Still Dance

I work in concert with the land. My art is inseparable from it. In 1981, I created Still Dance, which weaves together performance, body art, story, photography, and the particularity of a place. Still Dance is the summation of a performance ritual, the arrival at the "still point" in which the voice of a living place is responded to by a performer. My intent in this work is twofold for both the internal, ephemeral experience of the performer as well as for the permanent visual piece, the photograph.

Still Dance is a conversation with the land that begins with the eyes. You are stopped: some form, some texture, a shock of purple loosestrife that leaps away from the swamp, a moon sitting on the edge of a cliff, a bulldozer track lifted from the mud, some stray pocket of darkness. You are pulled in.

This is the call to a particular place. As the performer you open to its power articulating through your body its ground, its water, heat, wind, color, sound, season, the time of day. You come with your story, respond to the land's larger power, and a new story emerges. It is not a conversation between equals.

And it is not a process of forcing the land to serve as a metaphor for an internal human state; nor is it using the land as a backdrop for an abstract set of aesthetic principles. It is rather, a collaboration between the inner and the outer worlds. When you are first called, the place does reflect your inner world but you explore that reflection through chosen movements (sometimes as simple as folding and unfolding, sometimes a mere gesture) so that the outer world influences and shapes the dance.

This form, Still Dance, brings a performer to an authentic experience with a place. The use of color and texture (body paint, mud, grasses, etc.) emerges from the interplay of both the character of the story and the direct observation of the land. This body art helps to prepare the performer to move out of the ordinary realm, as well as to attempt to give the viewer the chance to go with them. My hope for both the performer and the viewer is to refine and extend the senses, to fully sense each place, triggering memories deep in the body. They are old memories and yet in their awakening comes the chance to couple again with the land.

By ..Eeo Stubblefield