Image Description: Two dancers twirling their jackets, from opposite ends. A long ribbon of pink, red, green, orange splashes across the image. In the lower right corner are the words “Dance Poetics.”
“When the image is new, the world is new.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Dance poetics acts as the movement from there to here. The world touches us just as we touch it. Such a poetics appears under the sky, breathes stillness into what has been and what we will become. Under this sky, we will lean into the spaces where we live, dream, and touch everything, even as the wind thrashes the mountain, the sea, the city streets.
An orange streak of light in this late afternoon might take us back to ourselves, to the distant call of those ancestral feet that sound out history, mete out all the ways that we can find ourselves. Mete, Measure, Cut. Metre, rhythm. The light moves.
In the heat of the evening as the clouds slide behind the island’s hills, there may be only one way to call this world back into us even while we hover here: to dance air, next to possibility. Such breath is still and, then, more still.
Yet, as our breaths are taken, from a demi-pointe to the lunge, our arms flutter, casting about secrets like flowers that light up in the dark night. We are wrapped in silk jackets fleshed with our histories in shadowed greens, whites.
The braille patterns projected through that history fall over our faces—the dancer arcs in the empty space between the audience and the screen. The hand, an image, touches.
Image Description: On stage. Across the backdrop, a large projection of a hand reading Braille. Three dancers to the right are slowly moving forward. Downstage is a large surreal-like bamboo and paper sculpture hearing trumpet flower, approximately 8 feet long and at one point 5 feet high.
How did we arrive next to the windows, next to the doors, next to the walkway that circles around the flats where we live. The shadows flutter.
While we wait—inside this poetics of dance—all those ghost clothes drift across the clothesline, across the line of night, of the flush of first light over the hill.
Credits: Sculpture-To Wun. Dancers-Yuen Hiu Shan; Hong Pak Lau; Men Tin Lam.