babelfish: my battery is pure love part 2
BABELFISH
For D and P and S.
For Douglas Adams and Florence Welch and Jiri Kylian and Ken Liu and Cixin Liu.
and special thanks to Martin Boyd
“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.”
Douglas Adams’ (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
I am the babelfish.
**
When I was a teenager, my dear friend Kevin said, “Some people lack a sense of humour, some people lack wisdom teeth, Lucy lacks a sense of reality.”
I suppose at the age of 16 it really did appear that way, even to me. But I have since realized that my brain is an electric field absorbing unconscious mental frequencies, connecting dots that haven’t been connected before. I can see routes between things with a strange vividness and I can transform them into art. Sometimes they don’t make sense at all. Other times, and thrillingly, they form compound words that I can translate: physical energy into mental energy, words into embodiment.
This obsessive pattern-seeking is my coping mechanism for anxiety. My first day of kindergarten this anxiety hit me as I skidded down the playground slide, staring in terror at my shoes. Later that day I became obsessed with the cubby holes in which we stored our shoes in the classroom, the array of patterns I could follow – colour, size, neatly together or tumbled over (of course I wanted to straighten those tumbled shoes, but the teacher had said we shouldn’t touch other people’s things). I struggled against my shyness and brashness, my desire to communicate and my terror of saying the wrong thing all the way through high school and beyond. I was precocious and solitary, I wanted to run with all the other kids and also be completely alone.
Unsurprisingly, high school was very difficult. I was bullied by a group of boys.
“I wish you’d try to kill yourself.”
“I’m glad your mother’s dead.”
“I don’t like fucking freaks at my school and I will get rid of you.”
It was bad. Really bad. But I couldn’t stop babelfishing my way through it, trying to translate their words into my peculiar inner world, rearrange them and send them back out. I was thriving on the heavy waves of horrific attention. Eventually I used my awkwardness to stand between the bullies and the younger kids they were picking on. By this time my doomsday clock was ticking: I knew I was getting out of Sarnia, that I was going to university and that I wasn’t ever coming back in any meaningful way. They couldn’t hurt me anymore, so I could try to stop them from hurting others.
But what does all this have to do with being a choreographer and dancer and a mostly well-functioning adult?
Dance, to me, is constant translation. It is taking an idea that exists in words, feelings or energies and giving it a form, limited only by the human anatomy. The best dancing, to me, does not “perform” these words and feelings, but embodies them, which is like speaking a language so fluently, that you know the right words to say, without being conscious of their meanings as you say them. I have been translating feelings and words through my body since the kindergarten slide and through the uncomfortable halls of high school.
My job as a dancer and choreographer is to consciously and creatively continue babelfishing, to offer some beauty to the world, and to be clear enough in my translations that you as a viewer want to translate them into the language of your own heart.
That sounds cheesy. But also, I mean it.
**
Eight months ago, I flew back from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming where I experienced a dreamy and startlingly wonderful artists residency. Once home in Toronto, I feverishly try to maintain my days as they were at Ucross. Breakfast, walk, warm up, dance, notes, lunch, walk, dance, notes, dinner, stretch, sleep. And I am also trying to write grant applications and proposals, organize the family, clean the house, while fending off anxiety and insomnia. Ucross offered physical distance that gave me psychical distance from these last two. Not one night of insomnia while I was there.
I was tornado of work at Ucross. I danced 6 hours a day, I hiked an hour a day, I read and researched 2 hours a day. I fell asleep with a book on my face most nights. I created 45 minutes of material in 9 sections, I shared my work with fellow residents who offered imaginative and encouraging feedback. I started off to create a work about the evolution of robots and I ended up creating “heartless”, something much more than a robot dance. Now, back home, it feels remarkably frightening, what I have made, personal in a way I can’t define, which makes it harder to control.
“heartless” now sits in a basket on the shelf of the kitchen island, in a leather-bound notebook full of the thoughts and decisions and feelings from April. Where do we go from here?
**
Translation
1. a written or spoken rendering of the meaning of a word, speech, book, or other text, in another language.
2. The process of moving something from one place to another.
3. In math: movement of a body from one point of space to another such that every point of the body moves in the same direction and over the same distance, without any rotation, reflection, or change in size.
The last definition really gets me. Your whole body, dancing, can’t help but do this. You can extend limbs, stretch a little, but essentially all points of the body move in the same direction and over the same distance without reflection or change in size. You carry your whole self everywhere when you dance.
Old school dance training – or mine at least -- had a spoken and unspoken rule: “leave your shit at the door”. I took the meaning of this to be: we come to the studio to work and you have to be able to push past the romantic, family, health and/or existential crises, and keep going. You have to be resilient. But this message was usually communicated in a way more like “sit down and shut up” or “dance it up and shut it down”.
We know this is impossible. Your feelings and experiences are in your body in the flickering messages from brain to heart to gut. These translate fluidly from language to language as they pass through different organizing systems of our unlikely, complex bodies. When you try to stop this communication, the language gets strangled and mangled, and a message of “you are sad” becomes “you are bad” or “you are anxious” becomes “you are a freak and you will never feel at ease with anyone.”
Or maybe that was just me?
**
I ask my friend and professional translator, Martin Boyd about his work. Martin has a wide range of translation experience from legal documents, such as contracts and court pleadings, to academic articles, books, particularly in the field of film studies, and literary texts. I am curious about the process, the science of it, the art of it all. In Martin’s words:
“Translation is generally described as a three-part process, starting with deconstructing the source text, and ending with reconstructing the message of the source text in the target language. In between these two stages is a kind of mysterious middle stage where the core of the original message is distilled into something that can then be expressed in a completely different cultural context and with a different set of linguistic tools.
The post-colonialist theorist Gayatri Spivak describes translation as "the most intimate act of reading" a text. Often when we read, we skim over things we don't understand or sometimes our minds wander, and we miss details. But when you read to translate, nothing can be skimmed over and no detail can go unnoticed. I enjoy this aspect of delving into a text and examining it closely, because it reveals all kinds of interesting things about the text, about the author, about the culture and about language itself (especially if the text is very well written). This is what Spivak would call "surrendering to the text".”
Martin makes it oh-so clear. This is the act of the dance artist and also, spontaneously and involuntarily, the act of the audience. The translation of the dance into the language of their hearts. This language is made of metaphors without words: a movement standing in for an idea, for a feeling. A emotion standing in for another sensation. If I go down this sensational rabbit hole: do we ever see a tree, or only experience the translation of a tree which light and brain-processing gift us?
Martin continues,
“Different languages map different aspects of reality, and despite what Google Translate might suggest, there is no 1-to-1 equivalence between languages. Something is always lost, and something is always gained in any translation. Sometimes, the disconnect between languages is related to cultural differences, like the fact that Spanish has no word for "understatement" (Spanish speakers are simply never understated about anything), or that English has no equivalent expression for "pena ajena" (a feeling of embarrassment about somebody else's actions). Others are embedded in the grammar of the language, like person, gender and number structures, so that "Tiene tres hermanos" could mean "He has three brothers" or "She has three brothers" or "He/She has three siblings" or even "You have three brothers/siblings". This can be especially challenging when ambiguity is used deliberately in one language and the tools of the other language don't allow you to be ambiguous.”
Ambiguity: the land of contemporary dance….
Dance is both 100% abstract and 100% concretely human. We are not literally the things we are embodying, we are abstractions. But we are always ourselves while dancing: real living things. While this contradiction might seem confusing, I think the exquisite and prolific choreographer Jiri Kylian put it perfectly:
“I don’t think there is such a thing as abstract dance. Because if you put a human being on the stage who has feelings and loves and hates and has experiences and is made of blood and bones and skin and has a brain and a heart, what’s abstract about it? As far as I’m concerned in dance there is no abstraction whatsoever.” (From the documentary “Jiri Kylian: Forgotten Memories" 2011)
**
It is now July. I am in a studio at Toronto Dance Theatre where 25 years ago I was told I was not a good enough dancer and that I should find something else to do with my life. No matter how many years go by, the building still whispers this message to me. I am here rehearsing with Fujiwara Dance Inventions for our upcoming performances of “Moving Parts” – a work for 6 dancers, 2 musicians, 3 vocal soloists and a community choir -- which will be part of Dusk Dances in Hamilton and Toronto soon. I am thankful that we are rehearsing inside, as last week I undersunscreened and underhydrated myself during our outdoor rehearsals and wound up with sun poisoning: nauseous, dizzy and disoriented for 3 days.
My left Achilles tendon has been bothering me, but I did a ballet class before rehearsal and everything feels pretty good. We are working on a section with a lot of running and quick stops. I have a brief thought “I’m really killing it today!” And then a sudden burning sensation in my right Achilles tendon. I try to continue for two more steps, then drag myself to the side.
I take off my shoes, sobbing. Sylvie brings me arnica gel and an ice pack. I limp out to the hall and sit in the chair, outside the office where I was once asked to leave the School of Toronto Dance Theatre in 1998. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.
I have been lucky. During my career, I’ve had minor pulls and tears, odd swellings and burst blood vessels, but until now I have only had one big injury. In 2007 I broke my arm on stage, requiring 5 attempts to reset it properly, the last through surgery. While awaiting and after surgery, I went back to taking class and rehearsing with a cast and a sling.
But now both feet are injured. I have legs to stand on, but no feet to hold them up.
I shake this idea out of my head, put my shoes back on and slip into the rehearsal, back into the dancing. I know this is obsessive, but I can’t stop myself.
Denise, the choreographer, sends me to her chiropractor-acupuncturist, who tells me that I have strained both Achilles tendons: the left chronically (over time), my right acutely (the sudden stop-and-burn in today’s rehearsal). I am not allowed to run for at least three weeks, and I am not allowed to jump for at least six.
I walk slowly to the subway, in a fog, with Florence and the Machine pumping into my ears.
“I am the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change, I am the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change….” (Third Eye, Florence and the Machine)
I don't like to slow down. Who am I if I’m not the dancer that just keeps going? If I’m not the Energizer Bunny?
The next day Denise is kind and wonderful, allowing me to modify whatever choreography I need to support the injuries. Everything is a balance of ego and fear. I am afraid of making the injuries worse, afraid that I am letting down Denise and the other dancers, I am frustrated that my Energizer Bunny identity is being challenged. I have always felt my prime value in any dance project is that I will just keep going. What do I have to offer when I can't just keep pushing through?
**
It is now December. The 27th to be precise. The first day of a residency at the National Ballet of Canada through their Open Space program. I have five days of studio space – a total of 32 hours alone to work on ‘heartless’. This is my first return to the solo since my time in Wyoming. My goal: to relearn all the choreographic material from April and to figure out what order it all goes in. The work is episodic and non-chronological. I have choreographed a fragmented life for a creature who doesn’t know the order of its own events.
I am arriving for this first day straight from Point Pelee National Park. Every year at this time D and P and I go there to stay in the cabins with my sister, S, who works for the park. We have a campfire, drink too much hot chocolate with Baileys, and play board games until we are sleepy. This year, however, S ruptured her right Achilles tendon as she arrived at the campsite. We spent most of our two-day visit at the hospital. She’ll have a complicated and long recovery and it is a sad time of year to be in hospital. Needless to say, I’m worried.
I arrive at the studio underfed and overcaffeinated but determined to work until I just can’t anymore. Push through. Today is gray. In fact, every day I am here will be gray. The windows of the studio look out to Lakeshore Boulevard and fragments of the Gardiner Expressway. It is 10:30am but the dull winter light and the gray makes it seem a permanent 5pm.
First things first – warm up. Take care of those feet, Lucy. My Achilles tendons are both healed, but I am now obsessive about warming up my feet before every class and every rehearsal. Warm-up sparks an idea that I think will fill the gap, the missing part I felt after my process at Ucross in April. In all the episodes of this “heartless” creature, the body does extraordinary things, whether in war or confusion, whether confronting love or the audience, it always works the way is supposed to.
It has to break.
It has to fail.
**
Unlike the beautiful Lauren Anderson studio at Ucross, the equally beautiful Maestro Studio at the Walter Carsen Centre for the National Ballet of Canada is full of mirrors, with no curtain to cover them. I am confronted with my own image, barely a corner to go to where my image is not picked up by one reflective surface or another. I have spent most of my dance life finding the spot in a studio, for class or rehearsal, where I see myself the least. Usually, it is the corner furthest from the door and/or closest to the piano. I love being in line with the reverberations of the piano, and a piano is pretty good mirror-block.
Alone in a studio full of mirrors today, there is nowhere to look, when looking, except at myself.
When I was younger, I was always the biggest dancer in the room. Everyone I danced with was about 5’4”, with tiny feet and waists, and at 5’8” and built like a two-by-four, I felt like an oaf– in dance and in life. This mental picture has grown over time, maybe because I have spent so many hours in dance studios alone and avoiding mirrors. I see myself as 6 feet tall and about 200 lbs. Image and self-image are translations. Neither is reality.
Seeing myself translated now in the mirrors at the National Ballet of Canada, I am surprised by how tiny I am, my general smallness in this large room. There is so much space around me and supporting me. What a relief.
As I continue to warm up, I think of the landscapes in Wyoming last spring – so much space around me there as well. I suspect that “heartless” has something to do with pushing into the space, moving the space around me, more it has to do with moving the space within me. Where am I in all this space? Can I make an impression? Can I leave a trail of afterglow?
**
CHOREOGRAPHIC NOTES
Review. Remember. Investigate. Brainstorm.
The broken body task – keep all limbs in the same state of bent-ness while trying to stand up.
Breaking down isn’t just a new section, it is an approach to all the existing choreographic material. I need to free up, splinter, and question the choreography, now that the subject matter is even clearer. “heartless” is a humanoid creature. It’s not me, it’s not not-me. It’s not a robot, it’s not a sophisticated AI. I don’t know what she is, and I like that. The static between self and self-knowledge is a very intriguing place, like Martin’s two languages, one with ambiguity, one without, attempting to have a conversation through a mirror. “heartless” is a little uncanny: big eyes, fast walk, tics and flow, sensitive wiring that sometimes overheats, sends out electric shocks or melts the insides.
Does this describe her or me?
TO DO:
Break down the order of things.
Break down my desire to make a logic out of it.
Break down to see more.
Break down to hear more.
I am so incredibly tired. I spend half an hour relearning the “neural network” section of "heartless" only to realize I have relearned the “wooden pigeon” section. I don’t even mistake one for the other, I just lose my mind while walking ten steps from my notebook to my starting place. I lie on the floor laughing at my stupidity. I am a mess – sweaty, grimy, hungry, dishevelled. Time to pack up and go home.
This is actually a pretty good start to the week.
**
It is now February. I don’t know what’s happening. The floor meets my foot in a time-space continuum that makes no sense. A shudder of pain through my right foot. The brain says “keep moving, don’t stop”.
Foot to floor. SLAM.
What’s happening? What happened? I don’t understand.
I walk home in pouring rain, limping, but trying to hide the limp. I am doing all I can to hold it together as I pass the neighbours, the stores and the construction workers who are daily on my route. I walk into my back yard, soaked through, assuming that my laptop and my boots are destroyed by the rain. I unzip the boots from my feet, throw them in our garbage bin, walk sock-footed through the muddy yard and up the stairs to the back door. I don’t even stop to say hello to the dear feral cats who live in a little wooden house on our porch.
I am a flood of tears and madness. I think I have broken a metatarsal bone and walking home has just finished my career. This is my second foot injury in under a year, after years with nothing worse than bruises and floor burns. After a shower, more crying, and more limping, I check my email and receive a double whammy of not one but two grant application rejections for my company’s 20th anniversary celebration production that is supposed to happen in the fall.
I don’t know how to do this. Any of it. I’m finished.
No feet. No funding. No performance.
**
My gut and the heart have been screaming since July, “YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DANCING!” Something about this age, this now, I feel it in my veins. I am supposed to be dancing now more than any other time in my life.
Zeroes and ones. A gap and a presence. Inhale, exhale. Always moving, but with close, tiny stops. It’s on or off, but also onoffonoffonoffonoff. I feel the flow of math through the space around me. I can’t see it, but my limbs fit into it. I need music because it creates the waves, it startles the air even in gentility. Nothing is inevitable, the 0s and 1s have both free will and no will at all. They dissolve the target. They translate the fear into two digits.
0 1
When I was younger, making my first solos – in my basement with my mom’s classical LPs, or in the meeting room on the ground floor of my dorm in 1st year university, or in the 4 x 4 space available in my first bachelor apartment in Toronto -- every move I made was about my insecurities. Lack of flexibility, over-musicality, the very deep feelings always riding the surface of my skin. Every move asked “do you like me?....could you love me?....am I good enough?”
When I watch videos of work from my early days, I feel how I felt back then. I cringe, and I can’t stop cringing, like a muscle spasm.
01010101010101010101010
I used to blank on the choreography all the time back then.
00000000
I got good at improvising through it, but blanking was harrowing and disheartening. While I strive for vulnerability in performance, constant self-criticism while performing takes you out of the moment, you drop the thread while attending to the ego. Yet staying present, truly present, is hard.
11111111
Except for my concussion and when I ran into a tree on my bike – both caused by an ambitious, self-destructive streak -- all my accidents and injuries have been caused by not being present. A broken arm, strained achilles, torn hamstrings, jammed (thankfully, not broken) metatarsal, falling up an escalator, falling down flights of stairs (at least a dozen times in my life) -- all caused by a flicker of self-analysis: thinking about what comes next or about what just happened.
Choreographing now, I load the choreography with impossible tasks so that I don’t have space to think “Am I doing this right? Does the audience like me?” because I am constantly failing at managing the details I have prescribed for myself.
For a perfectionist this kind of failing is a glorious freefall. All you have to do is persevere. And you are perfect at it. My friend – and a fantastic performer – Miko Sobreira used to joke, “I’m so present I’m absent.” Impossible and irresistible.
0000
1111
0000
1111
In “heartless” I have built many such impossible challenges:
2. Get up from the floor without changing the relationship between all points in the body (1010)
3. Speak only the consonants of song X and trace the form of the four chambers of the heart on the floor, while body flows to song Y (00 11 110)
4. Don’t make sense of any of it (000000000)
5. Know all of this but don’t know what’s coming next (1 0)
6. The greatest challenge of all: admit all of this to the audience (1)
The result is that I am so preoccupied with trying and failing at these tasks, I have no room to wonder what the audience is experiencing. I know that I couldn’t possibly have managed performing this way as a younger artist. It takes time to be brave in this way. It is a tempering of my desire to reorganize the kindergarten shoes in the cubby holes, it is an embracing of all the possible patterns simultaneously. Instead of spilling and spewing and trying to be alluring, the struggle is more real. Rather than illustrations, the dances are now the act of illustrating. And the longer I spend trying to make sense of it all, the less time I have to do it. So, let’s just do it. I’ve crossed an age-threshold where suddenly the electric field is hardwired to my brain. So many languages still to translate, so many movements still to unfurl.
1111111111111111111111111111111…
The clock struck one.
The mouse and the clock are running down.
**
At one point in my life, my parents called me mouse. I remember being about 4, sitting on the gray-painted stairs to our basement with my mother calling for me “Mouse! Mouse?” This is a lovely memory.
I was very shy and would scurry away from people or literally hide behind my mother’s skirt. The first adult I trusted, other than my parents, was Bill Clarke, a birdwatching friend of my dad’s, but old enough to be my grandfather. The first time I met him he offered me his hand and I immediately took it and walked with him down a trail at Point Pelee National Park, off to spot some spring warblers. I don’t remember this moment and only my sister remains to vouch for its veracity, but this too is a lovely memory.
There was a wonderful mouse who daily passed through the warehouse space D and I lived in when we were first together. Mouse never stole our food or chewed through any wires, but one day he paused to stare at the TV. The Superbowl was on. Mouse watched for a full 30 seconds before scurrying on his way. That’s .000095% of the average city mouse’s life, the equivalent of .0000011% of the average Canadian woman’s life.
**
CHOREOGRAPHIC NOTES
How the body fails us
**
“In a sense, translating may be harder than writing original fiction because a translator must strive to satisfy the same aesthetic demands while being subjected to much more restrictive creative constraints.” Ken Liu, from the Translator’s Postscript of Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem”
I have struggled over the past few years to clearly communicate my artistic vision, including my fascination with science, in a way that satisfies people. I wonder if I should leave my inspirations out of the public explanations of what I do. I’m exhausted by trying to explain that I’m not making dance that depicts science, I’m not making dance that explains science. I’m trying to put art and science on the same level through rigorous experimentation with beautiful parameters and equations, expressions of our experience of reality. Between science and art, one does not explain more about the world than the other. Just as a chemist might take apart the constituents of a painting – pigments, minerals, plant matter – as choreographer, I take apart the constituents of a scientific theory or natural law: behaviour, force, momentum, radiance. I translate the parameters of the science that inspires me into the limitations of a bipedal organism. My body understands relativity and entanglement and the heat death model for the end of the universe in ways I cannot put into words.
At this tender age, I am starting to revel in my awkwardness and learning to understand the odd ways my brain works. I want to keep learning. I am ambitious but not competitive (except at Scrabble and tag). I don’t want to play King-of-the-Mountain. I want to share my art as widely as I can. I want to make a living as an artist without self-commodifying. You might argue that this is impossible, and that may be true in some sense, but I can control how I think of myself.
**
And the words are all escaping and coming back all damaged
And I would put them back in poetry if I only knew how
I can't seem to understand it
And I would give all this and heaven too
I would give it all if only for a moment that I could just understand
The meaning of the word you see ‘cause I've been scrawling it forever
But it never makes sense to me at all…
(Florence and the Machine, All This And Heaven Too)
This dancework I’m making, this “heartless” thing, is a translation and an admission: I have never known how to communicate with anyone. Words and ideas straggle along behind me. I constantly re-evaluate what I have said, what I should have said, what I shouldn’t have said. I analyze it for hours, weeks, years. I plot absurd apologies. I agonize over words in their afterlives. I hope these words decay from others’ memories quicker than they do from mine.
Perhaps this is why ‘heartless’ feels like the most vulnerable dance I have made. It is crafted as a specific “being” and by her being not-me it is more me than ever. I am a babelfish of movement, interpreting through my body the waves and fields of energy in the world around me. But for the things that fall out of my mouth I still need a translator.
**
I have another residency and then a performance run for “heartless” coming soon. Deadlines have fired up this mouse. I paused, like our warehouse mouse, distracted by colour and light and crashing bodies of American football. I doubted for a moment. But I have more impossible tasks to do. The clock is running, but it’s not running out.
copyright Lucy Rupert 2024
Comments