LSH
Leanne Stewart Haugh
The Daily Grind...
During lockdown, there were days when any form of 'travel' was discouraged and heavily controlled by the authorities. Fortunes may be read in the tea leaves...but on one day, a landscape appeared in the bottom of my coffee cup. It became a daily escape from both monotony and the containment of walls, to welcome these coffee cup landscapes. Especially, when I longed for unfettered access to open spaces.
The COVID-19 Years:
Dancing in the Basement Series
About
What becomes of the human spirit, when it is confined to one space and enjoys only limited, or highly controlled freedoms?
Our homes became our fortress of isolation. In a time of The Great Pandemic, they transformed into barriers to protect us from infection. The solution to frantic calls for the enforcement of 'social distancing'. Emergency laws were passed, in late night sittings of elected and unelected officials. Soldiers began patrolling the streets, alongside police officers and curfews were enforced.
The walls of our homes were a point of stillness. They became a fixed, unchanging point, in an ever-changing world of news stories, fear, rumours and (mis)information surrounding the novel coronavirus.
Our walls became the focus of our formerly busy lives and contained our 'new normal' within that space. They formed our boundaries and our thresholds. Our lives shrank to be contained within those walls. Rules on when, or how we could leave that fortress and with whom we could associate were hurriedly enacted as laws. Inanimate, fixed and unmoving. Time stretched like the walls around us.
Walls contained the space and within them the figure was in turn contained within that space. Controlled.
However, the figure was not fixed; was not inanimate; and could not remain still for long. Inside those four walls there must be some necessary expansion out into that space. A response to all of that stillness. A small, yet necessary protest against the containment of life.
The body stretched and reached out, as if to fill every inch of that restricted space. Filling it with energy. Filling it with the alive-ness. A crossing over point, exploring the lived experience. It is a study in movement and all that cannot be fixed, or contained. It is an attempt to breach thresholds and cross into a liminal space.
A body may be contained, or regulated and restricted in every way. Luckily, the spirit is a liminal entity.
"I am alive. I will not be confined within this space.
This body will choose movement. This body will choose to dance. "
