Artist Statement
“Making Kin across divides of species, nation, gender and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task today.” ~ Donna Haraway
Caring Movement
Noun–Act of caring for and about one another. Caregivers’ movements. Direct Acts of Loving and caring deeply with empathy for another being. Act of caring for one’s grief.
Verb–Building a Movement of Caring through Movement. Seeking to Create and celebrate Beauty. Action of joining together in movement, staying present with folks to observe their needs, and taking direct action wherever one is called to. Actions of caring through grieving.
The experiences of listening to my mother’s needs, caregiving for her, was what pulled me back home to the Northwest and what also helped me to understand and articulate the roots that nourish the motivations of my artistic practices. The loss of my mother during a 10 year journey with dementia, slow incremental losses and ultimately her death in 2023, brought to light an invisible tree of grief that is part of my journey. What had grown invisibly beside me always longed inside me as a branch that entangled my heart. This called me to listen to the forests and oceans of coastal British Columbia.
I began to recognize an unexpected gift of being with her through these later years was to recognize how valuable and timeless some ways of listening are. My mother and I shared values of deep listening to nature through contemplation, sketching, meditation, and our embodied practices. A brilliant, deep thinking woman, the process of losing cognitive functions to dementia was one that my mother handled with grace. Even as she lost the capacity to read complex novels, we continued to share embodied practices, contemplations of Beauty, and Gifts of the Heart. My mother continued to share her wisdom with me–through her patience with her illness, through her loving kindness, through her pain and often her laughter about her own losses, through assertions of her humanity in the face of those who misunderstood her capacity to feel, through her love of family. I felt as though, through my deep presence with her in this illness, I could bring her back pieces of herself that would help anchor her in her love of family and her undying pursuit of Beauty.
During the last years my mother demonstrated to me, often by expressing a sudden thought, her understanding of the interconnectivity of our states of consciousness with all that surrounds us. I saw how, in the stitches between past and present, something important can be retained about the pursuit of Beauty and the Gifts of Loving. She shared her understanding of interconnectivity with multiple forms of consciousness in our universe that informs my artistic practices.There is a type of question that remains constant.
My art practices can be seen in continuity with these values because my work is about asking questions that go beyond my lifetime. Her heart sings through me just as we are still attached through an invisible tree. For example, in the 2010’s when she was still well I created several dances about water and healing. Some were performed at venues in North America, and others were performed beside a lake or an ocean. My mother and sister created a labyrinth of wildflowers to complement the dance.
As an artist I ask questions that might arise in contemplative meditation, How do I become the Water? Or in face of global water shortages and water contamination, Can water be healed? These are questions of hope that arise from tuning into a stillness and presence with nature, with concern for how the world is left to the next generations. Through these pursuits I have deepened my awareness about the land and water, including my position as a guest on unceded territories, and I stay receptive to learning from indigenous elders a more intricate relationship to water, plants, and many life forms.
An Ethos of Caring
I see the need for a movement of change, a Caring Movement on both a local and global scale. I perceived the toll of loneliness upon my mother during her neurological changes, and in her distress as she became dependent. I see the loneliness of caregivers in our communities when a partner becomes ill. I see the wounds and impact of climate change, global wars, and political distress that are at the root of despair for many.
I advocate for a more inclusive model of community–an ethos of caring that includes deep listening to the needs and gestures of elders, all those in our communities who lead through wisdom and kindness. I advocate for kindness, for celebrating our diversity in its many forms, and for focusing a movement through indigenous leadership and guidance. I believe in healing wounds and impacts of colonization within the self, family and community through mindfulness and deep work. I advocate for efforts of caring for future generations through artistry, education, support, and direct actions.
Dance Projects: A Movement through Movement
“For Those Who Cannot…”
Collaborations
I work with artists and collaborators who take action to disrupt and question complex ideas about caring, about how we care for one another. This includes support and action towards indigenous reparations, supporting individuals who work in areas of ecology and climate action, supporting peace activism and non-violence in the face of trauma and global wars, and finding creative ways of caring for the planet, birds, animals, trees, earth, and waters.
What action is needed during this time? How do we engage with the slow changes in those we care for? How are we attending to the grief within our families and our communities? How we can better care for one another and our planet in the context of global distress and war?
I focus through dance artistic practices and collaborations that help us process grief in community memory through deep compassion and presence. One of the ways I interpret these questions is through the lens of the life-death-life cycle of a Wild Woman archetype La Llorona (Latin America), Deer Woman (Native America- Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw), Yellow Woman (Native America- Laguna Pueblo), Mis (Ireland), Dzunukwa (Coast Salish) who goes through cycles related to femininity and aging, and who holds space for necessary deaths and births that are part of life’s journey.
This project began with research that uncovers stories about women’s particular experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loss when aging. We uncover a particularly female ache of loneliness and grief that raises further questions. What grief inhabits a body that loses touch with its own reality? What right do we have to ignore this grief in our mothers? What is the experience when social-emotional bonds and companionship become frayed or distant when an individual is being robbed of identity through the loss of memory? What happens to memories of our Ancestors, held within our bodies, that become lost in a mind riddled with a disease? What happens to thousands of years of ancestral body memory when the body’s memory is slowly fading?
Our shared experiences with our mothers for us demonstrate something fundamental about the society we live in. To create movement, we begin with isolation of the elderly, existing painfully during this pandemic amidst tragedies of broken healthcare, loneliness, loss of touch, and devastating global and personal losses. Our elders’ lives appear to some as unimportant and disposable, and we find ourselves fighting to have their voices acknowledged and heard. The pandemic exposes this lack of caring further as we see more clearly the systemic inequalities of racism and legislated poverty that exist in fractured healthcare, and other exposed disparities that became exacerbated by the pandemic. This brings to light for indigenous bodies and bodies of colour (BIPOC) the lack of caring, especially for the most vulnerable.
Recent Dance Works by Seónagh
La Hielera
La Hielera
La Hielera (2020)
Choreographer/Director Seónagh Kummer
Immigration detention centres are often referred to as “La Hielera,” The Icebox, due to extremely cold temperatures inside. This piece explores the idea of our complicity in the act of detaining children in these dangerous, unsupervised spaces.
Bluestocking
Bluestocking
Bluestocking (2019)
Choreographer/Director Seónagh Kummer
Dancer/Collaborator: Anna Paris
Women who do not mold to fit societal norms often get the raw end of the stick considering words that describe them. “Bluestocking” is a word that positively describes an intellectual or literary woman interested in books and ideas rather than fitting in.