LOAM, a Transformation Through Eco-Theatre

Recipe for Reconnection–

A handful of dirt

Bring it close to you and smell

Remember your roots.

I think about soil. Often. My first interactions with soil—the ones I remember—were filled with curiosity. Curly grubs in the garden-gloved hands of my father, writhing worms escaping the saturated ground after rain, mock strawberries dotting the yard, dandelions (for wishes, of course), darting chipmunks, and anything my father wanted to grow in his garden. I remember learning about how soil isn’t just a place where things live or grow, but it is a place where much of the world goes to die. I once watched a bird in our upstate New York backyard decay, visiting its corpse every day to observe the changes brought on by insects consuming its flesh. My father told me that once the insects and scavengers were finished with the bird, the soil and the tiny organisms that live within it would do the rest, eventually breaking down the bones whose minerals would then be incorporated into the soil. “It’s a cycle,” he said.

On a shelf in my parent’s house is a faded, sepia-toned photograph of Papa Calvin, my great grandfather on my dad’s side. He’s standing in the middle of a crop field on a farm owned by a state representative for whom Papa Calvin worked as the farm manager in Sanford, Florida. I’ve also been told Papa Calvin had a very large garden of his own on his property not far from that farm. Like many Black families who have been in the United States for generations, ours has a relationship to agriculture. As such, I am profoundly aware of how histories of race and commerce in America complicate our relationship to soil. Who has the right to own soil? Who has the right to cultivate it? Who has the right to profit off of it? Who has the right to traverse soil in search of home, opportunity, refuge, or adventure? Who has the opportunity to understand soil from a scientific point of view, and to what end? Who has the privilege of knowing soil in ways that are poetic, unhurried by the demands of a consumer public? For all the ways poetry was not automatically offered to me as a Black girl in the United States, I decided from a young age that I would take up the mantle anyway.

If I adopted the durational and repetitious qualities of the cycles I observed in and on top of the soil in my art practice, would those qualities permeate other parts of my life?

I learned the word “loam” in 2011 from biology professor Dr. Nicole Hughes at High Point University, my first academic institution where I worked in the department of theatre and dance. Loam is a balanced mixture of sand, silt, and clay, making it easy to dig in, well-draining, and able to maintain a slightly acidic or neutral pH, which is great for growing plants of all kinds. It occurs naturally in many places across the United States and in countries around the world. However, I have never come into contact with naturally-occurring loam. When I learned the word I was living in North Carolina, a state known for its dense, red clay soil. Still, I grew to love the word “loam,” the way it flipped over my tongue when I said it out loud, and the notion of a form of balance unabashedly existing in an otherwise chaotic world.

LOAM, the work of solo dance theatre I devised between 2016 and 2017, began as a question. If I adopted the durational and repetitious qualities of the cycles I observed in and on top of the soil in my art practice, would those qualities permeate other parts of my life? More than that, I took on the task of creating this piece because I desired a deeper relationship with the soil than I already enjoyed as an amateur gardener, nature enthusiast, and a concerned citizen with a growing awareness of the intricacies of the climate crisis from a sociopolitical perspective. By this time, I was living in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina and had unfettered access to forests and meadows through which to hike, read, observe, take notes, and contemplate.

In the studio, I made attempts to embody the cycles and interpretations of time and form as demonstrated by fungus, towering oak and pine trees, fallen leaves, rotting tree trunks, squirrel and deer carcasses, stones, bear and fox tracks, fiddlehead ferns, ephemeral ghost pipe flowers, rock cap moss, and elusive lady slipper orchids. I began to observe patterns of interconnection. For instance, I came to delight in the exploding seed pods of jewelweed plants brought on by being touched or brushed by animals or other plants. I also learned about elements of the ecosystem not readily visible to the eye. Through my research and outdoor encounters, I learned about the rhizomatic existence of many of the fungi found on the forest floor and how mycelium networks can extend for miles. In response to my findings, patterns emerged in my choreographic work. Small gestures became a series of gradual, full-bodied metamorphoses that tested my physicality and my mental focus as a maker and performer. A fast, maximalist mover and maker by nature, I found the practice of investigating subtle details and cultivating the patience to move through them over long intervals of time both enlivening and maddening. In other words, making this piece created the conditions for me to unearth novelty and nuance in my existing practice.

By turning my attention and my energy to the ground, I grew.

I remember the day I surrendered. Working on the opening gesture of the piece—a slow rising of the arms like roving seedlings searching for the sun, which took seven minutes to unfold—I gave myself over to the discomfort. I stopped thinking, I stopped crafting, and I allowed the movement and the passing moments to simply exist. For me, this piece became a new ritual. One where I met parts of myself that knew more about patience, listening, and living than the parts of me that constituted my outward expression in the world (my ego) did. By turning my attention and my energy to the ground, I grew.

Outside of the studio, my life moved as fast as ever. Though I had fantasized about it, I hadn’t been successful at adjusting my life to align with the seasons and other cycles of nature, nor had I become an astute strategist, able to offer concrete answers to the climate crisis. I was still a poet though, and sharing what I had learned about the elemental importance of soil to life on our planet and about myself as a human being as part of a dynamic ecosystem though my process felt like an important step in my journey.

Following the premiere LOAM in early 2018, I had the privilege of presenting it many times for audiences across the country and abroad. Notably, I performed the piece as a plenary speaker at the then annual Appalachian State University expressive arts (multi-modal art therapy) intensive at the Wildacres Retreat Center in Little Switzerland, North Carolina in the spring of 2018. Wildacres has long practiced environmental and spiritual stewardship through its arts, religious, and cultural programming on 1,200 acres of protected land. The Appalachian State University Expressive Arts Therapy program, which was founded by psychologist Dr. Sally Atkins, holds that ”art making and creative expression are healing, growth-producing processes in and of themselves.” I also had the pleasure of performing LOAM at a symposium hosted by the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics in Edinburgh, Scotland in the fall of 2018. This group, founded by Kenneth White and Tony McManus and now directed by author Normal Bissell, “is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2,500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world.” The artists, environmentalists, and philosophers at that symposium offered me a different perspective on the piece. Through their presentations and projects on geopoetic philosophy and environmental histories, I was reminded that I was not, nor had I ever been, in process by myself. This community of people seeking deeper connection to the natural world shared the same childhood fascination with nature that I did. They shared the same anxieties and sadness about the state of the environment that I did. And for all the ways poetry was or was not offered to them along their lives’ journeys, they took up the mantel and they shared. I left the symposium inspired by the idea that if we all keep doing our part and sharing the outcome of our respective processes, we can inspire others to do the same. We can change the trajectory of history.

Early in the spring of 2019, I got pregnant. I assumed I would take time away from performing during the later stages of pregnancy and the first months of my baby’s life and then resume touring LOAM. Instead, the pandemic came just weeks after my child was born. Lockdown offered my family an unexpected period of togetherness and a suspension of the day-to-day as we knew it, because we couldn’t go anywhere. With a new baby, I was hesitant to go back to work in person, even when our campus reopened. The immense privilege of being able to teach from home, though stressful, was not lost on me. What emerged most saliently during those early days of the pandemic was a deep need to remain connected to nature even though it felt like nature was trying to destroy us.

Several projects, both large and small, began to form in my brain. One of the first projects I did was called Touch the Ground. For forty days, I would take time to put my hands on the ground, document it, put the photos on social media, and invite people to join me in the practice. During that time, I was writing furiously. The excerpt below encapsulates a continuation of the work I did in the making of LOAM, while addressing the perplexities of times that included the murder of George Floyd, a public divided on the best course of action to address COVID, political strife, and personal upheaval:

The premise of this ritual is simple: touch the ground. Each day, I lay my hands on the ground in honor of the Earth, my body, and our kinship; as a manifestation of my desire to be better connected with the natural world and its spaciousness in this time of digital overload; and as a reminder to trust in the materiality of the soil, sedimentary rock, roots, fungus, plants and organisms, when the dizziness of human turmoil throws me off balance (which is often). In committing to this ritual and its invitation to slow down, to notice, and to connect, I am prioritizing and facilitating the healing of my body and mind, which is an ongoing process. I am tending to my own liberation and to the liberation of us all. As any action in collaboration with the Earth is a challenge to human-human and human-non-human disconnection, an affront to capitalist culture, and an affirmation of all the Earth provides materially, emotionally, and spiritually. This ritual is part and parcel of an inter-species, inter-celestial project in pursuit of harmony. As any ritual practice in recognition of the inherent blurriness of our existence and the interconnection of all things on the planet, in the universe, and beyond our scope of comprehension is anathema to oppressive systems, ritual is as much healing and generative, as it is a form of resistance. This is the magic of ritual practice.

Following the recommencing of public life in 2022, I began ideating a large project, one that would move the work out of a solo practice realm and into a collective one. I shifted the focus of my research slightly to explore what the climate crisis is doing to our bodies and to the bodies of our non-human kin. I wanted to understand how the trauma experienced by one of us is experienced by all of us. As soon as I was able, I began embarking on small residencies, gathering research, enlisting friends and colleagues to help create tests of ideas on stage, on screen, and in sound.

Trees are impacted individuals. Rivers are impacted individuals. Crustaceans are impacted individuals. Soil includes billions of individual grains—each an impacted individual. Many, many people are impacted as well.

In/Separate, in its fullest expression, will be presented as a multimedia, immersive theatrical encounter that explores how human bodies and non-human bodies experience climate trauma in ways that are similar, connected, or both. Approached from the lenses of physiology and forced migration, the project illustrates the multi-layered effects of climate change on the Earth and its inhabitants, as well as the changes in physical and geographical realities for impacted individuals and groups who lack the political and economic agency to resist their plight. The funny thing about this work and the research that serves as its foundation is that most every species that lives on this planet is part of a community who “lack[s] the political and economic agency to resist their plight.” Bees are impacted individuals. Trees are impacted individuals. Rivers are impacted individuals. Crustaceans are impacted individuals. Soil includes billions of individual grains—each an impacted individual. Many, many people are impacted as well. Most impacted are those people who have been historically oppressed or erased from environmental movements throughout history. Together, all of these impacted individuals make one interconnected web of existence. As ever, this work asks me to work with and through nature, not alongside it.

These days, I am back in New York City, where I began my artistic career many years ago. Our journey back here was a surprise to us all (myself, my husband, and our child), and it seems we are still adjusting three years after our move. I’m doing my best to remain connected to nature, and the In/Separate project is offering me a lifeline. Though I do not get to put my hands in the dirt every day, I’m still thinking about it, dreaming about it, doing about it. It will be some time before In/Separate becomes a true reality. I’m patient, though. If there is anything LOAM taught me, it is that the emergence of a new sapling cannot be rushed. Conditions need to be met; the time needs to be right. Of course, a seed is always ready, awaiting its opportunity.

LOAM
Hands in the dirt

I wonder if there are fragments of my ancestors
here

Miles away from the places of their births and deaths

Bodies of work

Souls carried inside seeds
Whose destinations are subject to the wiles of the current

Who knows how long we’ve known each other
How many times the tips of our fingers have touched

How many times I’ve brought a thought, a memory into my head
Through my nostrils

Reciting the family plea out loud --
Come for me;

And please

Bring water
The earth is dry where we have buried our children.

The Moment a Seed Touches the Soil, it Knows What to Do:
It breaks and splits, gives itself over
To the chaos of reconfiguration
Sending its roots searching for the center
Of the earth
Where the vestiges of so
Many martyrs
Bless an upward journey toward the sun.