Three Thoughts on Moving
BY ERICA PISARCHUK WILSON
Note: These poems were first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2024 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.
P O S I T I O N
What is a chair
Take away earth it cannot be sat
On
It looks dependable
But as we sit
We fold back opposite
Of standing walking running leaping
For an angular sitting begets
Crouching crawling slithering;
We fold into right angles
To slouch into slumps
Smashing our asses
Splaying our flesh.
A chair is logical
We know how it works.
Children don’t.
They “sit” tipped
Their feet free and their head sideways
Tilted, arms dangling
Or underneath.
It is not obvious to them
Right angles are
Our cities, grids.
But trees grow
Circular
And look what we do with its limbs.
A Chair is
A thin illusion from
Halfway
Falling.
A chair certainly looks like a chair
But it was once a tree
Its legs following
The logic of the grid-math
Perpendicularly.
We are how we move
And as we crease our joints
We cease our thought
Acquiescing to stillness.
The chair is only as reliable
As gravity is provable
Which is not at all.
What if we were once trees
Still and without joints?
Now our joints make
Ninety degrees.
It is settling and habitual
Function and reliability
And the deadening of ideas.
The end of movement.
As seats become cozier
Pleasurable
But not wholly ergonomic
(Not all the way functional).
Unless ninety is split and flipped
And flipped again
Might we circle around
And see the other side
Flip around over
Underside,
But
Minds and eyes transfix on screens
Bodies become sinkable
Like roots turned soft with water running
Still
Through them
Our veins and cells will slide off
The Chair
Circling around to the ground
We will decompose
Like all the rest.
If effort has made us stand upright
Surely the Chair is antithetical
To us.
My advice:
Next time you sit down
Sit differently.
~~
W E I G H T
She said,
“Your feet are in your hands.”
The start of it sounds like
Slow sliding high
Lilting
A muffled shade of a teal maybe
Gray
Washed across the room, seamless…
It runs into the legs of a double stag
I could have jumped
Only I tripped twice rolling back
And stumbling again
Till riding atop
Like rolling lumber logs
Lumbar loll
Down an apathetic hill
Till there is nowhere left
Down to go
Merely slightly slanted
Made of nonplussed soft grass
Dull moss and damp dirt –
They are not the floor
But soft spots as one should land –
Then a sneaking tapping
Like a persistent poke
An anxious thought
On the mind
It picks up pace
An incline
It feeds your state
Rolling uncontrolled
(What level stages no longer do.
If stages were inclined like the past
I might roll into the audience’s lap).
I am becoming my intended state:
An emotion
Unrehearsed
Caught off-guard
The body goes where it must
Not choreographed or practiced
But alert
Movements may be remembered
And the rest
Improv.
The hill stays noncommittal.
I am
Round log
Tumbling
Mounds
From the ground
A door here
A no there
An injury
A surgery
Steps
One
In front of
The other.
Ten years till I step into a Studio
Till either end tumbles differently
One higher another lower
Suspending then thudding alternately
My either ends of body opposite
Up to down
Thudding like what feels like
An increasing self-imposed momentum.
I’ve stopped calling it dance.
The journey to extremes is fast
The climb back is slow.
Relevè.
Stay.
Exhale
Slow down the seesaw
Between high and low
Slackline spine on a tilted floor
A back and forth mind
No decision.
Expect the throw
To an opposite way
Rebound
Balance
Balancé
~~
S O U N D
A simple bass grounds an endless arpeggio
Triples and sixes inside of eights
Circling around the room –
A spinning top –
The ears dizzy and aligned
In repeating revolution
Major notes place the floor underneath
But small “minor” influences tilt
You
Your head pitched
Slightly off-balance.
There isn’t a beginning
It merely gets louder
There isn’t a middle
There isn’t an end
Just digression
Deconstruction
Till something else –
Distraction –
Hello Thursday work
Day before Friday
Before weekend:
Drive to work, eat, lunch, nap in car
Work more, drive home.
The melody returns sometimes
To bones of vertebrae
Notes to ears,
Fingers running along fence
With no ground
Texturally pressed, moving together
Down mechanical seconds
Of material postures
Poised by water in hollow tubes
And slightly beyond
Below, in front, behind
A literal actual clock –
Timing
But in round
Downbeat unfound.
Sometimes the radio moves the hips again,
Without essay
(This is unnerving as most things require effort)
The bass now descends low
Slightly ahead of the present
Then dragging slightly below seconds
Beyond soft
Then sometimes louder
Then together
With everything else –
Not certain if it was louder
Or softer
Or just attention
And inattention
Faster
Or longer.
Did the ride end when the song stopped
Or did the song end the thought?
Do we notice when we dance
Or just regurgitate steps?
A kind of melody flitting above it all
Like a bird circling jaggedly overhead
Then it is gone again.
Did you capture its picture?
If not, was it real?
Do you write it down?
If not, did it happen?
Rhythms bounce off fascia
Like rain drops like mallets off glass lids
Not so precise but unceasing
Carrying you through a night’s sleep
Not sleeping
Tempo quickening
Then decreasing.
You’re not there but your body
Is
You wake up moving again;
Begin again
A thought’s incessant pressing
Rain against pane
Wave against grain
Mist against leaf
Part primal, part man-made
Nanotech evolved
DNA is math but breathing is unconscious
Attack – suspend – release
Hello – Hug – goodbye.
Sit – Stand – Walk –
Sit – Lie down – Breathe.
Listening again:
The vibration of it rides into me;
Wind through a tunnel,
It’s important and nostalgic
Yet I have never heard it before
Like remembering,
Continuing to roll around me
Cells that never stop splitting
Suns that never stop conducting
Earths that never stop revolving.
The end of it also its beginning
Music like this takes us nowhere,
Here, everywhere,
To lift off and drop in
Circling time around your limbs
We arrange sound
As we arrange our bodies.
I remember how to lift my hand
As if I had reason to.
~~
The Beginning.
~~
Poems from Keep Moving; A Book on Space by Erica Pisarchuk Wilson
Erica started her company Mövgram Dance in Reno which led to the creation of the annual Reno Dance Festival. Erica is a certified NCPC Pilates Instructor, has attended Cornish College in Seattle, and is continuing her education in Movement Therapy and Kinesiology. She teaches in Germany and is working on her first books, Not Words and Keep Moving; A Book on Space. Erica’s creations can be found on Instagram @erica_movgram, on YouTube as Mövgram Dance: Not Words, and on Facebook as Mövgram Dance.