a K Ō R E R O & a H U I : a conversation and a meeting in three parts

Abstract

I am a dancer.
I was a dancer.
I have been – a dancer.
I am mother, I am daughter, I am woman, I am Māori.
I am a horse.
I have been trained. I am training still.
I am Pākehā
I am a field
A body
An undoing
An undone.
I am a pluriverse.
I am treacle.
I am epistemology:
body, movement, science.
I am brain holder
Bone thinker.
I am cognition and movement.
And then, the world of the unseen,
I am also that
(because)
I am Māori: I am a pluriverse, a composite of place, a cascade of identities.
I am mercurial.
I am an ancestor catcher
I am a whale, a seed, a crag of rock.
I am a woman who has birthed
And bled
And raged against.
I am a transistor.
I am a wound.
I am my father’s thick black palm.

The economy of knowledge or epistemologies and means of acquisition, distribution, transference and withholding compel my current thinking.

My body knows (in limited and limitless ways) Western contemporary dance training, manifold adjacent physical learnings, somatic experiences, and much injurious rupture. My body knows performing and making dancing as it has been displaced to other lands, sites, cultures. The poesis of
kinaesthetic thinking-through meets with evidence-based clinical reasoning via study of Osteopathy, where the body is dissected and segmented to be anatomically and physiologically understood. My body knows, in its deep waters, that I am a Māori woman. My body senses an-other epistemology
drawn from realms of the unseen and inherited blood quorum. My body knows aspects of the tender minutiae of each: dance, science, spirit.

As this triad of broad category epistemologies amplifies (within me) with age, lived experience and critical contemplation, I wonder what is the dance that now wants to be danced? What does it look like, what does it do, how does it move, how does it speak, where (else) is it taking place and why
might a new pluriverse for the doing of this dancing be necessary?