Winter New (Cold) Moon
Ancientrails. A name happened on by accident, now 8 years ago. Still, it stuck and its meaning seems to grow. Dug deeper into my psyche as those years have gone by.
Recently discovered a book, The Old Ways, by Robert Macfarlane. Here’s a bit from a book review in the Guardian:
“…this is the story of many journeys. Fifteen of them are made by Macfarlane himself, along paths in the British Isles and, further afield, in Spain, Palestine and Tibet. He invokes, as he goes, hundreds of previous walkers, and hundreds of pathways – across silt, sand, granite, water, snow – each with its different rhythms and secrets. So the book is a tribute to the variety and complexity of the “old ways” that are often now forgotten as we go past in the car, but which were marked out by the footfall of generations. And it is an affirmation of their connectedness as part of a great network linking ways and wayfarers of every sort.”
In a word, yes. Yes. These are ancientrails. In this case actual trails and paths, but ones that encompass in their reality the more archetypal meaning I have when I use the term here. Just as there hundreds of pathways across all manner of surface there are even more pathways of the heart, the mind, the genetic paths, the orbits of planets and the movement of stars and galaxies.
Then, yesterday while at lunch with Allison she mentioned, again, Emily Johnson, one of the videoed artists whose life size figures graced the Thaw exhibit at the MIA a couple of years ago. Allison had become a disciple of sorts, going to a three-day workshop, making a fish skin lantern and even dancing within one of Emily’s pieces last year. Allison’s fish skin lantern is now on stage with Emily at the Baryshnikov Ballet. Allison thought of ancientrails in relation to Emily’s work.
Here’s why from a recent NYT piece:
“Structurally Ms. Johnson sees her new “Niicugni” (nee-CHOOG-nee) as encompassing “The Thank-you Bar.” Within an installation of 51 handmade fish-skin lanterns, created by Ms. Johnson and participants from workshops held in conjunction with residencies around the country, the work explores ideas about how a place, including a body, can tie everything and everyone together. It focuses on the wholeness of land, rather than its territorial borders.
“I know what it feels like to walk on the land I grew up on,” she said. “It’s very spongy. The trees and the ground smell earthy and piney. I’m really interested in not forgetting that there’s ground underneath this floor, and that we are all connected, via land, via ground, even in the sense that the ground is made of the remains of all creatures that have ever existed, including our ancestors.”
In “Niicugni” Ms. Johnson performs intricate duets with the dancer Aretha Aoki; some of the choreography is rooted in improvisations that required them to imagine they were dancing on earth. Part of the inspiration for the piece came from a picture of a mountain. “You see a huge physical structure that seems so permanent and so still, but then you can see where there was maybe a rock slide,” Ms. Johnson said. “You can see the precariousness of it. The contradiction between presence and movement is a possibility at every moment.””
