Engel!
summary
Performance — grace allerdice
Choreography — grace allerdice
Sound —
Costumes — grace allerdice
Photo — Davion Alston
as part of Portalism: New Moves by WonderRoot’s Walthall Artist Fellows | WonderRoot and MOCA GA
September 29 - October 2, 2016
at The B Complex
Presented by MaryGrace Phillips
Produced by MaryGrace Phillips with Danny Davis + Protect Awesome
in partnership Fulton County Arts Council
As part of this performance, we also did a free, live performance during regular school hours for two of our local public schools. This particular performance was followed by Q&A.
In this full-length work, the dancers and I contemplated how love pulls us in and out of Time. How relationship begs the questions of how we are truly connected and what that means outside of the day-to-day and inside of the dreaming. Once we are outside of time, how will I know you and how will you recognize me? Perhaps we only feel our weightiness and weightlessness once we are bound by love. We explored how the exchange of bearing one another, asking forgiveness and moving through love’s diverse distances leaves us changed and more whole, even (or especially) when we’ve been broken.
poems
I came into the world a young man
Then I broke me off
Still the sea and clouds are Pegasus colors
My heart is Pegasus colors but to get there I must go back
Back to the time before I was a woman
Before I broke me off to make a flattened lap
And placed thereon a young man
Where I myself could have dangled
And how I begged him enter there
My broken young man parts
And how I let the mystery collapse
With rugged young man puncture
And how I begged him turn me Pegasus colors
And please to put a sunset there
And gone forever was my feeling snake
And in its place dark letters
And me the softest of all
And me so skinless I could no longer be naked
And me I had to de-banshee
And me I dressed myself
I made a poison suit
I darned it out of myths
Some of the myths were beautiful
Some turned ugly in the making
The myth of the slender girl
The myth of the fat one
The myth of rescue
The myth of young men
The myth of the hair in their eyes
The myth of how beauty would save them
The myth of me and who I must become
The myth of what I am not
And the horses who are no myth
How they do not need to turn Pegasus
They are winged in their un-myth
They holy up the ground
I must holy up the ground
I sanctify the ground and say fuck it
I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death
I say fuck it and fall down no new holes
And I ride an unwinged horse
And I unbecome myself
And I strip my poison suit
And wear my crown of fuck its.
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
