Ah! A portrait of Earthdance as it straddled the grand Gregorian digit flip into 2023…what words will do? One hundred-thirty bodies joined in the most delightfully cacophonic six day game of sardines this reporter has ever seen. See the camera pan through the winter-warmed halls! The blue light of fading December outside, bodies strewn in studios, on couches, floors, across one another, entwined, nuzzling, battling, napping, dripping about like a glaze of Dalian clocks a-melt. Time stopped at the pirouette tip of the spinning year! Once again the droves twirled off to classes, the sauna, a soup dinner, a song-circle in the twig hut elegizing the suffering hemlock, a dollar to fly down the hillside wood path-cum-sledding hill; affinity groups assembled; institutional futurings were discussed; personal ritual was invited; collective homage offered; poetry hung from the windows; talent was displayed on and off stage; audience and performer cooked down in the same stew; bass rocked the kitchen pots into the new year. Every chakra found home to spin in. For the first time in years Earthdance displayed its most marvelous and messy work of collective collage in the winter season. It felt like a homecoming (so says this chef - knife in one hand, pen the other). It felt like a declaration. A culmination and a beginning. The whole staff is new. The culture runs before and beyond. The great conversation of Earthdance rolls on; it is sometimes difficult; it is often revitalizing. Like the bane blessing of deep love, it flies the heights of fantasies and desire, stirs the depths of fears, anxieties, hopes realized and soured. But all of this contained in the sort of winter snow globe shake of the world's full rounded beauty - the ups downs and all around of being here. And at Earthdance, once more, we got to practice being here together. Bless your 2023!
Brett Roche
(Earthdance Residential Chef & In-House Bard)
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