Can I?

By Rachel Cunningham; 7 July 2012

There is a timelessness we can experience when we dare to place our finger, arm or heart into creating. We can get lost in that timelessness or feel connected to it. Each artist has their own process, and each has their own experience. And when we combine our passion for creating, making and connecting then that feeling of timelessness can be life changing.

Some call it an adrenalin rush. I call it a welcoming home.

There are many sayings about “home” and two immediately come to mind: “Home is where the heart is” and “Home is where we hang our hat”.

I prefer: “Home is where we hang our heart.”

For two brief moments in June 2012, I found my writer’s heart hanging in a new home best described as a space of timelessness created while dancing with Remnant Dance artist Katie Chown. This homecoming took place in a dance studio, surrounded by dancers and fellow members of the Hanoi Writers Collective; the second in a café surrounded by an audience enjoying one of several events during Remnant Dance’s international tour of Món quà từ những mảnh nhỏ / Small pieces, a gift in Hanoi, Vietnam.

To say that Katie guided me into my new home is an understatement. She welcomed me into a new world that I never knew I could physically inhabit so completely. I’d been to this place before -- in my mind’s eye many times as a child deep in dream, then as an adult, writing screenplays.

This world is as real as the dance studio in which Katie and I collaboratively expressed text I had drafted that morning. I finished that journey, spent; lying in Katie’s arms as she quietly gave voice to my words, “Can I?”

One might call it intuitive collaboration, improvisational dancing or sheer exhaustion. I honestly don’t know what to call the experience of losing time while responding to the invitation to move alongside, and with, another artist. I do know ‘it’ happened somewhere in between loosening my shoulders like a prize fighter and rolling out of Katie’s gentle embrace to get my 45-year-old body up off the studio floor.

Can I? Can I dance? Did I just dance?

Katie and I smiled at each other like children seeing something magical for the first time, eyes wide like saucers. We shook our heads and found ourselves back in the studio, among friends who didn’t quite know what to say either.

I was left wondering, “What the hell just happened?” Of course, ever the doubter I wondered, “Did I make a complete fool out of myself trying to look like a dancer?”

“That was really beautiful,” whispered Lucinda Coleman, the Remnant Dance facilitator.

“Your leg extension was really good,” said one of the writers.

“My what?”

I couldn’t look at Katie. I was worried I embarrassed her. I needed a drink, and it wasn’t water I was after.

The writers in the studio were silent, clearly unsure where this so-called collaborative process was going. We writers were invited to create “text” and collaborate with the Remnant Dancers to make “works in progress” for two nights of Showings at a café in downtown Hanoi.

Can I do this again tomorrow night at the show? Can we?

I felt like I had just given everything in one shot then stepped back, exhausted, and suddenly felt acutely aware: enlightened even.

And then I remembered all those “in the zone” moments when I am totally energized while writing my screenplays. My characters start talking and demand my attention. They seem to craft the story line while I serve as a reporter, jotting down the facts and putting their actions in context for the audience.

Can I create, make and connect – through words and dance?

Yes, I can.

Yes, we can.