As they approached the stage, Azure Bosom began a series of prolonged contractions that pushed their bodies irregularly in space, until the tension in their spines was vigorous and filled with danger. The hushing sounds became screams and the haunting “ahhhh” was a pelvic groan like trembling oceans on a still night. They rolled across the stage erratically, like women possessed, and their sounds were beings collapsing in mirrors, and someone of them sighed for “mama.” Then a chorus of all the different times and voices for that one woman issued forth like the burning bush, and it went on, the cry for “mama,” until Celine made a gesture for silence.

And then there was celebration. Celebration of menses; of why she can be daughter, why she can be mother. How girl from woman. And the widely esteemed Azure Bosom puberty rite began. The first lighting other than candles blazed out, red. The women began to touch their thighs, make like they were smelling their fingers, seeing something wondrous come from themselves. Their hips cut into space, became familiar with sex. And suddenly Stevie Wonder’s “Here I Am, Babeee, Signed, Sealed and Delivered” blasted throughout the Ovary Studio. Accepting menstruation as the key to womanhood, what made bosoms and ass possible, why mama exists, and love among us. The women in Azure Bosom became the female body exalted. As the Stevie Wonder song faded out, the women made clicking sounds with their tongues and rubbed their thighs and crotches in a moving kick series out of the arena, leaving the audience to continue the ritual until every woman greeted her flowing blood and rounded hips with unbounded thanks.

CLITORIS

Choreographed by Ixchell Buenavilla
Music by the Marvalettes, “Forever”

From the far right of the round stage Ixchell slithered and waxed, seeming to pull all that was pain and disappointment out of her body. Her hands and feet articulated wanting something that was not there, reaching to place some constantly evasive element in some other than herself, while her torso heaved and contracted toward her heart like she was a cavern or a prisoner. She was the cave and the light. And all women forced to nourish someone other than themselves were dangling in her fingers, watching themselves dissolve in another breath. Ixchell seemed to die right on the stage. So intense and stultifying were her motions that she grabbed the whole of the theatre into her suffering, and allowed no lapses of relief from complete suppression of self. The final posture of the dance was a contracted spread-eagle: hands, feet, knees, and neck flexed. Absolute despair in the archetypal sprawl of the ravaged woman. Ixchell drew out the torture until the last light was off. Her shadow suggested a four-day-old corpse.

HOW DO SHE DO

Choreographed by Celine
Music by the Isley Brothers, “Who’s That Lady?”