Into The Woods

When I received a note from experimental dance choreographer Jhon Stronks asking me to participate in a film to be shot "outside in a wooded area," I half expected to end up dancing naked to trip-hop-remixed Stravinsky. I once watched Stronks writhe around in a clawfoot tub wearing nothing but bikini briefs, so it wouldn't have been a stretch. But hey, I'm always up for a little nude frolic, so I let him know I would attend.

Then I read the text that was to inspire our improvised movement: "Strange Fruit," a poem by union activist and schoolteacher Abel Meeropol that was later popularized in the song by Billie Holiday. "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees ... ."

So much for the sylvan scene. Lynchings were to be the topic of our woodland afternoon.

"These trees are too young to have been around then," Stronks says to me while we wait for the other dancers at choreographer Wayne Smith's home in Ben Hill. And they're not good hanging trees, anyway, I think, appalled that my mind can work in such a way. You know: no low, horizontal branches.

The others arrive: Spelman students Amber Reid and Monique Cobb, dancer Debra Mazer, acupuncture and homeopathy doctor Sandra Yee, and poet and performance artist Alka Roy. We are black and white, Asian and Indian, men and women. Choreographer Nicole Wesley arrives with two Digicams, and we get to work.

We read the poem out loud, two times through, and it sounds to me like a witch's spell: "Blood on the leaves and blood at the root ... ."

We enter the woods to see how the land will move us.

I find a tree with a hollow at the base of its trunk. I want to reach in and see how far the hollow goes, but it repels me more than it draws me, like reaching into a chest wound to feel for a beating heart.

Behind me, Stronks swings from the crook of a tree then chases Roy over the crunching leaves.

A rhythm builds. Smith is by the creek with his eyes closed, clapping his hands and stomping his feet in complex time. Stronks rubs his hands and claps in a complementary rhythm. On the ground behind me, I find discarded wheelchair footrests. Picking them up, I punctuate the polyrhythm with loud chrome crashes.

Reid, Cobb and Yee lay quietly in the leaves. Mazer sings a song, her body bent at knees and bottom.

I drop the footrests and sweep large semi-circles barefoot around the base of my left leg through the leaves, baring the soil beneath them. A tiny sapling reveals itself, just a few inches high. I kneel and rake my fingers in circles around it. I surround it with a barrier of twigs.

Mazer twists on the ground, several of the other dancers now crouch around her, laying their hands on her, rolling her in the leaves. They sing, slowly: "Feel the spirit, try to get near it." I slip into some preverbal place, certain a single word from my lips will break the spell. I hum a two-tone bassline beneath their words.

They walk to the space I've cleared, run their fingers through the dirt. Yee builds a battlement of twigs stuck vertically in the ground. The chant turns to, "Heal the spirit," me still humming, and we slap out a rhythm on the ground.

We stand, hold hands, and, quietly now, walk out of the woods in single file. We talk, we hold, we hug, we part.

On the street, reluctant to make my way back to the highway, I call out to Yee: "Back to the real world, huh?"

"They're all real," she replies as she drives away.

The film is one component of Into the Air, a new multimedia dance work created by Spelman Dance Theatre choreographers Stronks, Smith and Wesley. The work premieres at Spelman this weekend as part of a show that will include a restaging of the racially charged "In the shadows of tales and secrets told out loud."

thomas.bell@creativeloafing.com