TURIYA AUTRY
  • Home

Self Care When You're Dancing with Skeletons

1/14/2015

0 Comments

 
I remember Union Avenue, and a neighborhood where everybody looked more like me. Ironic that, as a child, being in N/NE Portland during the summer  was an all-Black experience. There were no white neighbors. We walked to visit with my great-grandmothers neighbors and friends up the road, and cabbed anywhere further. Lloyd Center was an outdoor mall, and as teens we avoided specific downtown spots that were hang outs for racist skinheads.  Then crack came…

Now, a  few decades later; I stand only half a mile from my great grandmother's former house, that now is home to my father. I see two youngish yuppy white women jogging down MLK, in expensive running gear. Everyone sitting in the coffee shop, that I just exited, is white. Sometimes, I just want a cup of tea without a gentrifying reality slap across the face and reminders of community lost. 

Portland has changed. 

I'm less than two weeks form the opening of Roots, Reality & Rhyme: The One-Woman Show. Rehearsals and practice are acts of repetition, with required emotional engagement. Feels like pulling all of the skeletons out of the closet and asking them to dance. The role of the actor is to inhabit the character, embody the scene and NOT act...  So I am becoming a better dancer. 

Gliding my way over muddied, potholed places of memory; sometimes I still act surprised to find my shoes dirtied. As if I could walk through repeatedly unscathed! I court the geography of my past,  mend the wound of a break-up, adjust to being without either of my grown-ups living at home. I am living alone, for the first time in my life. 

I know this place, this intensity of emotion and expression, where it is just me and the bones, left alone to twirl after twilight.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Turiya Autry

    A  positive motivational force encouraging people to look more critically and lovingly upon the world in which we live. 

    Archives

    March 2016
    May 2015
    January 2015
    September 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014

    Categories

    All
    News
    Projects
    Thoughts For The Day
    Welcome

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home