I learned coming home to the body through the chore- ography of grief that there is no other side; it’s a continuation of amassed steps we carry with care.
roles as partners and parents. These thoughts lingered into a mentorship exchange with Deborah Slater Dance Theater’s Winter Studio 210 Resi- dency resident artists, Tracey Lindsey Chan and Cyrah L Ward. I struggled with the word mentorship, wanting to refine or remove the word mentor altogether. Instead, I considered my work with these artists to serve their art-making as an aid or connector. Exploration. The storms pass, sea- sons change, and dancing continues. I’ve been focusing my time on my choreographic research on consent for YES! Identifying actions — the ability to recognize choices, and as I keep choosing dance again and again, becomes a strategy as I get through the melancholy of a transition to a new unknown normalcy. With col- laboration and relationships, I enjoy the process of unwinding the tension my body has endured during this sea- son of cancer. Bare knuckling isn’t a movement option; it freezes you into fear. I learned coming home to the body through the choreography of grief that there is no other side; it’s a continuation of amassed steps we carry with care. Maybe dancing together is the spiritual preparedness we need to face the risk of living — a willingness to see the truth of what is living and the knowledge that the transmutation of suffering is possible through dance as a liberatory skill. When dancing exudes a non-violent habitus, we enact our interconnect- edness and learn to shift with one another. Not left to right or right to wrong; instead, I find myself defining virtues we collectively value through the choreographies of grief and care. YAYOI KAMBARA is a multi-hyphenate artist working in dance as a critical form of expression. Kambara started her career as a professional dancer and currently directs and produces multi- media performance works, including film and XR, and was recognized as a stage director by Opera America in 2023. Kambara is a co-interrogator of Dancing Around Race, a 200-hour CYT, and is completing a restorative yoga certification.
I almost knock off an injectable medication on my arm. Rolling in the dark, unsure of my pain levels, a soft blanket confines me to wonder without action. An inability to focus, a fog, a dampening of acuity. I lean into rest and watch my thoughts but can’t get attached to them because I lack energy. Is this grief? Iśvara-pranidhānā or surrender. I’ve learned trust and resilience by learning the choreography of a heavy body. Radiation treatments require a patient to be still; my dance skills of helping my partner by holding my own weight interferes with the work of my radiation team who moves me with a sterile accuracy. The physicist I have never met exacts precision, tri- ple-checking every day of treatments so I don’t endure unnecessary harm. I’m on stage atop the cold table with a giant rotating machine beaming on me. The physicist is not lit, but we are performing together for a run of 15 days. Oncologists and teams of specialists, nurses, physical thera- pists, and nutritionists with constant eye contact are signatures of car- ing; they glow superhuman as they recite exact percentages from long research. The whys and hows of can- cer research reveal the benefits of systemic chemo, nutrition guidelines, radiation, and endocrine therapy and how they can blast rapidly reproduc- ing cancer cells, differentiating their reproduction from healthy cells. As tests and measurements are taken, fidelity to my life becomes para- mount. Why this allegiance now? Because the time to move is now. Śauca or cleanliness. Unname- able but feelable, I return. What is the new normal? I’m prepared that it will take a full year to understand
the new normal, and formations are already changing. I go beyond my neighborhood across the country as I write this piece, and I’ve been in multi- ple rehearsals, including making YES! a new dance on consent whose bud- ding is felt like wrestling in the desire to premier and tour. As I’ve identified the steps to consent for YES! recogni- tion, discernment, and action without attachment— I learned from dancers, doctors, therapists, and teachers during my cancer season. We make decisions for our bodies and hope we are mak- ing the best choices. If my medica- tion makes me sick, I demand another choice. When I bought my family daruma dolls for the new year, I hadn’t thought thoroughly about the mean- ing of daruma. Daruma dolls are tra- ditional Japanese wishing dolls that keep you focused on your goals. Using black ink, you fill in the daruma’s right eye while thinking of a wish. Should the wish later come true the left eye is filled in. Daruma dolls are modeled after Bodhidharma the founder and first patriarch of Zen Buddhism. Trav- eling from San Francisco to Chicago to Middlebury, Bennington, and finally to Albany, I took these dolls with me and shared them with friends and col- leagues as I shared my work. As I write from Middlebury, Vermont, where dancer, and Professor Christal Brown reminded me we all need the daruma, or the vision to enact the steps I iden- tified for consent: recognition, discern- ment, and action without attachment. Tapas or Self Discipline. During treat- ment, I was visioning with my choreo- graphic collaborator, Loni Landon, as we prepared for a commission with Robert Moses’ Kin’s New Legacies project. What would it mean not to do it all? Limit ourselves to not self-pro- duce, teach, dance, while fulfilling our
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