I've been thinking a lot about ugly. So much of what has attracted me about goth culture is the romanticizing of what is unknown, frightening, or downright unsavory. The older I get, though, the more I am of necessity and by dint of simply surviving coming to embody the Crone. I'm over 35, and my own face frightens me when I encounter it in bright sunlight at, say, eleven in the morning. The ravages of time. My teenaged self prisoned in my chest like Merlin in the tree where the sorceress Nimue put him.
This becomes an issue in photo shoots, too. With all the technology available, I could of course get rid of the eye bags I've got (in which small rodents could happily snuggle for the winter, I assure you--since I've been averaging five hours' sleep a night since I got the puppy). I choose not to. I kind of like them. They are baroque, ornate, puffy, the tarnished color of bruises on bananas. They're mine. They're the map of a life, just as my tattoos are.
Right now I'm choreographing an Alien piece, which is meant to stand for the utter joy a creature feels at being solitary and unobserved, and therefore free. The audience will get the voyeur's pleasure of spying on what a lethal predator does when she's alone and simply puttering around after waking up from a nap.
Look in the mirror. What do you see? Creatures that have their eyes in the front of their head are predators. The title of the piece of music I'm using is "Bathed in Love." I've always thought that the predator/prey relationship is one of love.
What does all this have to do with ugly? Just that I'm freelancing more at home rather than being out in the world, and I'm acutely aware of what a toll the beauty myth takes on my everyday dealings, how such nonsense as framing others' expectations saps my power. When I'm home I don't have to wear makeup, or even clothes. I don't have to bind my breasts so they look perkier.
Reminds me of when I shaved my head, and my mother-in-law asked me why I did it, and I said it was because it's so easy to be pretty, and so much more interesting to find out what's underneath the obligations to delight the eyes of other people.
The root of the word "glamour" is the same as the one for "grammar," and points to the relationship between Logos and spellcraft. The ability to put people under your spell, irrespective of what you look like. Reminds me of some of my favorite lines from Yeats: An aged man is but a paltry thing/a tattered coat upon a stick/unless soul clap its hands and louder sing/for every tatter in its mortal dress.
As youth flees from us, what recourse do we have but to develop the spirit, the mind, the heart, all brimming with the delight of a life richly and exquisitely lived from within, with awareness, plugged into the five (in my case, six) senses?
Who wants to see ugly bellydance? Isn't dance supposed to galvanize the onlooker with its beauty, strength, flexibility? Should all art be beautiful?
The movements I'm thinking of to depict this effort of carving Medusa out of rock where her own gaze has prisoned her has to do with the grace that comes from awkward.
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