my battery is pure love

 OGRES OF LIFE: Serge Bennathan and the original cast of “Chronicles of Simple Life” written and compiled by Lucy Rupert FIRST STEPS “Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal.” Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy of the Flesh, p. 6) Meaning is embodied. This is true for the meanings found by the dancer and by the audience member. Dance strives to reveal something to the audience, perhaps something they didn’t realize they needed to know. In the best situations, this audience experience happens viscerally and invisibly. On November 5, 1993, as a second-year student pursuing a Joint Honours bachelor’s degree in dance and music at the University of Waterloo, I had my first visceral and invisible experience as a dance audience member: Chronicles of a Simple Life, choreographed by Serge Bennathan and performed by the Dancemakers company at the Hu...

  photo by Zahra Saleki day in the life  The best days begin the morning after a busy day when the body is too exhausted to be self-aware and the exhaustion feels hard-earned in a very satisfying way. Most days begin with a mental journey, like putting your body through the x-ray machine at the airport. Parts of you go in the bin that travels on the conveyer belt through the machine, the rest of you walks hesitantly through the stand-alone arch. You wait to hear the beeping and then take stock: what caused the alarm? It might seem like it’s your foot but your pelvis is actually cause the source of the alarm. The root of the pain. Feet unfurl and uncurl by the time you get to the bottom of the stairs. You make coffee and feed the feral cats and then check the agenda. What is happening today? Are you in charge of directing yourself all day, organizing your training, yourself, your plans? Or are you reporting to someone else? (It’...

 Blue Ceiling dance is at Montgomery's Inn! I'm dancing "ice age" -- a 20 minute solo work 18 times inside this historic site and museum as part of Toronto Arts Council's Animating Historic Sites program. "ice age" runs Sat/Sun August 10, 11, 17, 18 and 24, 25 at 1230pm, 2pm and 330pm. The first two performances each day are in the Assembly Room and the third is in the fully accessible Tea Room. Entrance to the museum and the performance is free! More performances at Montgomery's Inn are coming in November -- including a creek hike led by Museum staff! "Ice age" was  made for specifically for Montgomery's Inn, and to celebrate the natural history of the area rather than its colonial history. The piece is about the geological, hydrological history of the rivers and creeks in this area stretching back to the last local ice, approximately 12000 years ago. Here I'm sharing some of the public images I found showing how water worked its w...

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.  photo by Zahra Saleki ** When I was a teenager, my dear friend Kevin sa...

part one by Lucy Rupert for D and P, always. for Badie, David, Edan, Esperanza, Josh, Jovia, June, Patrice, and Yuki, with whom I shared time and space at the Ucross Artist Residency program in April 2023. And for Tawni, who understood the song. ** I fly through utter blackness. On one of those small planes that seats 50 people, the depth of the blackness is vivid. I am passing through a portal. Who knows what is on the other side? Well, most of the other people on the plane know. This is their daily commute. But for me it is flying into a myth. ** I am nervous. I am running. I am obsolete. I am stumbling. I am a calculator. I am a bird watcher. I am perpetual motion. I am an elevated heart rate. I am scared that I am not enough. I am full of love. ** I am sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for Tawni, the Ucross Artists’ Residency  Manager. I am allowing the almost nothing that is happening to be profoundly something. I eat scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee at the compliment...