i land here, in and out of my element.

i replace myself and the world here seems not right.

there is too much lacking and not enough at all.

i slip in, i choose a gap, i think of reading de Certeau on the verandah of french colonial house as the afternoon rain rolled in.

i recall feeling alive. this is the difference. animated, animated, at the edge of my fingertips and covering me - life. 

in seventy nights, plus 70 nights, what will remain what will remain. 

sometimes things happen and nothing is as it was before. everything has changed. i end and begin at once in a new land.

Tuesday the 6^th September. KL airport. 

Now, I have left. It is always amazing to me how simple that transaction is and how huge it feels on the inside. Body relocate. Sensate relocate. On Saturday night I slept under white net to the sound of wind across fields and small creatures of the night. Today I am drowning in the noise of others.

In the early morning air I woke and left. On the skyline groups of people exercise at Olympic stadium, I see a yellow jumper saying have a fun bumper rabbit day motor past me, the world floods in and I try to take it in, as much as I can. It is always the last moments of things I wish to savour…always the last breath, the smallest capture of fine things to put in storage.  [ULTIMA vez].

I watch an interview on the plane with a writer. She says it is like that. When things become impossible, just beyond or behind you with a slight that you miss them already. The beauty is in the impossibility of that slighted moment of realising.

‘She’ also says loss and absence are the same thing, and loss and love.

I had my fortune told in a Khmer rice bar, by Ilah the Israeli, who learnt to read cards in Thailand. [It was a Sunday night. He laid the cards out on a red cloth, placed diagonally across table. He spoke in a tone not unlike a fortune-teller in a movie. It is his natural way, a bit shifty and gentle. He sees he sees].

I walked in a temple overgrown with magical trees.

I cried for the filthy feet bodie’s hands hair and eyes housing a particular pain that look at me.

I laughed at the ridiculousness of dance and questioned my intentions.

I watched children work in a garbage dump, a brick factory, a coconut corner.

I saw the details every day, and tried to make a list in my mind of it all: to see and to remember, to see and to remember.

I watched myself watching.

It is in the fingerless gloves on bikes, pyjamas in the daytime with high heels, small man perched on edge of moto seat: like a bird on an egg, balancing on the edge with huge load behind.

I watched some cows and observed people eating organs in soup.

I drank coffee with ice and sweet milk and walked through the building, a slum.

I trapsed in the rain more than once and again, and raced through a storm into black sky.

I did not eat spiders, I did not eat ants, I did not eat black duck foetus egg but I did buy a one dollar pink raincoat.

I slept on a hard and unbalanced bed, I walked into history, I saw Angkor in every turn and listened to funeral songs and wedding songs and songs for the ice cream man churn across sky. I considered how silk worms work and thread is made, and how people weave and sing and fix til it can be fixed no more. I fascinated at my daily drinking in, and wondered what it must be like to wake each day inside a house with no air that opens onto a street with no air. I watched people at an embassy desperately plea to be heard, and a girl sell her services in early afternoon light, at the foot of stair, leading up to Buddha.

I watched as Buddha – his eyes, his heart, his praying people, filters through it all. And then I watched as that became an excuse. I watched the rich pretend it was not happening and the government not care. And I saw people dance and learn and evolve. And I saw their voices take shape, find wings, and set off.

And now, it remains there and I am here; between then and now and heading for a tomorrow in a different land.

What is the lesson?

The weight of it all?

How much does a life weigh?

How do we, responsibly, bare witness to it all?

What will my response be and how long will it take to land?

 

What is the song for tonight? It is an important choice, a song for end and beginning to end.

I feel already that I have not been here and there and there.

I rode a white horse around the world.

I found freedom and speech and bits of discarded writing. I found corrupted politicians eating off the loss of a people. I found a woman with one long brown glove and pink pyjamas who made me food and gave it to me in a small white container.

And –

Lately I saved myself. It was a big fall but I have pulled myself clear. It is that kind of song. Songs of despair and vulgarity and pitch perfect arrival in the world. It is the song that Pov sang at the end of our work. It is that song that summed it, as they say, up.

Later –

We all sit on couch and laugh and chat. It is brilliant, in the most simple way.

This burning world.

What did you see sings Bob and what did you hear?

Maybe, she says, I will write my own song.

This hot earth. Underrepresented people. Thin white lines. So very very thin. Everything is collapsing dear.

At 6am I was in the early air of morning, amongst the street. 6pm and I am  - gone - drowning in other people’s noise. Sudden disjuncture. 

 

What remains my dear? 

We are dancing here. yes yes yes. And taking breakfast in busy local restaurants in traditional outfits (ha) and doing our own version of flash mobbing in the backalleys of Phnom Penh. And filming the ride, and being told not to film by police, and filming that. And exercising on a boiling hot morning in costume and in a public exercise park. Marvellous. Liver in breakfast soup and parts of stomach. Marvellous. Chaser is iced coffee with condensed milk. ah. We are dancing in here and the butt butt maintains a stead pulse...old meets new, meets unknown, meets impossible, meets fear and transcendence, meets meets meet. butt butt butt....images keep colliding and I wish for an ability to stockpile all of it. How to bottle it? Impossible. OK. 

This morning the first t shirt i see on motodop is 'smiling in cambodia'. nice. thank you. no camera on hand and small boy riding standing in front of father, holding onto the handlebars as he soars into the cool morning air. 

Less than two weeks remain. On the count down, this is always when that big stretch of time seems over in a small blink of eye. 

 

It is Sunday. There is breeze here on the balcony. Life is wonderful and terrible, as per each day. It feels like Sunday and I like that. This week, images only...and a story of racing through rain toward and then away from a black black sky. Drowning in a pink rain coat. PLaSTic $1 get up. LIberated from all expectation, desire, need and knowing in the moment of flying through flooded streets and feeling the rain in my eyes. A wonder. No, not everyone lives like this, and not everyday can you experience such wonder. amen to that. 

I begin the countdown to one. An interviewer asks John Cage if Time flies.....does it? He says. indeed. only if we measure it. 

 

Today in Cambodia: ‘holy cowboys’ are a headline in the Phnom Penh post. Kind of perfect.

A song plays into the early morning, unexpected, and sends me to another place : a boat between turkey and an island : an afternoon on white water : back in Cambodia and awaiting a morning coffee.

China is in the news, Pakistan, Libya.  Afghanistan, ‘grease devils’ in Sri Lanka, nuclear partners and Russia and Iran. Phew. The world continues to blow itself up and wage wars and child malnutrition rises, and we live in all the small gaps.

And I have lunch and I see the same pair of children I see almost everyday. Brother ad sister? No idea. And she – filthy and beautiful – says to me, it is not fair. And in that moment I say to her I know, it is not fair, oh how I know. And yet how can I possibly? I want to gather her up and rescue her. I sip my ice tea as they return to the street. Today it is not hot. Good news. And, today in my own life it feels not fair, (I hear you small sister) then I see her and realise it really is not fair.

: the world song for today:

 

Small voice. Large world.

I could cry. Again. Here a daily waging of life against life. A pact made with the powers that be to ‘do better’ because I can.  

Today (Saturday) we had a breakthrough. I say with exclamation. It was a bit great. It is 18.19pm. And I finish Reiki in the dark and the rain. 

The back of my head – my 7^th chakra has much energy. My front brain has none. I am so tired sometimes.

Today I was looking for some opera as leak rolled and Belle drew around him.

Now I find it, in the rain, and in my clean room with cool air.

I recall Finland and Mats Ek and the most wonderful piece I have ever seen. No idea what it was called. ha. 

Outside this door is much heavy air. And slowly the rain she falls. And love waits in the desert. 

We had a breakthrough. A small surge up through clouds. I felt like I was seeing something for the first time.

We improvised. A nice long chunk of it.

I am trying to see what is already there, to not impose dance on a space but to let it slide right in.

5,6,7,8 no longer has any purchase with me. time for the new. red lanterns and deer heads and fluoro plastic buddhas.

I want to see imagination and beauty and madness altogether. one wild ride. I want to see colour and physicality, inside an elastic structure. like the acropolis in the rain. 

Be who you are. Dance and considered dance.

To consider what I need to do to be brave as I ask of the dancers the same thing. This is about all of us you see.

Yes, I want to free myself from what I think I should make, and move toward the thing I imagine, on the edges of my brain and heart brain that I can barely glimpse. That is the thing I want to capture. Cage says he only puts music in where there is music already. 

 

ALSO

This week we learned how to jump. And run and fly. It was a good week. The work spreads out and we can be both wild with it and specific.  

yes. we started on a rooftop. today. perfect. 

I work with Davy who dances from a such a pure place. Not sure what else to call it. I can watch her for a long time because she listens with great attention. She is Cambodian. She is 26. She lives in a small place with a large family. she always wears matching outfits. today was a purple suit.

I again think on the motivation for movement and wonder how much we are affected/effected by the environments we move through pre dance and post dance. 

I write this:

It is dirty on the floor and she wears small stocking socks on her feet. they have lace on their edges. outside the sunrise ( as she calls it) and a man who plays a radio. street below us. sending up only parts of its sounds. there is small announcing on a megaphone and I think of all the war movies i have ever seen and remember a train in India in mid of night, woken to a similar megaphone, thinking I am somewhere in Eastern Europe. no i am in india. no i am in cambodia. time accumulates and spreads thinly across my remembering. she listens to the song of the world from the heart (kunyum sop baii chet....in bad phonetics) means: I am happy - from the heart. I learn this last night. I lean into this thinking. she tells me to stop, she tells herself. small walks forward. hmm. her small stockinged feet are dirty now. white large tiles. square. 'yes' she says.

the wind it passes through this quiet rooftop dance. i recall a friend talking  late at night in roadside bar in spain of the necessity of monks meditating in caves. to save the world she said. quiet to balance the lack of. and sometimes i think we dancers, we are part of some quietness in the gaps between and it is necessary, all this sensing. to balance out the lack of it.

and so, i think, we are the only ones who know we are doing this. below us, life at rapid and not so rapid pace. 

Cowgirls and renegades and retro shops in Phnom Penh. 

Music from an age before Pol Pot was magical and golden and filled with much flourishing and love stories and bells and a type of welcome to Texas feel. 

We talked about ideas happening simultaneously on the planet. About who owns it. What of then, a time when people had no idea or ability to know what was happening (from Cambodia to America) and yet...some uncanny mad sameness. Or, as the t - shirt says - 'same same but different' ($2 bucks in multiple colours, from any number of streetside seller). Bravo. 

This week we will learn line dancing and I will keep trying to wonder and explain how and why images of seeming absurdity land in my head here, while thinking on what (the hell) contemporary dance may be is is not claims to wants to be.