into alive now: choreographies of becoming
by Shane Rowlands
Lori Lorion, Holding the Moon, textiles, mixed media and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2020. Installed at Pinehurst Post Office, NC. Courtesy of the artist.
INTO ALIVE NOW:
CHOREOGRAPHIES OF BECOMING
SHANE ROWLANDS / Jan 2021 / ISSUE 4
in the flesh: December 2019
Shoeless on a humid night, we ride the funky bassline around our kitchen table. Jen is fifty and we boogie. Two of us together and each in our own whorl.
Loose and low in our hips, our star-fingers sensing the heat of the beat bouncing off the floorboards into our palms. Passing the pantry cupboard, we exhale percussive to knock-knock knee-bones and fill lungs for mouth-trumpet now clap hands and finger-click for chorus.
We dance and we dance with Chaka Khan, David Bowie, The Specials, M People, Yothu Yindi, The Communards, and Sampa the Great pulsating over the upstairs balcony into the street.
Passing by on their way to a party, a skin-tight posse of skimpy-clad teenagers stop on the footpath opposite our house to mirror us raising our soft-knuckled fists to air-punch these jubilant beats higher into sticky elation.
Little do they know our kind of collective fist-pumping began back in the late-eighties as raving testimony of outlawed-bodies-finding-tribe. For we are of the people who believe every part of your body can and must learn to dance.
***
Pick any Friday or Saturday night during my twenties to mid-thirties and chances are you would find me, unloosing myself, on a too-small dance floor in some bar moonlighting as an ‘alternative’ club somewhere in this town.
Whether this dance floor was deserted or crammed full to bursting or pulsing with just enough folks, chances are I was on it for hours, whirling fizgig, leaving only for sips of water, before plunging back to peacock strut and jigsaw-hips to bump-and-grind and frot and get funky with everyone and no one in particular.
On the way home chances are I was slow-driving or in the back seat of a friend’s car, tilting my head to stare out the window at dawn pinking the sky. My skin and clothes damp with sweat and stinking of a thousand cigarettes, I was having The Thought which did not come from my brain so much as the afterglow of a sparkling sensation in my wrists-to-fingertips-flicking-from-my-arms-above-my-buzzy-crown and my chest-blazing-blue-fire and my hot-stamped soles still tingly inside socks and boot leather: how could anyone ever stop dancing.
***
Woo-ooh-hoo-ooh we echo the teenagers’ farewell as they swagger off into sultry dark.
Little do we know that in just three months’ time a coronavirus pandemic will sweep the planet. And dancing in the flesh with friends and strangers in clubs at parties in loungerooms and kitchens and back yards will be off-limits.
***
what we choose to keep alive: December 1987
Watching late night music videos on TV
gooseflesh when we heard her
breathy sung swoop into fierce voluminous
chorus of Mandinka. All three of us
stunned by her stompy her elfin
stupefied by her fembutch bravado shaved head.
Next day Susa had come home with her album
& we’d played it over and over for hours days weeks
always our palms drumming the table
always our fingers strumming the air
into our lungs overspilling with lyric
always our chins sweeping to one side on crescendo
as if the full blare of our mouths-wide wailing
might overpower our fist-faux-mics.
Barely a year since Sinead has become our soundtrack
& one of us had gone to Rockinghorse Records
in search of a limited edition single from Chrysalis
we’d read about in NME or i-D
a teaser from her soon-to-be-released second LP.
Returning triumphant to bring these 12-inches back
to our turntable.
But this is not a story of nostalgia.
This is what Joan Nestle calls another remembering:
‘what we choose to keep alive
from the rawness of our beginnings,
the ways of being that gave strength to get beyond
the bleak, the limiting, the narrowing, the taken.’
***
Side A: to get to the dance
One night in my early twenties, my housemates and I went to the NOWSA Women’s Dance. NOWSA was the Network of Women Students Australia and this was only the second time that women at universities from all over the country had come together. This year, in our town. The dance was the culmination of five days of exploring some of the ways our personal was political and it was to be in the dome-ceilinged auditorium at City Hall.
These were the days I scoured thrift-stores for 1940s Victory suits. I preferred A-line to pencil skirts and boxy jackets to wasp-waisted. My mutiny—such as it was: to mismatch tops and bottoms.
My favourite going-out combo was a worsted houndstooth jacket in olive and avocado green with large cloth-covered buttons and a pale pink slubbed satin skirt that I’d scissor-cut to mid-thigh and safety-pinned a hem. This is what I put on that night for the dance and, as always, I shod myself in cherry red 8-eye Doc Martens.
To get to the dance I drove us in my old mini. Its engine was prone to overheating and vomiting up coolant green lava, but too expensive for us to catch a taxi from our share house into the city and back. No train station nearby to where we lived and the buses stopped running at 10pm. Ours was a town disapproving of late nights. This was 1988 and homosexuality was male and illegal, but lesbian sex acts were not criminalised because, in the eyes of the state, they did not exist or could not be imagined.
To get to the dance I drove us and parked the car on a street as close as we could get, as those in the immediate surrounds of City Hall were signed clearway. Too scared to enter the underground carpark next door to City Hall where, two years before a young woman, returning to her car at 5.30pm after a day at work, had been abducted by a convicted rapist who’d left her for dead on the side of a road on the outskirts of town. She’d survived by playing dead and was found by a workman the next morning. Barely alive.
For seven years women had been marching to reclaim the night. But ours was a town where the headlines shouted at us to lock our doors and keep our bedroom windows shut tight. In this climate of stay-at-home or get what’s coming to you, wanting to go to a women’s dance wanting to dance with women wanting to flirt with wanting to fuck with women was chancy, was asking for trouble, was dangerous.
But we did not know how to say we are brimful of fear and it is exhausting. Because this was the air we breathed.
we’d read radical socialist marxist anarcho écriture feminine & the combahee river collective.
we’d read hecate & spare rib & this bridge called my back & off our backs & on our backs.
we’d read & we’d read. the female eunuch & the golden notebook & oranges are not the only fruit & our sister killjoy & the laugh of the medusa & don’t take your love to town & zami: a new spelling of my name & les guérillères & the pirate’s fiancée & working hot
into the nights we read with macho sluts & the courage to heal by our bedsides
we tried to breathe through panic
& whenwecouldn’tfalltosleep which was
often we scribbled in the dark but what we needed most was
to speak it out loud to each other
our bodystuck & bodyshame & alwaysdesires confounding
so we read & we read when truthtell we wanted badly
for songs to practice embodiment & for nearlytimes cumming
we could scream from the bottom of our cuntlungs
& when I say we
I mean me.
To get to the dance we have to walk through intermittent dark and deserted mostly. In our boots stomping heavy on the pavement we talk wordswordswords loudly to make sounds many more than three of us.
When we get to the dance, we exhale slowly to release only-ness and inflate lung-balloons with dragon-breaths from smoke machine. Unoccupied hands hang awkward from arms. So quickquick to queue at the bar. Get glass of cool swallow and watch from dancefloor’s edge where the music wets our feet.
At first we still too-self for true abandon to be true. Still we dance and we dance.
Unstiffening away from stiff we dance. Into this night to surrender ourselves unto ourselves we dance and we dance into sass and audacious sinuosity at last too flowfast for thinking.
Only drum-hearts throbbing us now
in rhythmic communion
wholly viscous & voracious for
euphoria of sweatslippery bareskins
& everywhere girls grinding their hips
into the humid air giving birth to themselves
urged on by Salt-N-Pepa aaah push it push it real good.
Lori Lorion, Holding the Moon (detail), textiles, mixed media and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in. Spring 2020. Installed at Pinehurst Post Office, NC.
***
Side B: Jump in the River by Sinead O’Connor,
featuring performance artist Karen Finley 7:16
In the loungeroom we gather
to put needle to spinning vinyl
woo hoo hahahaha woo hoo hahahaha
like water spirits laughing off
pistol shots percussive
grinning we are yeah
& rhythm guitar is driving but sluggish
like a slow locomotive hypnosis
already we are nodding together
& Sinead sings low hush with sneer
drumbeats grainy black & white
over-exposed my eyes close bodyswaying
& if you said jump in the river I would
because it would probably be a good idea
with toes sucking into quicksand
I trade weight between legs
to make figure of eights &
abandon my hips to infinity
let ribcage & shoulders forget
sweet ripening head swung sexy pendulum
between raise arms raise hands high
& surrender becuz it wd probably beeeah gooood ideah
because she is smutty kissmouth slutty winetongue tasting of too many cigarettes
but her heart is not wormy so she knows how she goes to lose her head & lusttumble
inside divingdeep whine of guitar distortion into only always gorgeous mistakes
inside our shimmering mirage bodies up against the wall rutting
& if you said jump ... not yet
& if you said jump ... still swaying
jump ... stripping back
jump ... to bongo
beats lulling
into trance
yaaAAAAH! yayayayaYayayaya
yii-Ugh! yii-Ugh! yii-Ugh!
wideopeneyes
Karen crosses over into howl snarl growl into
yowling girlanimal into spectral wildcat prowling for meat
hardswallow
mouthsdry
utterly we are the first time
we hear her truth-spat unadulterated
Baby you got it wrong
I don’t smile when I cum
splitting the air with our too-choked
unspoken insides out
under skin / is
goodgirl / battery undercharged / by
blameself / too blackout / to restart
flat battery / girl
failing / to spark / ignition
inside / own skin / hardly never
for girlbattery / dirty
shamedirt / corroding me / too
playdead / to remember / how to
but by the third time Karen clamps
her highvoltage red to my cathode
& bites other-end on to her own throbbing terminal
I am shrieking banshees we are out of our mouths
hurling unlaundered words our skeletons uncloseted
Ain’t got a leg but I got a stump
Ain’t got a dick but I got a pump
Ain’t got a titty but I got a lump
in our loungeroom with Karen we scream
the rage of our girlbodies rewired
Never knew how to walk
so I gotta jump!
her current surging through us
creams fear off our unpasteurized
desires pump adrenaline pump muscles
blood-full gigantic unstoppable we
shout-dancing out deadskins
Jump start me! Jump start me!
sprung toes bouncing
our feet off the ground
into the sweating air we leap
jaws-opening to jagged copper
teeth snarlingkaren we
Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!
defiance in our molecules
outlawed un-singing together
we cauterise panic shame terror
from bleeding us dry &
jumpjumpjumpjumpjumpjumpjump
into alive now
inside cells of who we are
becoming utterly here
on the verge
splitting
species
jumpjumpjumpjumpjumpjumpjump
***
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Shane Rowlands is a writer and collage artist who lives in Brisbane, Australia on Yugara-Turrbal country. She has published two poetry chapbooks—rear vision (Spindrift, 1997) and cicatriced histories (Metro Arts, 1995)—and has written for theatre and live performance. Recent exhibitions include fall seven times, stand up eight (PF Studio, 2013) and Royals, Angels & Assassins (WAG, 2015). She has worked as an editor and dramaturge, public policy maker, arts and cultural strategist, and as a researcher, curator and writer for exhibitions and business story-telling.
Lori Lorion's paintings are dreamlike celebrations of the human body in motion. She creates a reality where imposing, large-scale figures quietly emerge from within a mysterious world. Her brightly colored, often richly textured paintings have a musical feel to them. Unabashedly bold, yet gentle and silent, these robust figures pulsate with life. Lori experiments with various media: paint, mixed media, clay, intaglio, woodcut, photography, silverpoint and digital.
Lori's work has been exhibited in California, Oregon, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Vermont and Skopje Macedonia. She attended residencies/workshops at Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Arts and Crafts, Mims Painting and Drawing Classical Atelier, Frogman Printmaking Studios, Northwest Film Center, SCAD and Light Factory Photography Center. Overseas teaching stints include: London semester 2004, Paris term 2008, one year GTMO military base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Lori taught community college students in Reedley, California and Gresham, Oregon as well as two years teaching junior high at St. Anthony Native American School in Zuni, New Mexico.
Lori was born in Michigan and grew up outside Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her undergraduate degree at Carroll College in Helena, Montana and her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Lori lives, works and teaches in North Carolina.