Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Greta Berlin’s
Woman
A record of a movement session during Sandra Reeve’s Ecological Body movement
workshop, held in Dorset, England in June 2009.
Photographs
and Sculpture: Greta Berlin
Information:
Greta Berlin
Website: http://gb.c8.com/biography.html
Sandra Reeve
Move into Life website: www.moveintolife.co.uk
PhD Thesis: www.moveintolife.co.uk/EcologicalBody
Ecological Body Website: www.theecologicalbody.blogspot.com
I am trembling. Am I making
myself tremble? Generating a
palpable strength of feeling that
will demonstrate (to me or others
or both?) my capacity to
resonate with this lump of black
metal [grief]?
Do you see? She is outraged and I am there. Here. How can I learn not to take it
personally? Or how can I learn to take it personally?
This is my training. I am curdled into imagining that my mother, feeding me, looked
down – perhaps only once – with a gaze of such unbridled outrage that I, in that
instant, assumed the mantle of shame for all the acts of anguish ever perpetrated by
man upon woman. So that, were I a tree surgeon, every branch removed would be a
breast hacked off.
{Do you see? There. Her breast hacked off. I’m certain it was done ever so
exquisitely, tenderly, by a woman surgeon even. But the result is her breast hacked
off.}
She stands perhaps two foot above me. Taller than me. Was she Dutch? In my
curdling, I/we cannot look up at a much taller woman, two foot taller, without feeling
ever so slightly Freudian. Her height makes pity impossible. Let that be a lesson to
you, objects of pity. Don’t overextend yourselves.
{Later I learnt about this tendency to overextend in movement. That’s why I’m
always hurting myself. What is this “Oh, I must just stretch everything until it
really hurts”? Tell me.}
Looking up I see rage and pain and pride and contempt and absolute determination.
In the detached space that surrounds Woman I can only quiver. All a-quiver. I never
knew her. She is an object that induces a slight aspen quaking. Shaking like a leaf. I
want something.
I settled on her almost immediately. Though she is turned away for decency’s sake I
have been watching her. With my trained male gaze.
I have largely resisted the inclination {a sloping, leaning, tilting word that I like
better than ‘temptation’. I think I don’t need Mephistopheles to tempt me. I can
just lean almost effortlessly into that which I disapprove of. It’s alright Ma.} largely
resisted the inclination to plan what I might do with her. Jesus, did you hear that ‘do
with her’?
Except for one idea – I have had the notion to take off my shirt and to press my heart
against her chest, there where her left nipple once was. It seems an outrageous act,
even in my imagination. I start to imagine people’s possible responses. I remember
this habit of drifting into imagining what people will think. It seems incompatible
with the way of moving I am studying. I stop planning.
When the time comes, I approach her cautiously, as I might approach a bull:
Greta.
I want something.
{In fact, this is how I started. Stamping and flapping. But I have
only just remembered. So it reads as if I started with the mouth,
chin and arm things. I did not. I started with stamping and
flapping. I remember how the tears began to boil. My tears. They
were hot, not wet. Desert tears.}
I cannot match her feet. They are huge. (Big feet mean a big penis.
Greta’s sculptures have vulnerable penises. Able to be wounded. My
feet are small compared to Woman’s feet. SHUT THE FUCK UP.)
With every footslap I feel myself falling short of Woman. Could she footslap, she
would footslap to make the gates shake and the metal doors clatter and rattle and
clang rustily. I peter out. I subside in standing. Actually I am better at standing. Well,
stronger. I feel more able to match her. Why am I trying to match her? Yes, I can try to
mimic her, echo her, mirror her. Like that I can feel my way through moving (en
tatonnant, feeling my way like a blind man with a stick) into how she might feel. No,
through moving, I can feel my way into how she makes me feel.
Or I can simply talk to her in moving, through moving and, in some way I’d prefer
my children didn’t challenge me to describe precisely, she can talk back.
Standing again I become more aware of that excised breast. Amputated breast.
{I Google ‘amputate’ to check if it only applies to limbs. It’s OK, it applies to any
body part surrounded by skin. But the Google search says:
Guttle - is to eat greedily, raven or pig. That’s raven as in ravenous, not as in Tower
of London. I’m sure.}
Then I attend to the remaining breast. The breast that is left. The right breast. The
outstanding breast. It is desirable. Dear God. Giving it too much attention seems
disrespectful to the flat side. I consider touching the great flat scar with my fingertips.
In the name of art I could do anything. Instead I step behind her and find her real
vulnerability. Remember, she has no penis. The wound is to her spine. The open
wound. Her backbone is exposed, open to the weather.
I touch it without hesitation. Finger it. I trace its lumps (as her not-extant breast must
once have had lumps) and its contours with interest. Tenderness comes. Compassion.
A wave of love. Not overwhelming. A warm wave, sloshing. No threat. To touch her
back like this is entirely intimate. And, since it uses fingertips and crosses the divide
between our separatenesses, it is erotic. About 73% erotic, at a guess. I drift into
swaying body. I sway into drifting mind.
Now Prapto is really here. I can contemplate Woman again. I am glad of Prapto. Glad
of Woman. Standing back, it’s drawing to a close. I can settle. Watch and settle. Rest.
Can you rest, standing Woman? You help me to rest. Can I help you to rest? Do you
want to rest? Do you want to lead a campaign to remind those with body shapes and
features that deviate from the norm that they don’t need plastic, silicone, reshaping,
remoulding; that they are good to go as they are? Can I help you lead? Or rest?
Perhaps I can be quiet now, waiting for Prapto to finish. There is settling to be done.
And all the time there is Greta – intermediary. Bringer of shape to feeling; bringer of
feeling to wire and metal and stone and plaster and paint; bringer of life to dead
Woman; bringer to the boil of everything that seethes and swarms. She is watching.
Probably. A wave of (imagined?) connection between me and Woman and Prapto and
Greta and the trees and the others with me – at last I feel them: as if I had been
walking along the beach for a mile without hearing or seeing the sea.
Become aware first of your own body structure, then of the environment and finally
of the others in the environment. Phew.
Finished. I’ve finished. Thank you.