Since I moved to London I have been intrigued by the world of this city, the history and pathways, how the energy moves, where sacred sites are built, how the water flows, where the fire is. London is a massive power center in our modern world, and has been a center for 2000 years. To hold such power. To hold such different peoples and such different dreams and such different realities.

Where I am in my life, I have become interested in making performance away and outside the constructs offered by the arts community. I am pulled to explore outside these boundaries, which indeed means to choose to move away from the community as support and safety. But it also means freedom.

There is something amazing about performing outside. I imagine it is a great shift, as choosing to live outside would be. Suddenly one leaves the way of the masses. Suddenly one is building ones own infrastructure – which is liberating, and also extremely exhausting.

So, I decided to take my work outside.

I had been working in nature and with sacred sites in Devon and Cornwall for the past few years – but Imbolc took me outside in the urban context.

I have always been one to push the limits, to go into the unknown with my work, to plunge into the darkness. Part of this comes from a great courage, and part of this comes from a discomfort in conforming to the mainstream. I have reached a place in my life where I realise there is no easy definition of things. I simply work with my own specific dialogue between self and other, self and community. In my own story, the constructs that have been created by my family and the society I have grown up in have been to a significant degree, unsatisfactory. There are aspects I need to work with, transformations that need to happen.

But before one goes outside, one must inhabit the cauldron within.

Inside

I love the way creative cycles work. For myself, the process must start deep inside, from a personal place, with a question that is ultimately related to my essential question. And for me this is about the heart. My life work is to open my heart with greater and greater generosity and ease. I am a warrior of the heart.
So when I make a performance work, first I go deep inside. Searching, calling, questioning, trembling, and facing the dark.

The way of the true path is amazing. I know, I have always known, that what I perform, if deeply linked to truth and essence – speaks for me as an individual and then resonates outwards, circles upon circles, until it spirals out to touch everything that is. Each moment of finding truth no matter how hard or easy or dark or light – is beautiful. Each moment of finding truth in our deep Self is a gift from life and to all life.

Imbolc is a work that began to vibrate inside me about one year before I actually performed it. Last spring I made a work called Black/White. It was a durational work that embodied the extreme pull between the desires of the animal body and the yearnings of the spirit body. The pull downwards versus the pull upwards. The dialogue between earth and sky. The struggle between where we have come from and where we are going. The attempt of the body to become a potential whole of seen and unseen parts, of seen and unseen desires. To somehow manage to be in the present moment holding/allowing all.
I worked naked, as I have been doing for some years. For 12 hours I walked forward up to reach for the sky, white – then to be repeatedly pulled backwards down to the earth, black. Over time the definition between the two poles deteriorated. And mystery emerged.

As the year went onwards many transformations happened. And in the richness of the autumn season, I found myself pulled to red again. Imbolc, to begin with, is a marriage of black white and red – a dance of the primal elements – a dance that is born from the extremes of earth and sky, and in the end emerges as a dance of the heart.

Outside

Traditionally Imbolc is a pagan holiday to celebrate the first light that appears from the darkness of winter. I took this as a metaphor for the first light of a new season of the heart. It began deep inside my body, this call to transform… But as I grew stronger and manifested the inner vision slowly outwards, this dance became a dance for everything. An opening of the heart, and a new awakening for all the people that saw me in London as I danced. An opening of the heart, for all the ancestors who have led me to be born in this body.

This dance is for the whole world and this whole era in time. I dance from the deep past, from deep underground – I dance for being and liberation and freedom – I dance to lead the way onwards, as evolution and the mystery of movement.