daughter, Savannah Bradshaw, remains unparalleled in her effect on my living, breathing, and writing. I honor her here.
The inspiration for so much of the book’s material was located in the dancing bodies of the following workshop participants:
for seven performers April 1993
Beverly Bajema, Michael Arnold, Jewell Handy, Meg McHutchison, Grace Mi-He Lee, Jason Phelps, Ginger Rhodes Cain
Playing Awake 1995
Polly Gates, Nicole Bell, Sarah Farwell, Charly Raines, Liza Belli, Elizabeth Kubala, Lisa Gonzales, Dorothy Saxe, Sylvie Senecal, Liz Gans, Angeles Romero, Genie Barringer, Harry George, Beverly Bajema, Colene Lee, Charissa Goodrich
Wesleyan 1995 Choreography Workshop
Nicole Zell, Pedro Alejandro, Ara Fitzgerald, Sue McCarthy, Sara Kiesel, Christine O’Neal, Carla Mann, Joan Alix, Betty Poulsen, Hooshang Bagheri, Claudia Forest, Teri Roze
Playing Awake 1996
Ellen Fullman, Adrienne Truscott, Rebecca Morgan, Kathleen Baginski, Mary Beth Gradziel, Edith Andermatt
Wednesday Nite Class 1996
Ellen Fullman, Adrienne Truscott, Rebecca Morgan, Cara Biasucci
Minnesota Dance Alliance Project 1996
Alexa M. Bradley, Thérèse Cadieux, Joan Calof, Janet Deming, Mary Disch, Tara Arlene Inman, Susan McKenna, Sherry Saterstrom, Susan Spencer, Karen Spitzer, Anthony Stanton, Elena White, Laurie Young
1–2–1, Melbourne, Australia 1996
Anna Szorenyi, Bronwyn Ritchie, David Hookham. Hellen Sky, Jacob Lehrer, Jane Refshauge, Karen Ermacora, Mandy Browne, Margaret Cameron, Martine Murray, Megan Don, Pauline Webb, Peter Fraser, Phil Mitchell, Anna Turner, Ranjit Bhagwandas, Renata Bieske, Ros Warby, Shona Innes, Sylvia Staehli, Valley Lipcer, Natasha Mullings, Adam Forbes
School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, 1996 Workshop
Ivana Muller, Marianne Langenegger, Lianne Ernsting, Ellen Kilsgaard Andersen, Katalin Balla, Katharina Pohlmann, Antje Reinhold, Friederike Koch
Skidmore Workshop 1997
Judy Margo, Danielle Seymour, Kara Martinez, Jenny Thomson, Megan Moodie, Abigail Sammon, Tracey Fischette, Nikki Verhoff
I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts Dance Program for its financial support of my work through its grants to individual choreographers. Since 1980 the development of my performance and dance practices would have been unimaginable without space and time secured with Dance Program Fellowship funds. Along with the generosity of friends and family, a 1997 NEA Choreography Fellowship allowed me to complete this manuscript.
I also wish to acknowledge support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kittredge Foundation, the City of Yarra, Arts Victoria, Australia Council for the Arts, the Minnesota Dance Alliance, and the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
introduction
Alone in candlelight one evening several years ago I made a list of the most valued teachings learned from my teacher, my body. I wanted to itemize, to see a written account of the practical wisdom I have discovered while experimenting with my teacher as guide. Each of the eighteen lessons is a chapter title in My Body, The Buddhist.
When the inventory was complete, it spanned twenty-six years. I also noticed a parallel with Buddhist thought, although I am not a practicing Buddhist. For as long as I can remember I have intuitively preferred the politics of nonviolence. Nonresistance, seen in the bodies of many Buddhists, has always drawn my attention. And action through nonaction, at least as I perceived it on the surface, secretly appealed to my middle-class upbringing.
In the early 1970s, when I was living at Mad Brook Farm in Vermont, the books I was reading—in particular, Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche—advocated a spiritual path that was analogous to my experiences dancing. I was inspired to construct a verbal dance vocabulary that merged personal and universal images. I wanted it to include the sensual experiences of perception. With the help of language, I wanted to simplify access to dancing while expanding the territory from which a dancer could draw immediate kinesthetic experience.
Books and articles concerning Buddhist philosophy have proliferated in comparable measure to those written about the body. Yet I am certain that no two people living in a western culture would define in the same way either body or Buddhism. How we describe the body even changes several times a day for some of us. I have come to understand that the body’s form and content are not what they appear to be; likewise, my dances do not coalesce around specific subject matter.
… once you have that experience of the presence of life, don’t hang onto it. Just touch and go. Touch that presence of life being lived, then go. You do not have to ignore it. “Go” does not mean that we have to turn our back on the experience and shut ourselves off from it; it means just being in it without further analysis and without further reinforcement. Holding onto life, or trying to reassure oneself that it is so, has the sense of death rather than life. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Heart of the Buddha)
My Body in the title of this book refers to a prescribed set of what ifs organized around my work as a practicing performer, choreographer, and teacher: What if alignment is everywhere? What if your teacher (your 53 trillion cells) inspires mine? Such imagined conditions, changed periodically, are necessary for me even to begin dancing.
There has to be a certain discipline so that we are neither lost in daydream nor missing the freshness and openness that come from not holding our attention too tightly. This balance is a state of wakefulness, mindfulness. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Heart of the Buddha)
My Body, dancing, is formed and sustained imaginatively. I reconfigure the three-dimensional body into an immeasurable fifty-three trillion cells perceived perceiving, all of them, at once. Impossibly whole and ridiculous to presume, I remain, in attendance to the feedback. At such times Deborah Hay assumes the devotion of a dog to its master; reading the simplest signs of life, lapping up whatever nuance my teacher produces. When the greater part of the Buddhist world finds its strength, solace, and wisdom through a practiced devotion to a guru, or Rinpoche, please imagine my hesitancy in admitting to twenty-eight years of devotion to an imagined 53-trillion-celled teacher.
The book grew from the list of eighteen statements that form its chapter headings. But I did not write the material to fit the headings. Several pieces had already been written when I began. Others I wrote to help me understand and gain a wider perspective on how dancing impacts my life and how life impacts my dance. With each story, or score, I would scan the table of contents until an unusually obvious or uncanny link to a chapter heading was made. The parallels were more experiential than didactic.
My Body, The Buddhist is the work of a dancer/choreographer not schooled in theory, analysis, poetry, or criticism. I study riddles, some of which are what ifs that arise when I am dancing. For example, what if where I am is what I need? As a dancer, I will notice what occurs when I imagine every cell in my body at once is getting what it needs moment by moment. The manner in which these what ifs can thrill and annihilate the body’s
