Shante' Sojourn Zenith

“The poetic is humans encountering things bigger than themselves,” a mentor told me once. My immersion in Lecoq-based theatre was an incredible apprenticeship to "the poetic," those gestural images created in performance that transpose the audience into a different reality.

The poetic carries you into a dreaming state, a space of enacted longing. Here, times coexist, consuming emotions are expressed, and inner lives are witnessed. In these moments, acts of aisthesis take place—a kind of soul essence passing between audience and performer. As silences thicken and deepen, the listening itself becomes a palpable tension, a substance conjured out of shared breath.

How do we create change when we are met with resistance? When we experience those moments that “the wall” comes up?

You know the feeling. Your breath is tight, the muscles of your jaw contorting, a warm flush rising to your face, a tingle in your body like maybe you’re going to faint, a hollowness in your chest. And inside you, a motor that starts going so fast the world around you is a blur and all you want to do is yell or hide or punch something or run away. Survival mode. What they call fight or flight.

 Marshall Rosenberg, the psychologist who created Non-Violent Communication, would use giraffe ears and hand puppets to teach rooms of business people how to listen to their feelings and needs. Apparently, it is almost impossible to feel shame and self-consciousness while you are watching a puppet show.

Desire lines cover this territory.
Small acts of rebellion.

A refusal of the concrete roads restraining us in a prescribed expedition—the straight line wounds covering this land that keep us estranged from the wilderness—never intersecting or questioning or doubling back.

Not that prescriptive path for us.

Instead, we shed our social bodies. Leaving behind our skins, we journey into the wilderness of ourselves.