CENA 11 X NATASCHA ZACHEO = Herd

Around the residence with Cena 11

I look at everything and can still remember that the elephant was and still may be an animal/arm/war object. However, in their struggle they update their own strategies daily. It isn’t a bloody battle, but one for the production of meaning. Within the boundaries of its memory images, the herd makes a practice out of the unexpected: its own memories; or, right this instant, the body hackers the memory needed to move on. Its hatching is slow, the recreation/birth is delicately dense inside each one. Much food is needed daily, not food matter to be eaten, but a ki to nurture. The trainings that remain in face of the deconstructed information. The objects with memories of 10 years back return in new technical uses the same way as it was necessary for many warriors to change their weapons across time.

From the possibilities of close and distant experimenting in the last few months, I can see that if in the past a body acted for another to move and the answer of the latter returned to the former as a way to hold, launch, fly into in time to hold back or shred the trajectory in space, today these verbs continue in grammar, but related to reveal, mold, absorb, unite. A herd is molded so that the maximum of history remains, a maximum that isn’t about quantity, but the quality of its yell, of its kiai. To hold the rock has nothing to do with throwing it into a clash, but with producing a frequency with a metal stick, not the wooden one that may be used in combat. The stick is made of metal like a sword, but doesn’t cut the wind in the daily handling practice. It is the body that moves it, like the sword en garde. The stick isn’t held. It is propped up by the flesh and modifies it against the landscape. It clashes into the body not to hold it, but to draw possibilities of other ideograms right there: as to search for the practice of a shodoh that writes situations.

In the circle of the elephants that beat bones when some herd information dies, rocks beat, but this is a life frequency in solitude keys and yells. Life and death aren’t only about opposites, but flux is needed in the maai. Foot that has the ground: hand, limb, torso that has the stick may generate ‘weapon’, ‘trunk’, ‘extension’, but not the submission of a body to another. Face that may become a noh theater mask – from the tense ones that spook evil spirits to the peaceful ones, to the old and the new ones – these masks that bring from the bridge what isn’t among the living anymore, that hatch chants that come out from the mouth and make everything happen. This: what is evoked from memory and wants a new possibility; an unspoken memory image that formulates the unexpected, revelations and beauty.

The territory the herd fights for may be the daily creation its own footprints, not to be reminded of the trail back, but perhaps to remember the way treaded knowing that they can’t go back for the most part, because the very past that has become a memory is constantly updated. Territory in the landscape without separation between fore and background that makes new ways appear, emerge, that make the doh to be cultivated, fed by the ki that is nurtured and moved at each moment. Anyone’s heart trembles when close to this territory flooded by frequencies as well as the movement that turns into an image in the memory of the elephants, the the plainest, most beautiful images. Brandishing elephant memories.

Natascha Zacheo studies warriors as well as dance. She is interested in swords, loves Japan since she was born and approaches practices in any action.

Image design: Natascha Zacheo

Translation Portuguese-English by Chris Ritchie: writer, poet, translator and partner of 7×7.