"For all those who've sailed with me"

After a night of blissful silence, I woke up to rain hammering on my tent’s roof. And while I was dry, of course the section of my oversized backpack that contained my clean underwear was not. Of course. But this was Lasqueti and you couldn’t be upset for too long! After all, our first workshop was about to be 

led by Stacy Murchison and Monica Strehlke, active company members of EDAM in Vancouver.

We explored movements in levels of space, learned some lifts and played with negative space. We examined bodies like scientists. Our partners lay limp and loose on the floor, the rest of us moving their arms, legs, hips, head, chest, to see what the body will do if you move it one way or another.  After dinner (including kale from Mark’s very own garden) I walked to the beach and scrounged for an oyster shell to take home for a souvenir. I think I might randomly take up painting and use it as a paint pallet. While the two kids Alberta and Nikko constructed an oyster shell tower, the rest of us sat on rocks and watched the sun set—witnessing something as beautiful as this:


We walked up the giant hill to Mark’s place, saw a HUGE black slug, lovely mini daisies, eating boysenberries on the way up. Now, much doesn’t happen on Lasqueti Island. It’s not exactly one of B.C.’s largest cultural centers. But this night was Arts Fest. There would be poetry slams and readings, visual art, and dance. But I skipped it. I wanted to keep this remote wonderland sacred from the outside world. Arts fest was another vestige of brief civilization that I wanted to avoid. 

Each day we had workshops and each day we ate delicious food. One day Mark cooked two of his own chickens! And let me tell you, if there was ever a time when I was going to break my vegetarianism and eat the most ethically grown meat possible, this was it. Instead, I had miso tofu, more of Mark's kale and brownies. Not too bad. My notes for each day include what the workshops covered--contact improv jargon quite useless for this blog or the number of times I saunaed that day. We hiked, we smoked Lasqueti's finest Lasquoobies. Drew had a guitar and would plays riffs and rhythms and we would make up songs to go along with them and sing them loud in the studio. We played charades. 

One night we had a live Harpist—a friend of Mark’s came down to play while we jammed. It was unreal. And all I could think was "I love my life, I love my life, I love my life." After the set had finished, the Harpist sat down with us and said, “It is so wonderful to be in the presence of people who move and live from that place and the people whose hearts outreach the extension of their bodies.” And it is. Being here I have been bludgeoned with a profound sense of gratitude. The phenomena about this workshop and maybe about this form of movement in general, is that you really get to know people. Dance is conversation between body and soul. We followed the contours of our bones in dance and found pathways to the heart. You listen to your partner and explore the flow together. It's improvised. Sometimes it’s difficult to refrain from trying to make things happen. We worked on finding stillness as comfort and uncertainty in contact. Because, eventually, something is going to happen. You learn how people move, their tendencies and pretty soon intense physical connections create emotional connection. Within five days of knowing each other, separating becomes a very morose notion.After our last class, we had a closing ceremony and shared our thoughts. And we all felt that what we learn in Contact seeps into our own lives. It's about giving, support, protection, taking risks, exploring the unknown, raw beauty and being present with yourself and the people around you.  




We walked down to the port to catch our ferry and a few of us miss it. We have a pint at the harbour bar and openly smoke on the patio. Beside the bar is a cookie shack. It’s a little wooden cabinet that inside has various treats in containers: lemon squares, date squares, peanut butter cookies, gingersnaps, thumbprint shortbreads. On each container is a price and there is a cash box off to the side. No on mans or supervises the cookie shack. There is enough trust on this island that they will openly put out goods and expect that you’re a good enough person to pay what you need to and not steal. Up a little farther is the “free store”. People who’ve been to the island leave things behind at this ‘store’ and then other people can come pick it up. Yes, for free. I myself found two books—one on the creative process and one containing contemporary scenes for student actors. What a find! 

I feel like the cookie shack and the free store are prime examples of how life is different on Lasqueti. In a lot of ways it’s easier than city life. It’s not corrupted by corporations that view people as dollar signs. You don’t have a job to buy things you don’t need. Life is slower paced out here. It is less about struggling. Here you dance, you eat, you play, you explore, you sauna, you talk. But in exchange, you take care of the land you’re planted on. This kind of lifestyle is a lot of work to maintain. They raise chickens and grown their own crops, they build extensions on their living areas, the maintain these areas, they cross the ferry to get groceries. It’s a physically laborious process to create  a life in the middle of nature. And because of the physicality, there are mental benefits. Less stress. It's a return to the roots of what’s important—that we meet our basic needs, are compassionate creative individuals and connect with one another. I will sorely miss this place and these people, but I vow to be back next summer, and hopefully for longer than five days. It was another 23 hour bus ride home to Calgary (get ready for the last time I will quote Mississippi in this blog for awhile)
“but my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free.
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for those who’ve sailed with me.”

"All my powers of expression"

We left our young and weary traveller groggily lugging her oversized backpack into Mark's truck. Already sitting with bags were Nina and C. C was the first to speak, "You look cute with sleep lines!" and so my falling asleep in the ferry became a running joke. I joined them in the back of the pick-up truck and we rode up the Island's one road to Mark's property. The ride up the mountain was already beautiful enough and when we opened the wooden gates to the Studio and walked in, I found Bob Dylan's Mississippi haunt me again: 

"All my powers of expression, and thoughts so sublime 

Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme."

How was it possible that this dance studio was here in the middle of nowhere on obscure little Lasqueti? It just doesn't make sense. What I can tell you is that Mark started building everything in 2008, and and had it completed enough by 2009 to start having workshops. The studio did not scrap nature's interfering trees or stones, but was built  around them. An arbutus  tree shoots up in the middle of a stone stairway out of the studio and out back into more wilderness! 

Now Mark doesn't just own the studio. He owns 20 acres  of land out here!! So until the next batch of dancers arrived and it was time for dinner, I figured I had better start exploring and find a prime location for my tent. While stumbling my way around the paths, I kept seeing Oyster shells. They mark the trail because they glow in the moonlight, just in case, you, an unprepared wanderer had forgotten your headlamp (extremely useful. Often I felt like I was relying on faeries or fireflies, my friends, these glowing shells to bring me back to the comfort of my tent.). Apart from the studio, there were a couple of other smalls buildings: a cabin for Mark to sleep in, two chicken coops, and the sauna (there was also a kitchen, attached to the studio). 

On every structure were solar panels and the walls were built with glass bottles and cob, to let the light in. I saw some chickens on my walk and said hello, walked past laundry lines and the outhouses, and decided to put my tent here overlooking this pond. 

On my walk back I saw a couple people  sitting at the dinner table. Mark pipes in, "There's lots of fruit! And we're is making guacamole. I don't want you to go hungry! So really, please feel free to eat whatever, whenever you want." I glance to my left and see Hannah scraping out avocado into a large mixing bowl. On the table was a magical mixture of strawberry jam, chocolate and almond butter which was pretty much amazing to dip your organic bananas or pears in. Of course, they compost out here! And anything that is actual waste is used as an insulator for the chicken coop Mark is in the process of building.

The rest of the troops began  to trickle in and introductions were made!Before us was a dinner that similar to the studio, I wasn't sure how to compute. Vegetarian lasagne, fresh salmon, and just-picked raspberries for dessert. After dinner, people were expecting to jam (when I say jam, I mean dance sessions). There wasn't a formal lesson today but eventually, like trickling rain, bodies touched. And I felt a profound sense of returning home after a long trip away. I hadn't jammed since the end of Eurydice at the University and I had sorely missed these contact highs. Right about now you're probably wondering dear reader what Contact Improvisation is. It's a form of dance and movement with the principal is maintaining contact (or anti-contact, i.e. negative space) with the floor or your partner and exploring different ways contact can be made whether it is pushing, sliding, pivoting, rolling, pushing or pulling. Here is a video to better articulate and explain! 

The jam evolved and dispersed and reached many people until I found that Nina and I were the last in the studio and that it was nearing midnight. It was decidedly sauna time. As we staggered through the dark, drunk with dreamy amazement at this wonderland and passed my tent, I asked, "What do you wear in a sauna?"

"What do you wear?"

"Yeah."

"Oh. Nothing. Nobody really cares. I mean you can wear clothes if you want."

From where I stood, I took a look of contention at the compartment of my bag where I knew a bathing suit was--paused--and we kept walking. To get to the sauna, we crossed a wooden plank over a stream of water and hopped tree trunk stumps until we found our ways to its warm doors. We undressed and entered. It was dark. Apart from a meagre window that occasionally lets moonlight through, it is just you and the people, the dark and the sweat. Throughout this trip, it became necessary to sauna after every class,  having philosophical discussions in the dark, jump in the pond right outside its doors, return back to the sauna for a second sweat, perhaps have a shower and continue to hang out with the great people you met. 

This night, feeling delirious from the heat, from countless ferries and buses and from the sheer beauty of this place, I was walked back to my tent, read maybe a page of Lolita, and fell asleep hearing no cars, conversations, trains or lawnmowers. Just silence. 

"We struggle and we scrape."

How fabulous for the continuity of this blog that where I left off talking about primitive happiness in Ignorance, the next post I shall write is about the rustic wilderness and beauty of Lasqueti Island B.C. Until I left Calgary and would tell people where I was going, all I got were confused looks complete with raised eyebrows. Lasqueti?  Yeah. I didn’t know either. It’s too small to put on most maps, and B.C. locals rarely know it exists.  I was going for a Contact Improvisation Workshop on the Island that I found out about through my University. This is being posted on the ferry ride back to Calgary from Nanaimo to Vancouver. (How exquisite it is to eat a Nanaimo Bar in Nanaimo!) It was mostly written on my commute to the island.

Sitting on a bus for 23 hours leaves a lot of time for thinking and introspection. It also meant a lot of ogling the mountains while mind-numbingly eating sunflowers seeds. Pop the seed in your mouth, crack the shell, eat the seed, and continue to gaze out the window dreamily. Repeat. As an extrovert, I am energized by other people—even you internet folk! I need other people and I care about them. This is my first solo trip. Enter Courtney the ever wildly mature and evolved human being!  This trip was good for me to spend an extended period of time by myself and relying on my own wits to get around and entertain. 

I brought several things to keep me busy like DVDS:  Blue Valentine, I’m Not There, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the entirety of Flight of the Concords, none of which were watched because I hadn’t an outlet or enough battery life in my Macbook. I brought books: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: short stories written by Sylvia Plath (her widowed husband Ted Hughes introduced the book managing to eloquently state that her stories are not the best and she probably didn’t want them published. Thanks Ted.) and Soul Pancake by Rainn Wilson (yes, that actor who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office. And yes, there will be an entirely separate post on this book soon because it was both invaluable while I was travelling and an ambitious, innovative composition of various art to get a person thinking about our abstract world.). I had my notebook to write in (28 pages filled in the time I was gone!) and I wrote people letters. I played Whirly Word on my phone.

I’m sorry that I didn’t learn how to knit on the bus ride. Melissa, I’ve let you down.

Buses are a bit gloomy: the steady background hum of the engine that I’ve grown so accustomed to. The minute I get off to go to the bathroom or stretch my legs, I am always alarmed that the sound has quieted or depending on how far I walk, has gone away completely. Back on the bus nobody talks to one another, even the people who are travelling together. The first hour of my bus ride was off to an optimistic start! I spent it talking to a Czechoslovakian tourist named Eric who had been in Yellowknife before. But after an hour, he got off at Canmore. After that, there was a lot of silence and a lot of feeling like it was far too many degrees below room temperature in the moving vehicle.

Behind me two people: an elderly woman and a guy about my age bashed Calgary pretty good. “I just hate it. There’s too many people. And they’re all drunk. The Calgary Stampede? Invented for more drinking! My brother died while I was in Calgary. All drunkards.”  I’m not sure how her brother’s death is related to her hatred of the city (or it’s alcohol consumption) but mostly the old woman groaned on and the man repeated such catch-phrases as, ‘I hear ya’, ‘I’m a small town boy myself’ and ‘Yes mam’. Head-nodding was another popular response.

To my left and up a little is a woman, aged around 30, who must be having a fight her her partner because she woke me up from a very brief nap threatening “That is not what I said. It’s not what I said. You’d like it if I did say that but I didn’t. I would never say that.” They hung up on. She calls them back. “I asked you a simple question. I asked you a simple question. I asked you a question.” They hang up. She shrieks and yells “Motherfucker! Ingrateful bastard.” loud enough for the bus to hear. She tries to draw or write, I’m not sure which and she gives up on that too crossing her arms and stares at the window, her phone clutched tightly in her hand, squeezing it to show some sign of life.

Boxed in on this bus overnight surrounded by the woman who was always complaining about something new, the woman who was still finding ways to argue with her partner and by the snoring slightly obese man to my left all made cosmic sense to me when Bob Dylan’s Mississippi played on my iPod.

“Every step of the way we walk the line


Your days are numbered, so are mine


Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape


We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape”

It wouldn’t be long until I was on a remote Island on the West Coast away from the city, its problems and the complications of modern life!

Always as we stopped over: in Banff, Golden, Revelstoke, Salmon Arm, Kelowna and Vacouver, I was feeling down that I wouldn’t be able to actually see these places how I’d want to. I want to climb your mountains! And I want to eat your sushi and ride your Skytrain! Fifteen, twenty, sixty minutes is not nearly enough time to spend in any of these places. 

From French Creek, I would catch the ferry to Lasqueti. And before French Creek was odd Parksville: there’s not much there—it’s a camping destination but in the middle of it is a stripmall that includes a Toyota dealership, an A & W and my personal favourites a Mexican restaurant titled “The Mexican” and the Amish Antique Store. Waiting for the ferry I ate some Pollock (a dollar off on Fridays!) at the Wheelhouse Café (run by one server and one cook) and peeled my eyes for other people going to the workshop. In the restaurant, I was told there’s not much on Lasqueti and I was very gung-ho to live the hippie lifestyle!

The ferry is a small boat carrying 35. In a large ferry you don’t actually feel like you're moving. Motion sickness is pretty much impossible. But on this ferry ride people were ready: clutching plastic bags nervously in their hands. The boat started to rock and sway and I felt I was on an over-enthusiastic tire swing but there was no way to tell my friends to slow down and relinquish some splinter of mercy on me. Staring at the window helped. You saw a wave and you prepared for it. But eventually this motion rocked me to sleep, I returning to the womb awoke up in Lasqueti to a man shaking me, “Are you Courtney?”  I was the only one of the boat. “Yes.” “I’m Mark. Nice to meet you! Let’s grab your stuff and put it in my truck.” I followed him, still dozy, sure that soon I would remember who Mark is and where I am and why I’m putting my bag in his truck.

Introducing Mark Young: organizer and founder of Leviathan Studios: Home of Contact Improvisation, Lasqueti Island, British Columbia.