PRUE LANG

Prelude #2
(Whalerider writing)
:

“Ferocity is what people fear” she said.

Her, as fierce: and, the word fierce,
apt for the time we are now living and dying in.

Prelude #1:

A photocopy of Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 essay
‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (in Men Explain Things To Me: And Other Essays, Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2014).

16 July 2020

She: Apartment, Port Melbourne, Victoria
I: House, Western suburbs, Melbourne

I shall
prove
I am not
a
derivative.
This is not a game for the young.
I ask - What?
What is here and what is not?
Where is the fierce
Point
The sharp end of
Rigor?




Dance theatre tells us
reiteratively:
men women men women men, men, men, women needing men.
Emotion story breath dirt
Chaos pulse emotion story.
And so, I side-step
into abstraction and potency.
I say: He empowers women – ‘he’ – does ‘he’ do it?
As I say this, I think sharply, in a quick of a thought: a dancer,
African, American, Woman:
en pointe.
Focus borne from feet
Grew into
an up-expand
A great thrust, heaven ward and out ward
Power, Life, Thought, Breath
Story not story,
Force that was fierce:
She,
She was gamma rays of sun.
Potential always feels infinite. On with the dance. Remember:
Nothing is as it seems.
What happens at the pointy end of thinking?




The woman and environ
collide and integrate:
They enfold.
I mentor young women.
I am keeping my fur.
I am reaching for the ballet:
in nurture.
Once I was a superstar:
Stellar.
Now I am here
And
plant, salmon, octopus, sharp-shooter.
I am a thriving stealthy upstream swimmer
And
TH- R- I - VE means something new,
And potent
And up-pushing
And devil may fucking care.
Fierce was a language, a way of saying something:
Like 'Deadly'.
It is the 80’s, New York, the gay movement, pride, queering, pumping up:
‘you go girl!’
you go.
This has not been killed by the killers:
Because,
It can’t be.

deux
.
.
.
.
trois.

quatre
....



.
,

.

six
..
.

huit >
neuf
.
.
__

Excerpt:
'Fierce the Salmon:un á dix'

Moss
Moss
Moss?
Yes.

Nature does its work it takes time and we see that it works
Its doing its work and its working
And every now and then you recalibrate.
Pause.
It’s a beautiful way of looking at a body of work,
Remembering the depth of connection with Deborah Hay – now she is a whalerider,
while also being a pig!
We are not slicing heads off
But we are, though.
It is
It is short term thinking.
Ha!
I can see you coming up through the cracks:
Eco-dancing.
Amazonian
while unable to be:
Fierce.
Pointe shoes flung akimbo etched into historical moves.
The dismissal of the dancer is brutal.
Sadness and fury.
Caps on, legs down, wait to surge,
And dance on into a field of expanded, luminescent possibility.
“You fucking-go girl
YOU GO”!

un

cinq

sept

dix

PRUE is a choreographic-explorer based in Naarm/ Melbourne.
Currently in lockdown, she has turned her 2m x 2m living room mat into a choreographic laboratory.
Her daily explorations draw from the octopus, the sensorial, the somatic, plants, biology, philosophy, feminism and 28 years of embodied methodologies. She collaborates via zoom, using Theraputty. New projects are brightening slowly, until they can once again thrive.

It is not what a person makes, or creates, but the rigour of an arrival at something;
the sheer force of energy and concentration needed to surge to place IS a force.
It does not matter what it is, but how it came to be.


It is like my black swatch cap with FURIOUS penned in silver thread.
The rigour of arrival: one word on a hat and
the how behind its being there.

PRUE - RESPONSE in IMAGE (#1): 'Lang-F'
Photographer - Amelia Ducker

PRUE - RESPONSE in IMAGE (#2): 'SALMON & Lang-phasmid'