Daylighting

​In December 2021 I was part of an ensemble of dancers from The Dance Collective on stage at the Crown Theatre, Perth. We had the privilege of bringing to life the choreographic vision of Company Director Charisse Parnell and Assistant Director, Andrea Chan.  

"What about us?" began as an impassioned response to the impact of fast fashion on humans and the more-than-human world. It grew to encompass a bigger picture of destructions and the possibility of healing and repair.

I write and I dance . . . they seem very different activities.

Until a rare confluence shows the depth of the connection.

In the image above we are dancing a once-poisoned river restored to life. It was profoundly felt. Many of the dancers and members of the audience shed a quiet tear.

Soon after this event I spent a week in silence and solitude camping by a river. I do this most years as a necessary complement to the intensity of being part of a major performance. We are (mostly) amateurs, in the true and original sense: "lovers of".  

During my time alone the surface waters of intense activity cleared and I came to understand that we had danced "daylighting". This realisation brought me a tenderly painful species of joy.

My essay Landscape Manifest, was recently re-published in an Australian journal. Re-reading it reminded me of just how much daylighting matters.

"In grief it is common to dream that the dead have returned to you. The exquisite relief is a fair measure of the depths of the pain you do not dare to plumb.  I had this experience in waking life when a friend, a poet, told me of ‘daylighting’. 

​Daylighting is the name given to the practice of liberating rivers or streams long ago buried and built over [. . .] I was heart struck hearing this. Having the impossible suddenly presented as possible showed me the depth of a grief about the world I had long buried and concreted over. It opened up hope. "

from Landscape Manifest


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Two rivers, one world