THE DEATH SONG RROJECT

About eighteen years ago, I began a three month course of, 'Body Voice Work' it was called the 'Death Song Project'. Perhaps what I've written is not the wording I read when I first saw the course advertised. It seems, things are like that for me. At the time they are occurring, it is everything, when it's finished, it is finished. However  that's not quite the case either, because eighteen years later I'm still doing that work, with the same people. However, the terrain and the expression of that original darkly- watery- wavy place,  have bloomed into a land of calm and fruitful living.

Very early in the Body Breath work, I felt compelled, to express the tidal wave of emotion that engulfed my body. Sound was the expression that opened a way. Not soft sounds, or pretty sounds, not sustained and melodic notes, not breathy or raspy sounds, rather my sound was a long sustained scream, only interrupted, by the slow suggestion of another movement, a movement that eventually took my awareness to different parts of my body. But, to begin with, I felt that my body was a large gray impenetrable concrete block..

 The concrete block had been an image in my mind's eye for as long as I could recall. Now I felt myself to be the heart of the image, and I began to scream  in rage and terror at my isolated state. I screamed in fear and rage as I crouched there in my buried, airless tomb. One day during a session, I'd crumbled to the floor, the teacher knelt beside me and asked, 'Where are you?' I pointed to a picture another student had cut out and pined to the white washed concrete wall. "There! I'm there!' I said.  The picture was the face of a dead baby, surrounded by rubble in some war torn part of the world.

Early in the work, creative expression, appeared and helped rein in some of the flood of energy. The expressions came in the form of writing, and art works.  And so began my my journey out of  the prison. I floated, trudged, clawed and crawled my way out of the life long mire of destruction. Exhausting as the avalanche of energy was, to finally know I was alive was a miracle. The struggle out of the hideous terrain, continued for years. I don't know when the terrain changed, but again, it came in the form of creative expression. The key to my prison was creativity! For me to believe that, was as hard, as it was to look inside the prison of the block of gray concrete that contained an almost dead baby, with barely enough breath to survive.
                                     (To be continued)
16/3/12   Tushie