Ania's final reflections from the last month at
Earthdance. (The text contains bits from different dates.)
So, July the 4th jam has started and i have to say i
find it hard to engage since i am still a bit exhausted after the SEEDS festival
that just ended. I just long for some time and space to be introvert and not
have to engage with people all the time.
As a preparation for our stay in Buenos Aires in a
months time, Roy, myself and tow girls that we know from Earthdance have started
to take Spanish lessons with a local friend of the Earthdance community. In the
first lesson she spoke Spanish to us for 2 hours and i got quite enthusiastic
to learn the language. But i found a strange thing. When trying to get another
language into my head, all the other languages somehow come up to the surface
and fight for attention like jealous wifes. All of a sudden my Polish, Swedish
and English are all present and the Spanish has to carefully negotiate with the
current residents of my brain to find a place alongside them.
Another thing that i found interesting and slightly difficult is to learn a
foreign language form the base of a
language that is not my mother tongue. All the pronunciations are explained
from an English point of view and for a person that has got Swedish as a
foundation, that is quite confusing.
A few days later:
Today the contact improvisation festival, the july 4th jam, ended. A
bunch of us celebrated by going swimming in the lake nearby, and it was great.
It has been an intense week of about 75-90 people, children included, sharing
the Earthdance space for dancing singing and playing. I was amazed by what a fantastic
community it was, how lovely people where, how open and friendly.
During the jam Roy and i put together a tango class
and Roy was teaching and i was assisting. It went fine, i think some of the
people that came got a flavour of what tango can be about and some even got
this shiny light in their eyes which was wonderful to see. So that was great,
but there is still a lot to learn about how to structure a tango class for
beginners and if i was to do it again i would change a few things. Still, i am
glad to have been a part of this experience and very proud of Roy as a teacher.
One of the feedback comments we got was that his passion for tango was very inspiriting
and he was a clear and good communicator of that. Hurray!
During the contact jam I found myself not
participating in many of the jamming sessions of contact improvisation because
of some mental blocks of mine. Many of the dancers are very good and i felt a
bit intimidated, not really daring to take part. As if i did not really allow
myself to be at the level i am, believing i must be something i am not. But
luckily i still got to experience some very precious moments of
non-self-conscious joy and playfulness, and i has some beautiful dances.
In my processes in and around contact improvisation
i have come to see (again and again) that this form, dealing with the subjects
of self and relationship, is a wonderful
mirror for reflecting back patterns of thought and behaviour in life and it
gives me a very honest image of all my internal and external issues. It is
great. And scary.
Some days later
Me and Roy and all of the staff members on Earthdance have just been on a full
day Healing Racism Training and it was an interesting experience. It gave
me a lot of insight to the culture of racism history in this country and
it was eye-opening to understand the "white privilege", what it
means to be a white persons and that i get to enjoy privileges that i am
not even aware off, for example the privilege of not being scared that
people might move to another seat on the bus when i sit next to
them because of my skin colour...And that is just a mild example.
A few weeks later Earthdance was
partly hosting and partly holding an event for young black people from poor
urban communities. Two groups of them came out to Earthdance and some of them
had never left the city before. They where amazed by the nature and the clean
air. I got to sit in on their sessions, lead by a very passionate black couple,
encouraging them to start thinking critically about their situations and their
lives, and not just accept the reality they were in. They also shared their
creative skills with us and with each other, like dancing, signing and playing
and is was so touching to see them unfold and start expressing themselves. They
did exercises if envisioning their futures and where encouraged to express
their dreams about how they wanted their lives to become as they grew older.
One girl said that she had never been asked this question before in her life.
This was a very eye opening experience for me and i felt so grateful for being
a part of it.
