Retracing Myrrha - notes from EOCCC residency session, 17th March 2015
Retrace
(verb)
[with object]
1. Go back over (the same route that one has just taken):
1.1 Discover and follow (a route taken by someone else):
1.2 Trace (something) back to its source or beginning.
For me, the very first
session of our residency at the East Oxford Community Classics Centre
was primarily a time to retrace and to rediscover key episodes that
we had already explored. Although I had thought a lot about Myrrha
since our performance in November 2014, I had not danced her. There
is always a huge challenge in going back to origins, of finding those
original pathways in body and in space once more, of stripping the
choreography back to the source. As we warmed up to Mal's improvised
work around Beckett and Joyce texts – rather appropriate for a
rehearsal held on St. Patrick's Day! – I was a little fraught with
thoughts as to whether Myrrha would (or indeed could) be found again,
as to whether she still existed in my body somewhere and how I was
going to call her out. Yet the body possesses a memory of its own,
and prompted by the sound-world and, primarily by the evocative theme
that Mal has developed for Myrrha, the overall patterning of the solo
came back fairly quickly.
Yet there was one main
difference. I usually play Myrrha with a neutral mask, and this time
around, I chose not to use the mask, as an experiment to see what
might happen without it. Something quite extraordinary happened.
Suddenly very aware of my facial expressions, and of eye-lines,
feeling 'unmasked', vulnerable, and exposed, I was also suddenly
aware of my humanity as a performer and so Myrrha suddenly felt much
more human. This was of course workable when she is the seductive
then shamed and pregnant young woman, but her tragedy - her
transformation into the tree - suddenly felt incomplete. Although the
tree needs to have a human element – Myrrha is 'woman-tree' –
this time my tree was all too human. I needed to re-identify with how
I originally translated her transformation into tree into my own
body:
'While she
was still speaking, the soil covered her shins; roots, breaking from
her toes, spread sideways, supporting a tall trunk; her bones
strengthened, and in the midst of the remaining marrow, the blood
became sap; her arms became long branches; her fingers, twigs; her
skin, solid bark. And now the growing tree had drawn together over
her ponderous belly, buried her breasts, and was beginning to encase
her neck: she could not bear the wait, and she sank down against the
wood, to meet it, and plunged her face into the bark.' (Ovid, Met
10. Kline's translation)
Originally, when first
creating the solo, I had improvised around the changing quality of
the body, of bone, of blood, of muscle – feeling skin hardening,
bones hardening, sensing the liquidity of marrow and blood flowing
like sap, sinking down to meet the rising wood, yielding to it,
giving in – all this had been lost...and now needs to be found
again.
Furthermore, rather
than give birth as a human woman might, Myrrha gives birth through
the bark:
‘The
child, conceived in sin, had grown within the tree, and was now
searching for a way to leave its mother, and reveal itself. The
pregnant womb swells within the tree trunk, the burden stretching the
mother. The pain cannot form words, nor can Lucina [goddess of
childbirth] be called on, in the voice of a woman in labour.
Nevertheless the tree bends, like one straining, and groans
constantly, and is wet with falling tears. Gentle Lucina stood by the
suffering branches, and laid her hands on them, speaking words that
aid childbirth. At this the tree split open, and, from the torn bark,
gave up its living burden, and the child cried. ' (Ovid, Met.
10, Kline's translation)
Ovid
evokes the 'dat gemitus arbor' (the groan of the tree) and the 'fissa
cortice' (the bark ripping open). This time, I had not found the
creaking of the tree, the bark cleaving open, nor the final moment of
cradling, more human tenderness before the rigidity of tree takes
over once more.
 |
The birth of Adonis and the transformation of Myrrha.
Oil painting by Luigi Garzi (1638-1721).
Source: Wellcome Images |
Next time
then: a return to the mask and a concentration on the elemental...
(Susie and
Ségolène
observing also pointed out the need for a more explicit moment of
passion in the flashback to justify the overwhelming sense of shame;
as well as giving more space on the upstage right diagonal for what I
call the 'weeping woman' – Myrrha wandering the desert, in exile.
This should better balance the performance space: downstage left
being the past, the downstage left diagonal the path between past
seduction and shame / torment, and at stage centre the point of final
transformation and child-birth)
