience, invited to follow and film me as I listen privately to a musical loop of Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Dark, Dark, Dark,” consider: What kinds of access do we have to other's interiors? How are we kept in the dark about those very spaces? What does it mean to move imaginatively through someone else’s interior space—especially an intimate's? How do we find the spiritual sustenance for joint healing?

The songs in my pocket just crumble apart won't you sing me something from the dark, dark, dark?

This work seeks to literally raise up and move through the griefs that connect me and my child’s interiors within our family’s past histories and traumas that continue to impact us physically, emotionally, and energetically. Like Hansel and Gretel, I scatter song lyrics I have written, along my own path, trying to imagine my way into my child’s bodily experience, inaccessible to me. Undertaken on Halloween, when the portals open between the spirit world and this one for passing, recognition, and exchange. The audience provides a circle of care for this act of summoning and experiencing—even though they themselves can only try to imagine themselves into the spaces of the walker that they can’t hear, see, or feel, directly, of his experience.