Unarchiving: Amnesia & Innocence
"Satan is just unclaimed energy"
I dissolved religion and all its forms from my life in 2017. It was a process more than 10 years in the making, where I realized and decided in the end that I ultimately can choose to believe and not believe in whatever I find expansive and aligning in my life. Also, I like how Reda Azlan (he wrote “Zealot” and “No God but God”) describes religion—as a language where one can speak it, have fluency in it, understand it and communicate and relate with it and with others. In my Cultural Anthropology Studies (I forget which writer or what book), but religion was described as a roadmap for navigating the cosmos. Maybe I formulated that on my own from a less “cosmic” or mystical academic writing I read. Maybe they said that it’s like a languaging of the world and a worldview…?
Aaaaanyways… Satan is like Voldemort, not to be spoken of or conjured too much for fear of his appearance or drawing attention to one’s soul. Even after stopping to consider myself Catholic, I could feel the deepest beliefs still engrained in me about my soul, god, satan, guilt, fear of making a fundamental mistake in my life.
In my solo “Spirited”, I have a 15-minute dance where I dance to a long live recording of Big Brother and the Holding Company from San Francisco in 1960-something (3? 7?). Janis Joplin is the lead singer. In this solo I let myself do what I want. I follow the music. The solo starts with me just skipping around and not caring about anything…just doing what I want without a care in the world. I skip around and let my arms be relaxed and free in space without taking any responsibility for anyone or anything except my own desire and interest. I feel like a bad bitch, a rockstar, the sexy wild bad girl in a movie that attracts the more innocent main character guy, a sexy rebel. Later I do a two step like in Native American dancing, and I let my arms extend out like a bird gliding high in the air…native American and also hippy and 70s. Maybe Jim Morrison or other rockers of the time did a dance like this. I noticed my thoughts of judgement around cliché and obvious and silly arise, but I let myself dance this dance to this song anyways. In watching the video, I realized that I really liked it. I dug it!
Later in the song called “All is Loneliness”, I start to clench from my center…a pain of loneliness and sorrow and torment, an existential yearning, a void unquenched. My face winces. My hands claw up. I put one claw up at chest level and the other at hip level…both with palms out. It’s the position of the statue of Satan where the upper body is mannish, but a head of a goat. I realize that I’m doing Satan. I’m afraid. I’m saying “Voldemort” out loud. I’m conjuring the devil through my body and my spirit and my soul. It’s a wreckless risk. I let myself. It’s exhilarating. I trust that I’m an artist learning about the universe and life and that this is a part of it the way everything is a part of it, big and small, mundane and life-exciting.
I like to say Fuck You without saying FUCK YOU. I say this by enjoying myself and channeling joyful energy in the face of oppression. Maybe there’s anger in the fuck you, but I focus and follow with the good-feeling release of the action…the expansion to let go of old patterns and systems.
In the studio I don’t linger too long with being Satan. I don’t want to channel or fall into cruelty or maliciousness or downer feelings too much. I more want to feel the fear and then tell myself it’s ok. I shake it out. I allow the energy to release through me. I feel powerful and humbled.
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, aid programm DIS-TANZEN by the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland