Clare Byrne
Clare Byrne is a choreographer and dancer. Weekly Rites is a performance selection chosen from an hour of continuously recorded improvisa...Video Episodes:
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14:38:32 11/05/09
Weekly Rites CXXV - Brother Fire
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ St. Francis' Order was founded eight hundred years ago this year - in 1209 AD, in Assisi. St. Francis was so crazy in love with God! So was Clare. Both renounced medieval middle-class. She was a young girl who followed him - escaped the marriage her parents set up. She eloped to Francis' chapel, San Damiano, outside of Assisi, cut off her hair and married God. Both undertook a life of keeping their hands empty - burning themselves up for God. They created twin orders, the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares. Francis turned over San Damiano to Clare, where she gathered followers, and became its abbess. He died in a hut, on a mat on the floor. She lived more and more in seclusion. By the end, she didn't need to leave her cell to attend Mass - it appeared as a vision on her stone wall. Today she is the Roman Catholic Church's patron saint of television. I think they were lovers. They shared one meal. I love their foolish love affair with the world and the sun and moon and birds and mountains and olive groves. Their unequivocal sense of place in those God-lit hills of Umbria. Here is a verse of Francis' Canticle of the Sun, as we descend into the darkest part of the year: "Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong."
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17:36:07 10/09/09
Weekly Rites CXXI - calves and toes
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http://clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/2009/10/calves-and-toes-more-than-we-know.html Went to my twenty-year high school reunion on Saturday. We are all still ourselves! Each person's gesture, movement - so familiar. We really knew each other: chemicals, nerves, muscles, skin, and heart. Some more deeply than others, but all more than we know. But since the last time I saw you - the people I spent twelve physical years of Catholic school with - every cell on us, except nerve cells (the ones that feel and remember) have been replaced. We've died by pieces and replaced ourselves. You can see it: a canniness and a grace achieved - knowing death and birth - along with stray grey hairs and beginnings of wrinkles. It makes everyone look better. There was so much to hear, report, laugh about, include, omit- it was too much. Wished I could cut out the talk, or turn down the volume, and just watch everyone. Really look - or smell - or touch. And before and after, on my seven-hour drives to Pennsylvania and back, I missed everyone. What comes up is sensory reassessment, revisiting, remembering. All the wantings, not-wantings, gettings, not-gettings - they percolate into the stories I live, now. This rite is for Kerry - it was so fun to see you at the reunion - responding to you response, from back in March! Here in Vermont it is a speechless time of year. The colors, in perfect disorderly jumble, are clownish, are ridiculous, are laugh-out-loud. There is nothing to do but stand mouth agape - and applaud. The trees are going out, flaming - the trees are dying for the year, burning up. Things die to perform, they die to come into their own. This is a performance to match any performance anywhere in the world. It calls to mind Annie Dillard's quote "any life without sacrifice is a sacrilege." The dying must happen, for the life to be lived.
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18:16:17 09/18/09
Weekly Rites CXVIII - the music
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Came back from town with just enough light to take a power walk up the mountain before it got dark. I put on my hiking shoes and charged on up. My goal was to exercise my ass, which had been sitting too much. Hadn't been up there for a long time, since all the leaves were fully out, I guess, because it looked unrecognizable - or maybe, unseeable. I couldn't see into the woods what was there. Under my feet moose tracks were all over. I feared looking out into the trees, what I might see, but couldn't even see because of all those damn leaves and the gathering gloam. Breathing hard, heart beating, teeth numbing, I still charged on up - up - up - the slope. I reached the first level place, crossed the ridge where there were more and more moose tracks. A real stomping ground for moose, in big mud splotches - how lately had they been there? On up - vaguely ominous downed tree across my path - to big rock face where I can usually look out at the view across the whole valley - but now, nothing. Not even a hint beyond. Leaves, leaves, leaves, millions of saplings and teenage trees and middle aged trees and ancient trees, taking up all the seeing. I started down, and starting saying things - little nonsense words and syllables, silly sentences - so that the moose about to jump out at me would know I was a human, a crazy human, and just let me go. Then I started singing Stevie Nick's Leather and Lace. That was it - that was the key. I began to feel more calm. I slowed down. I enjoyed being in the woods, seeing what I could see, and being looked at, and heard. And appreciated - this is really it. It seemed an appropriate gesture to give the woods, as if the woods would recognize - as if the woods has known for centuries untold - that THIS is what humans are good for. This is, in fact, why we put up with them, the trees and the ferns and the moose say - they SING to us! As if I suddenly made sense and had a function in this world. Ah, I get it, I understand! My job is to sing - and dance -and do all the joymaking capacities which I have been granted as part of my species. Leather and Lace dropped me into my rightful place, my proper notch, in this woods. And when I finished ("take from me my lace, take from me my lace, take from me my lace"), the silence followed - and I felt received, at peace.
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08:18:36 08/28/09
Weekly Rites CXV - Patrick's Rules
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I'm on assignment this week - following a set of instructions that Patrick Ferreri gave out to gather material for a project he is working on:
spend 2 min exploring each of the following tasks...
...middle finger dance, start by focusing on the bones and how they fit into their joints
...try to get your scapula and floating ribs to touch
...try to get the opposing halves of your pelvis to touch
...combine all three ideas and see what happens
I interpreted the timing liberally. In the end what happened is that they exploded into something else, an animus, a being all its own, a reactive alchemical composite of the rules.
The music is C.P.E. Bach's Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings.
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05:02:49 08/13/09
Weekly Rites CXIII - Flies in the Kitchen
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Here in Vermont my tub garden on the deck is really taking off, just now around the Feast of St. Clare. The clouds have cleared, it feels likes summer, day and night. The plants are finally getting good sun, good soil, good moon. The plants appreciate that night light - or that non-light, just as much. They need the sun to soak their green cells, and they need the moon - well, I don't know exactly for what yet, but let me know if you know. In the meantime, sitting out in the dark with them the other night, they whispered a non-mantra for me to use: Don't right woman me. Don't real woman me. Don't true woman me. Don't good woman me. Don't nice me. Don't best me. Don't bad me. Don't woman me.
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06:04:30 07/17/09
Weekly Rites CVIX - Table Blessing
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13:14:18 05/29/09
Weekly Rites CII - Tongue Solo
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ The ones closest to you are the ones to set at most careful distance. Travel together, but make sure to stake your tents apart. Erect elaborate, beautiful borders - flowers, trellises, arbors - but guard your border assiduously. Set a dog out. Its ferocious snap is needed when your tent is too often visited, or when their stuff is taking over its order - socks on the floor, underwear hanging from the lantern.
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06:29:51 05/08/09
Weekly Rites XCIX - Base Level
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13:23:54 04/24/09
Weekly Rites XCVII - Light Green
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ "The impassive stones that receive and return so many echos" - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself The spirit of the thing, that's what I want to know here and in all things. The clues to figuring it out (make a figure of it) are caught up in, snagged in, embedded in the details. Smoothness of bark, a taut satin. Absolutely solid roundness, firmness - not one fissure. Constancy, resolve. Sexy stuff. "Whitman hit upon the idea of exercising his limbs by bending young trees ('my natural gymnasia,' he called them). The first day he spent an hour pushing and pulling an oak sapling, thick as a man's wrist and twelve feet high. 'After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health's wine.'" - Lewis Hyde in The Gift
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08:59:20 03/26/09
Weekly Rites XCIII - Bird Songs of North America
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ I'm dialoguing with a Rufus Hummingbird, exotic for this easterly zone but then we are both transplants. The birds are back - so glad to see the birds, hear the birds - rarely both at once.
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16:51:44 02/24/09
Weekly Rites LXXXIX - Main Street
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07:14:25 02/19/09
Weekly Rites LXXXVIII - Mirror Alley
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Walk this morning, 8:00am: Crossed road into brown sunlit brambly woods, low trees and tangles - easy to navigate in winter - though there is still purple in the matriarchal vines and they do still grab - as if to say, I've something to tell you. Sat astride log over one of three meanders of stream, rushing meltoff with lacy borders of ice on either side - listened to the sound, running water sound. Flushed deer as I got up - followed it further across loops of stream - down a deer path, very narrow, snacked on by thorns all along, to a place where the deer must have "ascended bodily into heaven" (Annie Dillard) as the path ended at a wide swath of deep stream. Tracked back in sunlight getting warmer to road, crossed over and down mirror alleyway past Dan's studio to ice patches - one, frozen solid over the rope swing, so I swung and skated at same time. Then another patch, not so frozen: clear; I stepped on embedded cinder blocks over it, heard voice of the ice - a pleasing note of shift and strain. Squatted down, looked closely into still faces of the leaves - oak, maple - in watery grave. Then noticed ice bugs - translucent shrimp-like things - darting in and out among the leaves. What in the world? They like that cold. Back along path to field, lay on disc, arched back and round for the sun, now warm and pleasant. Walked to the middle of the field in surprisingly few steps, turned back to slope of woods rising up from the field - and saw that it was the show. I was the audience. What a transcendent slope of earth and dead leaf and bark, browns and browns. This week's rite is from the Dragon's Egg in Ledyard, CT, and the mirror alley is a magic of Dan Potter.
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09:41:35 01/29/09
Weekly Rites LXXXV - Under Veil
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Diego puts his nose close to my mouth, to sniff intently the bonita-kelp flakes. He's just about kissing me - I am so pleased at his apparent attention - but he's really just interested in the smell, not me. "Once upon a time all the world spoke a single language and used few words." 11-1 Genesis
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16:26:39 01/23/09
Weekly Rites LXXXIV - Smack
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Two weeks ago took a walk to a favorite cemetery spot and sat on a stone, looking at the ski slopes across the valley. My gaze strayed down - a warm day for this month, perhaps thirty degrees. Spied, next to a tombstone, just peaking out of the top of the melting snow, a pair of sunglasses. Pulled them out, only after several minutes realized that they were my sunglasses - had never missed, had dropped who knows when, maybe months ago - no worse for the wear. Otherwise, a bit busy for revelation, am missing it. Waiting for dust, or snow, to clear. Would be good to find still and wonder in midst of these sorts of times, it's available, I know. Sharon Estacio, who visited and danced with me this week, chose this week's rite. In fact, she's the one who gifted me with this spinnable, smackable cymbal Jesus.
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14:33:29 12/19/08
Weekly Rites LXXIX - Woo Woo
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Why are we cynical about woo woo? I suspect the mind that discredits or mocks woo woo is scared ignorant -that is, skeptical - of the ramifications of performing certain actions: listening, seeing, smelling, and feeling, and imagining more closely. We are systemically dispirited, wounded with the formidable power of stories ill-used. Deathly afraid. It is hard to contemplate so much surgery, cleaning and rearranging of ourselves. Hands have it so good. Look at all they have to touch and feel. We should give our feet more interesting information. They get terribly bored - aching for variation. They are meant to be articulate processors of signs and signals: hot, cold, soft, hard, wet, dry. They have incredible capacity to sift and store pain and pleasure. Instead they are given molds of various sorts; are overburdened with the weight of us - since we stood up on two feet and moved north. Some people who really like feet realize and address all this.
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08:27:16 11/26/08
Weekly Rites LXXVI - Loophole
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http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ I agree, I think in wave But 'tis a stormy sea Thought come next sets out before The first come back to me They cresting greet and crashing clap Obfuscate another I feet dragged lurch on the shore Wond'ring about order Emily Dickinson ruins each poem near the end - she uses a word that doesn't fit, that jangles where you expect rhyme or smoothness. She puts a hole in the container, like how the Native American Mimbres pottery bowls were buried: a shard punched right out of the center. If she buried them perfect the soul would be trapped; there must be an escape mechanism. The poem above is mine, in Emily cadence.