Back to the Source

One Heart

by Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

When I returned to working on Every Falling Thing (EFT), I knew that one of my main interests was in going deeply into this poem. It was part of the basis for the first version of EFT, but we moved away from the poem, into flight in general, and a progression from falling to flight. This time around, rather than returning to the previous dance, I decided to go back to the source of my inspiration, this poem. It sets up an emotional atmosphere that feels important to work with. My cast and I have read, talked, and written about what the poem (or its parts) means to us, how we understand it, what it makes us feel. Knowing that not everybody has the same love of and relationship with poetry that I do, I was impressed that we all seemed to have a lot of the same associations with this poem, that we came to a lot of the same images and themes. Now, we're trying to figure out how to work with those, how to infuse the physical atmosphere of the dance with those things.

Upon reading a snippet of a quote about how poetry "works patterns and then rejiggers its patterns into different relations and constellations," I decided to recombine the words of this poem and see what happened. I don't know how or if they'll influence my choreography, but I thought I'd share a few of the new combinations.

The day was fastening the sky open.

Work is born of falling.

Heart flying

Wings inside you

day is born

Birds either falling or flying

open sky

the end of wings

first nothing is inside

every day heart falling

even the sky is work

Look--freedom!

fastening flying wings

to the sky