who As I write to you I am listening to my dog Ceebee snore on an entirely white queen size bed of her own at a Nashville Super 8 motel.

We rise early to drive the remaining two hours plus to Jamestown, where the Pig Preserve is located, but more importantly, where lives the pig that changed my outlook on a great many things. His name is Abbie Christopher.

My very first blog post was a tad less than a year ago, all in enormous caps because I couldn't figure out weebly yet. It read something to the effect of : HOW DOES THIS THING WORK? OH WELL. TOMORROW WE GO RESCUE A PIG.

Now, ten months later, I've been dancing about the pig, talking about the pig, thinking about the pig, and finally even walking down a path of offering therapy inclusive of pigs. But the question remains: do I know even one thing about pigs? do I really?

My marvelous professor Paul Smith, director of the Equine Assisted Mental Health concentration at Prescott College's Masters in Counseling program has given me a dandy of an assignment. I was looking to narrow down my paper about tomorrow's reunion and he offered the task of "bringing the individual alive on the page" by tracking three aspects of being: 

Body

Speech

Mind.

I go armed with nothing more scientific than my body presence, attention, and sketchpad. And a barking walker hound observing from my little car. She's my pet; Abbie Christopher is not. Our relationship is... er... hard to define. Am still working on it.

What is this all about?

I don't know where to start except with my most recent thin slice of understanding. Imagine for a second that you have one rolodex (dated american word for personal or business address book file) that is supposed to contain all the names of anybody who's anybody to you. Anybody that matters. And all your life you thought you had x number of somebodies, and they all walk on two feet and use words to think and communicate. Then one day one name pops out: with a face not like yours; and not so bipedal. And tending to use sounds and body language to say what needs saying. Well, ok. One exception.

Then another crops up: weird. But you make one more exception.

Then all of a sudden all of these friends... you opened the door and it doesn't close. The door of your rolodex just opens, and opens, and opens, till it can't open anymore.

All these snouts, feathers, wings, all these ways of Being in This World.

It is so joyful to have friends who are so different than me.

I don't think this particular friend will remember me, but I"m hoping we'll reconnect. I'm told he's now kind of awkward adolescent. Not hanging out with big boy Rufus anymore, preferring instead his pack of homies more near his size and social preferences. 

Am I cool enough to hang with him?

I never saw a cotton field in bloom until I moved to Memphis. I grew up in Illinois and my rural landscape was made up of the corn & soybeans that my Grandfather, Robert Reeder, grew on his farm in southern Illinois. These landscapes are vastly different but they both resonate deeply within me. I am discovering that landscape is deeply connected to my dance. There is the landscape that I can see, touch, smell, taste, and hear. The tall green summer cornfields of my youth, guarding the land like “dutiful soldiers.” There is also the landscape that lives inside of me; the composition of this unique container of mine. There is yet another landscape that I am coming to know through the practice of Authentic Movement. I close my eyes and wait for the impulse to move that comes from within. This unseeing landscape I have been experiencing through Authentic Movement is ever evolving.  It started out circular in shape. It had borders, but they were permeable. Although my eyes were closed, I could still orient myself in the real-world landscape, in my case, Overton Park. The unseeing and the real-world landscape informing me simultaneously.  This past Thursday, that all changed. I completely lost touch with the real-world and found myself solely in the unseeing landscape. The space became infinite and the shape not so clearly defined.  
I am fairly new to the South, and am trying my best not to be, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “a casual visitor with casual ideas.” What I know for sure is that the landscape of the South speaks to me, as does my internal and this new unseeing landscape I am coming to know.
-Bethany Wells Bak

Well, folks, Bethany and I got to go hear Sven Beckert talk at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN last week. He's the author of THE EMPIRE OF COTTON, a global history of capitalism and of that soft stuff often called the fabric of our lives. 

The air in the Blount Auditorium that night was thick. Descendants of cotton farmers, cotton moguls, and laborers filled the standing room only hall. We came a half hour early and were thus cozily seated in the middle, so I can only report what I was able to perceive from somewhere relatively closer to the front than most people's perspectives. But I will tell you, as soon as the Q and A got hot in there, the facilitator clamped down the dialogue. This wasn't before Sven had a chance to tell it like it is:
Capitalism was founded--like it or not, necessarily or by coincidence--on slave labor. And today continues to rely on what's called "cheap" labor. 
We got to have him sign our hardback copies of this sizable tome, and share our enthusiasm for this subject, and in particular our excitement at seeing this subject solicit some active heat in an otherwise intellectual and tamped-down arena, that of a private college auditorium in well-to-do central Memphis-town.
Thank you, Sven. Thanks for not hamming it up with the farmers and twisting history for them. Also thanks for not making a big deal about it either--it's history, as you say. But on the other hand, we have to acknowledge, it sure as heck isn't over and done with. Not here, it's not.
Memphis was at the center of this world-changing force called global capitalism, and the pawns of that system were its laborers and life's blood, laborers brought here by force from West Africa. Sven compared Memphis in the 19th century to Saudi Arabia today. It's something to think about. The Cotton Exchange on good old Front Street was the largest and most important such exchange in the WORLD. 
Why is is so dang hard to talk about this? Two good old boys stood up and tried genteel tactics to steer the conversation to a more favorable light on the use of enslaved labor as a necessary component of capitalism's rise. One savvy guy mentioned Marx. That went over well.
We have our hands full, as dance makers working here in the post-colonial and yet still very much capitalistic south. But methinks more than anything the hotspots around this conversation need some love and awareness, not punitive gazes, so I'm glad those good old boys couldn't see my face when they were jabbering.
When we went up to him afterwards and told him we were making a full-length dance looking at Cotton's history and the embodied labor that shaped it, his face glowed. "A dance?" I dare say he was thrilled and curious. We' promised to keep in touch.

I recently read an article by Jan Erkert titled "the choreographic lens" and was struck by this sentence, "Our studios are clearly alive with making." As a dance-maker I am constantly moved to dance-make by all that goes on around me, but have always considered the actual "making" of my dance as something that comes from within. There is a pressure to conjure up the "making" like some sort of awesome magic trick. What if the "making" was instead this other-worldly energy not inside or outside of us, but in a new dimension all together. Each time we try to access it, we can never quite remember how to get there. We turn right instead of left, we go round and round in circles, until finally things begin to feel familiar, but we are never really sure. There will always be uncertainty and questioning when seeking the "making."

Meat Space Diaries #4: ODE premiered, finally, here in Portland, Oregon two weeks ago yesterday. I was pleased at the contrasting responses we received. Several attendees of the Body Mind Centering Association's first evening of performance works approached me with faces of utter delight and astonishment; others were wary about framing their responses in words; a few told me they were terrified or simply unsettled. Carla Mann, professor of dance at Reed College, wrote me that the piece was "wonderfully hard and soft." Could I be more pleased? Those who could hold the tensions did. Those who couldn't chose where to stand with the ambiguity and didn't look back. I think that's okay. I think my job as a maker of performance works that are, I hope, "worth a grown person's time," to quote Shelby Foote, is not to persuade my audience to see what I see, but to show them what I see, and let them look. 

In my experience with raising pigs, a pig is remarkably suited to its own skin, and at the same time terrified by the imposition of structure on their soft, three-dimensional experience. How do I make art from that place? It's a living question, and there is no quick and simple answer.

Friday morning, I took my nest-cage down. Maybe it had to do with the unseasonably "cool" weather that day, but something inside of me whispered "cut the cord" and I heeded the call. This is the place the wildness lives, well... used to live. I stepped into my nest-cage for the last time Friday morning and devoured every inch of that wildness, soaked it up from the earth through my heels, into my bloodstream and the marrow of my bones. This wildness now lives within me. If she had a name, it would be something sultry or exotic like Tallulah. You see this wildness is new to me. I like to be in control, I follow all conventions of politeness, I'm buttoned up, reserved... all slicked back into a tight little bun without a hair out of place. This wildness has been suffocating, on life-support for the last 30+ years but this nest-cage gave her new life. Slowly but surely hairs fell out of place, and things began to loosen, until eventually the dam broke and this wildness, MY WILDNESS, roared back to life.   

There are currently seven different books on my nightstand and I am reading them all simultaneously. I have been devouring words for months and my head is starting to get overcrowded. It is time for some serious self-nourishing, what Julia Cameron calls "filling the well". I have decided to commit myself to the Artist's way  for the next 12 weeks. I am most excited for my weekly "artist date". Julia Cameron describes the "artist date" as, "an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers. You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist, a.k.a. your creative child. That means no lovers, friends, spouses, children--no taggers-on of any stripe." I have forgotten that I can not be nourished creatively by words alone, I need to get out there and have a sensory fantasia. Have a little fun and hopefully experience some magic. Here... I... GO!

Hey, you are kind and glorious for showing up: my brother Paul. Moira and Sally. Maxine and Paulette. Jarad. J.D. Erin dh@ and Ruby Magnificent. Wayne M. Smith. JD Holmes. Erin Walter. Joan Biddle. Elena Stoeva and your friends and daughter Leni. Dana Wilson. Marie Dennan and your gorgeous dance-talking friend. MJ Adams. And Marianne Bell in spirit, Edyta Kutnik in spirit, Maggie Rawling-Endicott in spirit. Abbie Christopher. And my tribe of creators, Nat Newburger, Kimberley Baker, and my RIGHT WING WOMAN Bethany "BOO-ya" Wells Bak. Steven Prince Tate facilitating and expecting and holding space. Matteo Servente on the tripod and lens. What do I have to say about how much you matter to me? You are in this work. And we deserve each other deeply. (thank you.)

I was laughing and crying as I left "company class" yesterday. (Dance Makers Workshop is not a company, but a community engine... nonetheless we host classes and they are kinda like company classes... chill but vigorous.)  I reminded folks that DMW is hosting an open rehearsal on Saturday of "Meat Space Diaries #4: ODE,", and one of my good friends bowed her head sheepishly and asked if meat eaters were allowed at my showing. I sat there in astonishment! Then another one, who had brought eggs from her farm that many of us buy each week, piped in, "Yeah, what about meat farmers?" I'm sorry that I had no words for you just then. But here are a few.

I certainly don't knock on the door at Central BBQ and ask if I"m allowed entrance as a vegan! I go right in and order what I can.  My eating choices don't define my audience range any more than yours do, beloved community. Keep that in mind.

But if you want me to promise to protect you from getting your feelings touched I can't. And I must tell you my feelings get hurt all the time--we are each sensitive in our own ways, and this world doesn't really care, does it?  It all depends on how closely you need to guard your inputs in order to maintain your comfort level. I respect you completely.

What you can expect: a heartfelt and humorous engagement with the art of herding an animal. And I'd add, this piece is super duper child-friendly. I hope you'll bring your wee ones.

And I promise I won't bite you, as long as you return the favor my loves.