What was this performance for: How to heal the fissure? Flower the sword? Mend what is broken? How to create a vocabulary for such intentions? There is a profound fracture in contemporary reality caused by the concept of separate identities. We are cut off from everything else and this creates a wound. This ritual hoped to call attention to the need for a healing process, socially and culturally, by mimicking an individual brain’s healing process when it has suffered deep trauma.

Life, a woman in a hospital gown and a diaper, placed a porcelain bowl on the floor. Within the bowl were two mangoes. The brain’s hemispheres, each represented by a young man dressed in a long pink dress with many ruffles and furrows, approached the bowl. The two men used uniquely stylized movements. The young man who is the right hemisphere approached the bowl visually, intuitively, synthetically, inductively, integrally, non-judgmentally, etc. The young man who is the left hemisphere approached the bowl verbally, rationally, quantitatively, deductively, critically, etc. Each ate a mango.

The hemispheres separated and tossed the bowl between them, laughing as they did so. The bowl accidentally fell and broke on the floor. The right and left hemispheres fell simultaneously.

Life recites this verse:

“BRING ME THE BROKEN BOWL,
That hands receive its weight.
A stemless gladiolus.
To warm it between.
The rift is where
A park trembles its leaves
Of I nest you, of light that whistles
Between melody and midnight.
The sweat from so much flying
Blinks the become eye.
Around a copper light
It hardens, sword.
A finch fastens the shadow
Like rock, like a thimble snug.
Planting on the socket’s red.
Make touch greener.”

The hemispheres draw a circle in red lipstick around each bowl fragment. Then they connect the circles, enacting a “dance of wounds” based on each fragment shape.

Now right and left, who have exhausted their physical vocabulary of respect, arrive at each fragment and lift it, attempting to take it to life.

But:

1. Everything, even their own hands, seems literally miles away.
2. Everything seems to be moving rapidly as if in an earthquake, hard and fast.
3. Everything is so out of focus that it is difficult to distinguish.

The hemispheres have emptied all the red circles. Life lays them on the floor on their sides, like two fetuses. Then she begins to cascade stemless gladiolus flowers over them. Each time one of their bodies feels a flower fall upon it, it twitches. When life has finished raining flowers upon them, she sets the shards of the bowl on the floor between their bodies, in the nest she has made there.