BODY AND SOUL: devynn emory: dancing in the liminal

devynn emory on set for Grandmother Cindy, 2022 (photo: Reilly Horan)

emory with bronzed skin, dark black faded hair stands in their grandmother's warm fuzzy coat covered in polar bears looking directly at the camera while clasping their hands in anticipation of the performance beginning soon. behind them is a silver sterile table with bowls of medicine placed in preparation, their performer/collaborator Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) and their cinematographer Jorge Cousineau. two figures draped in yellow fabric hold the space, representing devynn's ancestors.

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There's no reason to build a wall of labels around devynn emory and their work in this world and between worlds. They care for body, spirit, and community in a multitude of ways--from nursing to choreography, from mediumship to bodywork, from writing to work with death and grieving. This rich interweaving of skills and services sounds strange only in a society that deliberately separates body and soul and fails to respect the multiplicity of ways of knowing and healing. devynn, however, stays attuned to ancient ways and what the land teaches.

Listen to their segment on Body and Soul podcast here.

Subscribe to Body and Soul for more.

Read below to learn more about devynn.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

 

devynn emory filming Cindy Sessions: LAND on the lands of the Serrano peoples

 

BIO: devynn emory is a choreographer/dance artist, dual-licensed bodyworker, ritual guide, medium and registered nurse- practicing in the fields of acute/critical care, hospice, COVID and integrative health. emory's performance company devynnemory/beastproductions finds the intersection of these fields, walking the edges of thresholds–drawing from their multiple in-between states of being, holding space for liminal bodies bridging multiple planes of transition, finding reciprocity practice as a constant decolonial practice. they are currently working on a trilogy centering medical mannequins holding the wisdom of end-of-life experiences. (deadbird + can anybody help me hold this body, 2021, Cindy Sessions: Grandmother Cindy + Cindy Sessions LOVE, LOSS, LAND 2022, boiling-rain tbd). emory is a research group fellow at danspace 2020-2023, a recipient of the Onassis Eureka award, an FCA emergency grant recipient, and an Art Matters Artist2Artist fellow. born on Lenape Land, emory is a reconnecting descendant of mixed Lenape/Blackfoot/settler ancestry. www.devynnemory.com

Maria Bauman sweats truths of life, rest, dying, freedom

Cast of Maria Bauman's dying and dying and dying
l-r: Bauman, Audrey Hailes, Valerie Ifill and Courtney Cook
not shown: Alicia Raquel
(photo: Scott Shaw)

At the close of dying and dying and dying--the new work by Maria Bauman (MBDance), just opened at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--my guest, another Black woman, turned and asked me to verify the words of a particular line of text. Was it, she wanted to know, I have the right to die a natural death? How interesting that she should pick up on that particular line.

A few weeks ago, Bauman's Open Studio preview made me think about the history of Black death in the Americas, so much of it anything but natural. A history of dying dominated by brutal violence or illness due to poverty, due to lack of healthcare access or access to malignant care. A history of final moments that could have been solemn, sacred, even exalted, but where many Black bodies suffered hard deaths, in some cases, experienced profound dishonoring that should be no one's fate. These are endings of lives lived in the zone of an undeclared war.

I also flashed back to the title of Melvin Van Peebles's 1970s musical, Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, and Audre Lorde's line from her poem "Litany for Survival": "So it is better to speak/remembering/We were never meant to survive."

In this context, the assertion, "I have the right to die a natural death," takes on power and poignancy. And the same can be said for Bauman's expressive ensemble piece.  More than a few times, she and Courtney Cook, Valerie Ifill and Audrey Hailes, all circling an assemblage of ancestral memorabilia with warm, graceful, exuberant movement and vocal work, drop to the floor and lie still long enough for us to wonder what just happened. These sudden, decisive breaks in the flow evoke yoga's Savasana pose (corpse pose), a cessation of motion that allows bodymind time to absorb and integrate the energies of its previous actions.

Bauman aims to reorder what we value in life, to give space and time to rest, to surrender, to lying fallow, now and again, like a patch of good, growing earth, as we regenerate energy needed for the future. In her view, key to the purposefulness of that humble rest is the space and time to listen for and take in what our ancestors have to offer us. And that is why this piece--her "performance-ritual" and "earnest offering" with spoken word performances by Alicia Raquel--continually takes its strength from all of those treasured artifacts and photos of departed loved ones in the center of the space.

Try to imagine a viable way to introduce the notion of "death as the opposite of capitalism," a task Bauman sets for herself in dying and dying and dying. Video work and some mechanistic movement and aggression between Bauman and Cook do evoke the capitalism part, showing the women as having fallen prey to toxic, destructive values. But I'm still not completely convinced that death as a metaphor for needed rest will work for many people outside of a yoga class. It's a tricky conceptual leap for most. (When Death turns up in Tarot layouts, readers like me do quite a bit of verbal tap dancing to allay most querents' immediate fear.) But I do think dying and dying and dying succeeds in its accessible humanity and especially when dancers draw in, embody and ferociously release the personalities and energies of those whose bodies are now permanently still, at peace.

Bauman is Gibney Dance’s 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence and has also received Gibney Dance’s Beth Silverman-Yam Social Action Award. Go a little early, and you can enjoy Bauman and Cook's gallery memorial, To Rest, while you wait for the theater to open. The exhibition will be up through September 22.

dying and dying and dying continues tonight and Saturday at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Filmmaker Livingston looks at death and loss

We do everything we can to avoid addressing the human fact of impermanence and death. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennie Livingston (Paris is Burning), who lost several close family members within a handful of years, now turns her storytelling skills towards her own experience of loss in Earth Camp One.

Livingston has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to complete her film. In her appeal, she wrote:

"...I’m all for films that encourage people to act. But it’s surprising that just as social media and the blogosphere are revitalizing first-person storytelling (in ways that run from irritating to brilliant), first-person stories, in film, are a tremendous challenge to make. Companies, foundations, and investors fear that a work that’s “personal” is, by definition, not relevant to audiences or to broader social goals. In this way, film is trailing behind both conventional and Internet publishing; as when, thirty years ago, a memoir not written by a movie star or president was unlikely to find a publisher. Back then, the literary and commercial successes of best-selling memoirs by authors like Dave Eggers and Marjane Satrapi were unimaginable."

More cheekily, she posted this on her Facebook page:

"What is more cool than a film about impermanence and death?!!! Isn't that why 13 year old boys wear shirts with skulls???"

Learn more about Earth Camp One and support it on its Kickstarter page.

Music Therapy Helps the Dying

Music Therapy Helps the Dying
by Suzanne DeChillo, The New York Times, July 3, 2011

Liberate your soul

Krissy Keefer of Dance Brigade
(photo by Anastacia Powers Cuellar)

San Francisco's feminist troupe

Dance Brigade

presents

THE GREAT LIBERATION UPON HEARING

 

at Dance Theater Workshop 

Thursday-Friday, July 7-8 (7:30pm)

Saturday, July 9 (2pm and 7:30pm)

Writer/director/choreographer Krissy Keefer, called a "rabble-rouser" by the San Francisco Weekly, has turned to the Tibetan Book of the Dead for her unique new work, performed by a group of 12 including a taiko drummer. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose actual title is "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State" or "Bardo Thodol," acts as a guide for the dead during the state that intervenes death and the next rebirth. It is read aloud to the dead while they are in the state between death and reincarnation in order for them to attain liberation.

Founded in 1984, the feminist group Dance Brigade engages diverse communities and artists in their multicultural, multi-media dance/theater works. At home, in San Francisco, they operate the Dance Mission Theater, support the dance company, produce a series of annual events showcasing both emerging and established Bay Area choreographers, and conduct dance programs for adults and youth. For more information, click here.

For reservations, call 212-924-0077 or click here.

Dance Theater Workshop

219 West 19th Street (between 7th & 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(map and directions)

When you're ready to move beyond Oprah...

The gorgeous, always imaginative Rubin Museum of Art is well into a series of seven Wednesday evening conversations called Tibetan Book of the Dead Book Club in association with its special exhibitions, Bardo: Tibetan Art of the Afterlife and Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures. Each Wednesday, curator Ramon Prats explores the TBD from different perspectives with an expert representing a particular discipline. They inquire: Does the TBD have relevance, wisdom and practical application for us today?

This week, I attended Prats's talk with Jungian psychoanalyst Morgan Stebbins on "The Analysis of Dreams," a topic of perennial relevance. According to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs, dreams will always be relevant as long as humans exist, as long as humans remain unenlightened. Enlightened beings do not dream. They no longer have to, for to dream is to open onto an altered level of awareness in which we come face to face with avoided, unknown or normally inaccessible issues.

Stebbins discussed how Tibetan ideas and traditions around this heightened state of awareness parallels the theories and practices of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung's psychoanalytic approach, he said, represents a journey into the "totality of one's being--the Buddha nature" where one can gain information on unconscious patterns of behavior, insight into so-called symptoms that are actually "symbolic attempts to get to somewhere new." Dreams herald a shift towards liberation.

And the TBD considers this liberation through hearing, as Prats mentioned, in his intriguing introductory remarks. Why hearing, I wondered? One sentence from a TBD passage read later suggested the reason: "So, recognize what I show you without distraction." We are simply too distracted by illusion to get with reality. Like children in school, we have to be brought to attention and made to hear. The Bardo afterlife process, Tibetan Buddhists believe, first brings the soul to that required place of attention and learning before it can move on in its journey. But dreams offer powerful opportunities for growth within our lifetime.

And what of the images of deities of wrath, featured in so much Tibetan art? And what of our own terrifying nightmares?

"Psychologically speaking, nightmares are great news," says Stebbins. "Wake up! Look at this! It has a lot of energy. You have a lot of energy you're not using. Change is scary."

Upcoming TBD Book Club sessions will feature Rabbi Neil Gillman on "The Death of Death" (July 28), Brooklyn Museum curator Edward Bleiberg on "The Egyptian Book of the Dead" (August 11), medium Jesse Bravo on "Channeling the Dead" (August 18) and Roshi Enkyo O'Hara on "How to Die" (August 25)--all at 7pm. Click here for full information and tickets, and promptness--in both ticket purchasing and showing up to get a good seat--is strongly advised.

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan

Directions

Speaking from the heart

Off Broadway Play ‘Let Me Down Easy’ Tackles Issues of Death
by Gina Kolata, The New York Times, November 9, 2009