An Gael i Phortingale

An Chorp Bán i dTír Oráiste - White Body in an Orange Country

I came to Portugal to investigate the anatomy of the Irish language.

‘Odd decision’ you might think. But actually, I came to learn the skill of body listening from Lou Chardon, who runs an artistic hermitage Southern Portugal.

The French dance maestro left her successful dance company in Belgium six year ago to open a hermitage in remote region of Alentejo.

Aiséirí an Gaeilge

As a language revivalist and a performance poet, I have long considered the implications for our biology in speaking Irish.

In Chinese medicine, each of the meridian lines that govern the health of the body are tuned by a specific frequency. This is the foundation of vibrational healing and in waveform universe, no small fact. So, I contend that the broader range of sounds in Irish (almost double by some reckonings) act on a greater number of biological functions than English with the potential of making Irish speakers healthier.

The body is the measuring instrument of this hypothesis.

As a bilingual performance poet, i have observed a marked difference in my body movements according to which language I’m speaking. There is a languid quality to Irish and my body responds snakelike to its this rhythm in recitation.

I wanted to investigate the correspondence between Irish words and body and to substantiate and articulate this experience of a physical response to a word. I wanted to begin to chart an Irish alphabet in the body.

I applied to the Creative Europe mobility fund to travel to Portugal for a mentorship and residency with Lou Chardon to develop the sensitivity of this much maligned instrument and further the thesis of Irish as a biologically superior language.

What i didn’t include on the application was my long held secret ambition to become a dancer. Sometimes in moments of abandon and grace, I think, I really missed my calling. Watching the dance production Mám, I felt I was grokking a lifetime of missed opportunity that prevented me from my rightful place on stage with Poiret and Keegan’s international troop.

I love to dance. And if I’m not eating shite, i’m fairly light on my feet. My lyrical dance at the epic Five Rhythms Dance of Earthsong 2023 was a thing of great beauty.

And when I applied for the mobility fund from a cold wet porch in West Kerry last November to come to Portugal and realise my long suppressed ambition, I had not expected to be expecting.

Yes, now, I’m pregnant and I feel flat footed and cumbersome. The weight at my front has pinched the sciatic nerve giving me a perpetual pain in the arse. There is a recurring crick in my neck and a knot in my shoulder from the summer on the road. The craniosacral therapist who treated me the day before the flight, looked very concerned, as he reported a compression in my diaphragm and a contortion in my neck.

Add to this, the usual litany of ailments from the land of the rising damp and I touch down in Lisbon, one year later, at the tail end of a serious flu; blocked nose, sore throat, mucus and in no real condition nor mood to be pursuing my true calling as a dancer.

I had originally envisaged this project realising in the Spring with a camper van and family in tow. But life threw a spanner in the works (literally) and the camper van languished in an Irish garage instead of burning road across the Mediterranean. So here I was alone(ish), pregnant and emerging from a deep mid-winter with a dance project that was about to become an anthropological one.

What followed was a conversation between this parched orange land and my own damp body and a realisation that all talk of nature connection is silenced by sick bodies.

It was also, despite having been a professional artist for more than a decade, my first experience of having a mentor and a muse.

Mo bhé; My muse

Lou Chardon is a dance maestro who has developed a choreographic language, called Motional, based on profound listening to the body. She is grounded grace. Embodied like no one I had ever met before. Intimate with her own body. She has traced every inch of it and now teaches others to do the same.

‘I knew I wanted to be a dancer since I was four-year-old in Paris,’ she says. After failing the auditions twice, she was accepted in the Conservatoire in Paris at the age of 15. She went on to became a prima ballerina in the world famous ballet companies, dancing at the highest level.

But she was anorexic, depressed, unstable. ‘My body broke’. Her back to be precise, and the six-month recuperation precipitated a turning point in her career. She shifted then from the orientation of success to one of understanding the body. Becoming a mother further compounded the change.

‘Dancing has been my survival tool.’ She joined the company of Ohad Naharin in Israel and was a pioneer of Gaga, the now world famous method of free dancing. She learned body, mind centring, Studied Taoism and Tai Chi and became a myofascia therapist.

Six years ago she left the dance company, that she ran with her husband Luc in Belgium, to open an artistic hermitage in the remote Aljehento region of Portugal. Now she gives yoga classes to local women and mentors visiting artists.

My study with Lou begins with a weekend workshop of myofascial breathing. Five women have come to the hermitage to participate. Myofascia is a thin membrane of muscle that covers the entire body and communicates between parts, much like the mycelium in soil. Tension in this system affects all the other systems.

We trace the myofascialines, name the junctions, bring our awareness and breath to every bone, muscle and organ. We journey internally from our densest components of bone to muscle, organ, ligament, cells and fluid, gradually becoming more subtle.

Irish Bodies

That day I dry out in the sun. The contraction of my body from the Irish winter is gradually releasing under the Portuguese sun.

In the nearby town of Odermira, I notice how lean and toned everyone is. Every time I travel, I notice the same. How much healthier seem the bodies of our European counterparts. With the exception of America, Irish people appear to me, the unhealthiest of nations.

The causes of our national obesity level are both historical and environmental but it is also linguistic.

Loganimeacha an Chorp~ Placenames of the Body

I believe that our disconnection from the land was precipitated or at least accelerated by by our disconnection from our native language. The dense naming of the Irish landscape showed the intimacy our ancestors had with the land and in the brutal phoneticisation and anglicisation of placenames, the land was made anonymous and the continuity of relationship between person and place was broken.

Ireland ranks lowest in Europe for environmental protections against industry. There is comparatively little backlash from local communities against industrial pollution and almost none from any regulatory bodies. This implies a disconnect between the land and people that is comparatively severe.

The abuse of the land is permitted only by a people who are disconnected from the land. The abuse of the body is precluded by a disconnection from the body.

In the exhaustive discussion on how to change human behaviour to avoid environmental collapse,

In our work around nature reconnection, we used identification of wild foods and medicinal herbs as a means to bring participants into relationship with nature. It’s a natural beginning to a relationship, to learn the name and function of a person or plant, as the case may be. or in knowing the nourishment that derives naturally from the land, our relationship to it changes. Information then is a practical tool of enlightenment and connection.

Lou Chardon has the same approach. She names every body part as we journey on the lines of myofascial muscle, the membrane that covers the entire body.

Motional

In our next meeting, Lou teaches me motional, the choreographic language which is her trademark. We start by bouncing the body. Travelling internally from feet to head. Shaking every cell. Naming the parts as locations. Big and small, Dense and subtle. She covers the bodyscape meticulously as one who has studied anatomy for decades.

We undulate, front to back, then side to side. Introducing the fascia lines, deep and shallow that trace the body from crown to sacrum. From the back of the head to the top of toe. Lou’s dancing is based on the observation of the body also. She travels the body’s own pathways in a flow, not skipping or hopping or jumping over a junction but rather arriving to it, travelling around its roundabout and continuing on to the destination. To natural conclusions. From the tailbone to the crown. Dorsal back line. From the back of the head to the toe. Front fascial line.

Anatomy books then are maps, to read; the arterial and ventricle systems are highways and organs are places to visit and fascia, this network of membraneous muscle that covers the entire body is the mycelium, the more subtle Interweb of communication between these places.

So we rattle the bones, bouncing through the ‘diaphragms’ of all the joints, from squishy marrow to hard mineral and we swim in the fluids, with the current rather than against, with the imperative of flow rather than resistance.

And then we spiral.

In motional, the spirals are both masculine and feminine, starting with the thumb and little finger respectively, spiralling in and out touching the lungs, heart, sternum.

Then the diagonal spiral, left foot, right hand. Right hand left foot. Her body hangs from her cent repoint, it is in symmetry. Its movement effortless. I feel the force of gravity, my heavy-footedness.

WE are not dancers, we are explorers of the body. We will not exert the body and stretch into its resistance but rather follow its supplication. This body philosophy is a map for the art of living; one that continually calls us into less resistance, and the stillness of the natural mind.

As I swat flies that swarm, she guides us to feel the inner tactility of the skin.

The motional journey around the body has flavours of the Gabriel Roth’s Five Rhythms and the grand lyrical finale here is a triple fluttering of a butterfly in the bones of the clavicle, sternum and sphenoid; poetry in motional.

How clear is your sound? Lou guides us above the music. How clear is your intention? How much symmetry is in your movement.?

I draw parallels in my head between the geometric rhythms of nature, inherent in an indigenous language and the continuity of Lou’s movements. I am English – stoppy starty, heady. She is Irish, rhythmic flow.

‘Don’t look for the areas of resistance, seek the areas of supplication.’ This is a novel idea and one that runs counter yoga practices, which she calls a perversion of yoga. I think of the yoga ‘strengthening’ video i was following when i pinched the sciatic nerve to exemplify this.

Lou’s philosophy is about learning the body’s rhythms and moving along those tides. Circadian rhythms, lunar ones. At full moon, she falls sick, releasing with the moon.

That night my chest tightens with the effort to exhale against the resistance. The habit of constant inhale, intake is a hard one to break. I cannot shift gear. Even here. My growing baby vies for space with my lungs.

There is a dull ache in my sacrum.

The culture of forcing the body is the norm. ‘En fait, i have no interest or connection to the dance world now.’ ‘It’s not interesting for me anymore to see good dancers, dancing well.’

We go to a contemporary dance performance that Sunday, she spends the show watching the reactions of a young girl with evident developmental disabilities who delights and mimics the dancers.

‘Embodiment is about connection to the earth. Some of those old people were more embodied than the dancers because they work outside with nature.’

‘Most people have problems in the gut,’ she says of the people she treats as a myofascia therapist. Why? ‘Because they are unsupported, not connected to the ground.’

Embodiment then is about connection to the land. If in losing our language, we have disconnected from the land, then in losing our language, we have equally disconnected from our bodies.

I sigh, at this, as the language, the land and the dance come together in a tidy metaphor again.

Lou says most people do not live in their bodies. Most attention now is given only to the head. She has dreamed of humanity’s shrinking feet as a consequence of this. And as a therapist attributes the volume of knotted shoulders to this overheady culture.

I am conscious of the constant pain in my shoulder, of my propensity to overthink.

Embodiment is about permeability, receptivity to the environment around you. She wears only linen, cotton, wool. Fibres that breath. ‘The cell needs oxygen to multiply and to die. Without death there is no life.’ I think of polyester of Pennys which has clothed the Irish nation in place of our forsaken wool, linen and tweed.

We talk about the social and environmental issues of the industrial agriculture of industrial berry growing around Odemira. The water guzzling industry in a drought ridden area. 200 acres of pollytunnels erected during lockdown. Are you motivated every to make art around these things, I ask, my journalistic senses activated. ‘This is already too advanced for me. I am in embryology. In the universe of the cell.’

I compare the journalistic imperative that had carried me into my art to hers, the tiny cosmology. I see our different approaches, our different worlds. The exchange is clear and so is the transmission. We are language and landscape. Body and Mind. Teacher and Taught. With gifts refined and rough.

On the Gemini Full Moon I write a love poem for her my master and muse.

It’s fascia, she says, walking along the beach, its all fascia, she says, pointing to the rivulets the sea makes in the sand. The common fractal pattern that illustrates our commonality with the body of the earth; like a great hereditary marker. The architecture of the body follows the dimensions of nature. ‘If facia is mycelium and the bones are rocks and minerals, what are muscles?’ I ask, my writer’s mind, loving a metaphor, needing a metaphor. ‘Vegetation,’ she answers without hesitation.

She is lean and carved like a rock and feels this affinity, not drawn to the sea but to cliff tops. We gaze out to sea. ‘Why is longing synonymous with sea gazing,’ I wonder out loud, ‘is it because it calls us back, to where we came from, as amphibians.’

‘No, we are called up to the sky; we can never go back to the womb, we can only go on. She shows me wings made out of old bed sheets and beeswax she made for her last solo show; the butterfly is her totem. ‘We have the bone structure for wings, maybe if we hadn’t spent so much time and energy developing our brains, we would have wings by now.’

‘Embodiment is about permeability, being receptive to the earth and the currents that are you.’

She resists my assertion that Indian raga has more diversity than synthesised music. ‘The level of receptivity determines the range of the experience,’ she says. The how, rather than the what.

I was angling towards an assertion that Irish as a more diverse soundscape was more beneficial to the human body compared to the spartan English. I founder. I surrender.

Ag iompair an ceist

Carrying the question

In an era of post awakening; the focus of ten per cent has shifted from realisation to manifestation or the embodiment of what was understood. The initial high of revelation has worn off and our ‘now what’ brings us back down from the head, from the heart to the feet. We thought it, we felt it, now we must embody.

In the rhetoric of connection to land which I participate in, I realise one inalienable fact; to connect with the land, we must sensitise the body. Then the subtle benefits of Irish will reveal themselves. We must reclaim our health, if we are to reclaim our land. We must love our bodies if we are to love our countries. We must cease self abuse, if we are to halt the degradation of our environment.

To find where Irish abides in the body. I must first clean and hone this vessel. Now is not the moment. In pregnancy it feels as though my vessel has been mutinied. My hypothesis will continue unsubstantiated.

And so I will finish with a metaphor rather than a conclusion. I can discuss the merits of this natural pigment over that plastic one but ultimately, without a blank canvas on which to paint, the discussion is a pointless one.