Dance
Share Article Mr. Easy Rider took me to the Hue train station. He was a gaunt gap-toothed happy man riding his ER cycle.
The next time you come to Hue you find me, I take you DMZ, Ho Chi Minh trail, Highway #1. He looked at me. You’re old enough to remember that I know.
Yes I’m young enough remembering our eight minute spin to the small red & pink art deco station seeing hearing smelling remembering V trains filled with scared young men and war equipment rolling north and south to fight the French, VC, Americans and ghosts.
Tribes of Australians performed luggage contortionist tricks manipulating mountain size rolling bags clacking up pink stairs. Tattooed blond feminists with white elephant bellies and Mohawk cuts mixed with retired well shoed businessmen and their smart bagged wives.
A diminutive Viet woman arrived on her motto with big goodie bags destined for transport. She struggled to unload everything and drag it upstairs to the shipping zone.
A bored mom waited with two rambling kids as loud European tongues played tag.
A detached thin well-manicured high heeled beauty either going home for a hot shower or heading north to take a sperm bath in the Hanoi skin trade sat alone.
The W.C. in the SIE 4 waiting room smelled sweet. A potent extract of high acidic aroma. Every blue plastic chair bolted to the floor was occupied.
All the film extras in a long running performance milled around playing bamboo flute river music. Old eyes remembered everything from years and tears swallowing dark natural amazement.
A young woman with delicate hands and perfect posture wearing scuffed white ballet slippers and a five-point gold star painted on her forehead turned to me.
Did you hear Mercy Cunningham, the dancer died.
No. What’s the story.
I study dance, that’s how I know. He was amazing. Dance is all about ambiguity, poetry and acceptance. He had independent detachment. He had creative imagination. He said dance was isolated yet cooperating and independent. He believed in the magic of dance.
When you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.
I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, a language in space, I said.
It’s more than that, said Tran a one-legged dancer leaning against nothing.
There are five rhythms in dance.
You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.
Really, said the woman.
Yes. Then you have a line, from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.
Chaos follows, a combination of circle and lines where male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.
After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.
She danced away.
Movement never lies.
Seeing through soft eyes I visualize a language in space, said Rita.
A spoken language dies on Earth every two weeks, said Tran.
Yes, said Devina. Storytellers sing and dance oral stories. The world is made of stories, not atoms. WE memorize seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies, create and exchange clan and tribal myths as children listen, memorizing, chanting, reciting songs and the dances of their ancestors. They receive and transmit future oral traditions.
Historians try to understand what happened through the arrow of time.
Cultural anthropologists try to understand how people communicated their stories, said Omar.
The more I see the less I know, said Leo. WE ride beams of light. Let’s dance.
