Body Prayer | mariebergbyhandeland

BODY PRAYER

The text was written for Dunce Magazine in the autumn of 2020.

Sissel Johanna Bakken (83) is a retired music therapist, and Marie Bergby Handeland (34) is a dancer and choreographer. They met in 2013 when Sissel was involved in Marie’s dance performance De Grønne (“The Green Ones”, 2015), and they’ve kept in touch ever since. They both prefer having just one thing on their to do-list per day, reading poetry, finding big old trees in parks, wandering around in graveyards making up tiny biographies about its occupants, and drinking breakfast coffee on Sissel’s balcony in Uranienborgveien in Oslo.

This text is based on conversations from winter to spring of 2020 relating to Sissel’s daily morning practice, which she calls kroppsbønn (“body prayer”). Marie’s interest in Sissel’s practice became the foundation for her newest work Kirkedanseren (“The Church Dancer”, 2020). This is a work where each audience member books a time slot in a church room to dance accompanied by an organ player who plays facing away from the dancer.

The Church Dancer gives every one of us the opportunity to be the main character. Besides our own baptism, wedding, and perhaps especially our own funeral, we rarely stand out as individuals in a church room. On the whole it is rare being in a church alone, and even rarer that one is free to let go of inhibitions and unfold physically there. In the autumn of 2020 The Church Dancer (co-produced by Black Box Theatre) takes place once a week in Grønland church, often referred to as the “Eastside Cathedral”. Upon arrival, you get to choose between three different moods for the organ music.

Marie: Can you explain what body prayer is and how you came up with it?

Sissel: Body prayer is a little dance I do every morning in my living room. I put on a piece of music, preferably with a female vocalist, close my eyes, and move as I want to for about seven minutes. For me it’s a very good way to start the day. I have been doing this for three years now after taking a summer course in Sufi whirling in 2017. Every morning in this course, the leader would put on music for seven minutes while we each moved with our eyes closed. One of these mornings I had an especially nice experience while warming up. I began to move slightly, starting from the soles of my feet emanating up through my body, and I simply had an Aha! moment: That I could do something so small, which had such a profound effect on me. In that moment I decided I would do this every morning when I get home.

Marie: What is it about the body prayer that makes it such a good way to start the day for you?

Sissel: Being present in the moment, noticing how I feel right now, today, that’s what the body prayer is great for, that I experience it quite concretely instead of being caught up in thought – it is a reality that I am sensing with my body. “Oh wow, am I really this tired today?”. Moods of sadness can often arise, and there is nothing wrong with that, because there’s been a lot of it in my 83 years of life. On the contrary I’m often grateful for the sadness, and sometimes the tears also start to flow by themselves without me thinking of anything special. It’s more a general feeling of melancholy and sorrow that is present in the body while I am in body prayer. Often the tears come because it feels like something melts inside of me, as if something around my inner core is melting, so I can get right into it. But now I haven’t cried in a few days. This morning was more like: “Oh wow, that neck is really stiff!”. I didn’t know how stiff my neck was until I did the body prayer.

Marie: It sounds like you get a very subtle connection to your own body by paying attention to it in this way every morning. You find its daily nuances, in a way?

Sissel: Yes exactly, I really notice how my body is doing, all the way into its inner core. I work with directing my attention inwards, like how I imagine a seed works to be able to start growing. I like to pretend that every morning I’m a tiny seed deep down in the soil, down in the darkness of the earth, that’s where it happens.

Marie: Almost like a daily birth?

Sissel: Yes, indeed. A daily birth. Often I wake up feeling groggy, tired, or sad, with little motivation for a new day. Through the daily birth I reach other places with different moods. The dance gives me the feeling of really belonging to something larger than myself, which is a huge daily relief. To not have to carry everything yourself, but that there’s something more. That there are other forces.

Marie: Hm. A huge daily relief. That sounds beautiful. I don’t think I have access to that.

Sissel: Well, it might sound more impressive than it is. It's more like a small consolation, a hope I find in my body that helps me get going. Do you have any ways to feel the nuances of your body in your everyday life?

Marie: Hmm. No. Not in such a conscious way as you. I think I'm pretty bad at taking care of my body. I think of your body prayer, first and foremost, as a way to take great care of yourself. I have no such regular self care ritual or practice. The closest I can get to what you describe is my newly discovered relationship to the instrument torader (diatonic button accordion). I often play it a little when I wake up. I’m a beginner and I’m drawn to the actual sound in all its simplicity – to play long notes on it while singing long notes on top. It’s a nice way to start the day for me. And what's coming out of me these mornings somehow reflects how my body feels, how I feel, it says something about how I’m doing that day, maybe. Some days I cry, and I’m moved by the sound of the instrument – there’s a vulnerability to it. It also feels very private, like your body prayer. It’s something I do just for myself. I remember earlier this winter you told me that not even Bjarne (Sissel’s husband) is allowed to witness your morning body prayer, that it is more private and intimate for you than all those years you spent dancing with your eyes closed in groups of other people. Why is the body prayer more intimate? Because the practice of closing your eyes is quite similar, right? Is it the word prayer that makes it more private?

Sissel: Yeah, I think so, but I’m not able to say that I completely know why. The fact that I often start crying, I don’t want anyone to see that, not even my husband.

Marie: But is there a greater likelihood of crying when the practice is defined as prayer, rather than if it were not? For me, to make room for crying, I have to be able to concentrate. When I'm concentrated I'm devoted, in a way. I’m safe, and I’m safest alone. Talking to you makes me interested in the word prayer, because I notice that I have an aversion to it.

Sissel: Yes, by calling it prayer I am addressing something greater. With that, the experience grows beyond myself. To me it is a spiritual practice. For the woman who taught it to me, Pernille Overø, dance is by definition prayer. Everything she danced was an inquiry into something bigger – this greater thing that some people call God. I've become a Christian, you see.

Marie: When?

Sissel: Through the 90s, I think, consciously. Through dance, therapy, and dreams I became a Christian. Not verbally, not through thought. I have read very little in the Bible.

Marie: So you’ve become a Christian through physicality?

Sissel: Yes, you could say that. To say that I come in contact with the divine when I dance sounds a little grandiose, it’s a little too halleluja for me, and I don’t like that. So I would rather repeat what I said earlier, that something melts in me that brings me closer to a core that is truly me with a capital M. And that core belongs to, and is associated with this “something”, which is a lot bigger than little me. One can say a lot about God, but one of the things I like to say is that God is always greater, regardless of definition. When I turn on the music and close my eyes in the morning I feel like I’m being seen and embraced by something bigger than myself.

I have long used the word ageless when I dance. In the ageless room I carry all my ages with me, and that frees me from just being 83 year old Sissel. I carry with me a lot of physical practice and experience from a long life, and now I deserve to indulge in being free, and the right to think that what I’m doing is good enough. There’s a place beyond right and wrong, says an old Rumi quote, and for me, dance is that place. Maybe it doesn’t really have that much to do with the fact that I'm a Christian, I don’t know. I feel a kind of devotion and maybe fervour in me when I dance. I feel most real in my body prayer every morning. Yes, ageless and real.

Marie: That is inspiring to hear. Devotion and fervour are complicated words, I think, and they’re becoming increasingly more so. There’s something childish about them, as if they belong only to those who are experiencing something for the first time. As if as an adult I should be a little ashamed if I behave too fervently, too devout, I don’t know... I can feel embarrassed when I surrender completely in front of others. I quickly feel a need to tone it down, to behave, in a way, to pull myself together. Nevertheless – adults who do not have complete control but still surrender completely to their bodies is one of the most beautiful things I can think of.

Sissel: That’s nicely put. Devotion and fervour are words that have come back to me again, now that I’m so old. I don’t care anymore, you see. I trust my body and I don’t care about societal norms. It's a good feeling – you can look forward to that.

Marie: Hehe, yes.

Sissel: What kind of experience do you want to give the participants in The Church Dancer? Are you looking for that kind of devotion in the church room?

Marie: No, not necessarily. I facilitate a place where one can feel free and unseen, a private experience akin to your body prayer. But with that said, the church room is something completely different than a private living room. It’s a large public space. Whether one is a believer or not, it’s a charged atmosphere, and one does not escape the fact that one is dancing in the “house of God”. I think anyone who books time to dance in there will somehow deal with themselves in that context, deal with what one allows oneself to do with the body in a church room, and how it feels. Does one feel small surrounded by such magnificent architecture? What kind of guidelines for right and wrong behaviour in a church live in each and every one of us? I'm not so interested in finding answers to these questions, which certainly depends on a number of factors – what kind of relationship you have to the church from before, to believing, or not believing, the relationship to one's own body and its movements in general, to dance, to organ music, to magnificent architecture, and the feeling one gets in aesthetic spaces. I’m interested in how one deals with it, and the friction between the private and the public that arises in each and every one of us. Or maybe you don’t actually feel that much, maybe you lie down in a corner and just listen to the organ music. That’s fine too.

Besides, church dancing is its own tradition. By me choosing this title the work places itself in the physical history of the church. On one hand, the place of the body and dance in Christianity (and all religions) has always been important. The dance has been, and still is, associated with contact with the divine, and a celebration of the fellowship between people on earth. On the other hand, dance and the body throughout the church's history has been a topic of discussion, where the meeting between dance and the church's powerful (men) has often ended with prohibition and excommunication. Dance in the church room, and especially performed by female bodies, has a long history of being associated with sin, forbidden desires and looseness. Thus, body and dance have in part been cowed and disgraced in the history of the church, and have contributed to a general bodily shame in society. This is all there as a rich backdrop for what I want to give the audience. What kind of experience did you have when you danced in The Church Dancer?

Sissel: I was very surprised by my own reaction. I was gripped by a feeling of strong embarrassment when I entered the church. This came to me completely unexpectedly. I was taken by surprise in a way, and I noticed a limit in me that I had no idea existed. I'm used to both being, and dancing in church rooms, so I was basically unsure whether or not this was going to be a special experience for me at all. But I was hit by a feeling of embarrassment I remember from childhood, in the late 40’s, where one was supposed to behave properly, not take up too much space, not show who you are. I was struck by an experience of abandonment during my dance. It reminded me of being in the high mountains, where the space around you is immense. I don’t thrive high up in the mountains. I become tiny, almost annihilated there. That same feeling also appeared in the large church room.

Marie: Interesting how you experienced such an unexpected sense of embarrassment. Maybe you’d like to book another session, test a different organ sequence, and see if something will be different? Not that it’s a goal to make the embarrassment go away, because maybe that’s actually what made the experience interesting for you.

Sissel: Yes, I’d like to book another session – I’m curious to know how I’ll experience it next time.