Fragments of the Body, Landscape, and Identity: A Dancer/Poet's Terroir (original) (raw)

2020, Identity landscapes: Contemplating place and the construction of self.. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill/Sense.

The textures of identity and place are ever changing, yet as constant as the terrain that lives within my body. My limbs, tissues, cells, and blood hold memory of particular ethnicities, and my relation to place is deeply connected to my embodied understanding. As a dancer, poet, and arts-based scholar, the heart of my work has explored the way the body integrates and inspires connections, ruptures, and creative capacities to place. I resonate with Adrienne Rich's words, "Begin though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in-the body" (2003, p. 30). The body holds a fragment of memory, conscious or unconscious, through the cellular landscape of skin, bone, tissues, and gestures. Here is the threshold for an embodied knowledge, which has the capacity to go beyond comprehension, and lies waiting to be discovered, holding possibility for deeper dialogue with how one traverses one's own relationship with their history or herstory. Through poetry, dance, and the spoken word I have cultivated lifelong practices of creating and recreating the fragments of what it means to be in connection to the natural world as well as my to own cultural identity of being Irish and Armenian. Place is both outside and inside my body, dancing in an ongoing relationship. There is a scent to the body's knowing. We smell, touch, feel the sensate world within and around us and here is a habitat of longing and belonging. I draw on forms of poetic inquiry and embodied inquiry, rooted in autobiographical methods, which explore a visceral connection to language, the earth, and cultural identity (