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The next day I was in the communal kitchen making banana bread when Thelma entered the room. She and I had noticed each other before, sharing silence together with occasional eye contact and toothless grins across the table together at different moments during the past week. She was there at the residency with her young stepson and I was consumed in my own affairs. She noticed what I was making and enthusiastically decided that she too would make a banana bread, parallel to mine. Her stepson loves banana cake and she wanted to comfort him, the only young person at this adult residency center. Together we participated in this kitchen choreography - me, squinting, estimating the metric system measurements; her, yelling from the pantry asking where I’d found such and such ingredient. We decided mine would have walnuts and hers would not. 

We closed the door and shook together for 30 minutes. Without music, we were in silence, except for when we shook our vocal chords or when our shaking made sound rattling against the surface of the space. We communicated clearly that this could be generative for both of us, and she proposed that we periodically film each other in slow motion throughout, all while continuing to shake. It was deeply amazing. 

When you clean a rug outside, slamming it up and down, the dust particles float in the air. They are visible in a ray of sunlight, rearranging, eventually to settle again, but slowly, and changed. The rearrangement is so powerful, so disruptive. We, two dancers with our training in our bones, had an experience of obliteration. We were without reference and for a moment, we got a glimmer of ourselves. 

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