Reflections: mayfield brooks & Dohee Lee

Later this month, mayfield brooks will offer public workshops through Gibney alongside Dohee Lee, and through Movement Research’s Winter 2021 MELT. The below reflections will give you an inside look at mayfield and Dohee’s current processes and inspirations, and each workshop will offer you a different angle on engaging with this powerful work.

We hope you’ll join us Jan. 23-24 at Gibney and Jan. 11-15 at Movement Research’s MELT!

“The earth has spoken.

Slow down. Be still. Explore solitude and quiet. Quit your job. Work at home. Smell the flowers. Listen to the wind. Take a walk, bike ride or run. Ditch the car. Leave the city and go to the forest. 

So much has changed since March 2020, and I do not need to name it because most of you already know. Many lives have been extinguished. Much loss has occurred. How does the body receive or reject loss? How does the body embrace healing outside of the normal constructs of societal expectations? Additionally, how do we heal when physical touch is connected to illness or contagion?  

I don’t have answers to these questions but I do feel them deeply. My respite comes from surrendering to earth. Sometimes I go back in time and capture a memory of my body napping on a bed of soft moss on an island in the Pacific Northwest–the birthplace of a dear friend. Sometimes I watch a sunset and let my body absorb light, color, and warmth. As I tremble before the power of earth, I remember the immediacy of surrendering to earth’s magic for my own healing and hopefully the healing of others.”

—mayfield brooks
https://www.improvisingwhileblack.com/

“This year has been a great lesson and message from the earth. It shouts to us: ‘Enough is enough!’

We have all been processing these pandemic situations everywhere in the world–and especially in this country–with layers of trauma that have been carried so many years from colonial time to present.

This is why it’s so important to know our ancestral stories, histories, roots, culture. It’s what keeps connecting us through times back and forth. 

We need to fully understand our histories–both what happened and what continues in this present time. We need to deeply digest and to heal so we can have hope for the next generation, our future.

We need to put more efforts towards reconnecting to our ancestral time, to our histories, culture, myth, land and rituals.

Our body is a land where our ancestral memories are deeply imprinted.

Our cells are their histories, our body becoming their home. House of spirits and house of ancestors.

How can we decode all these memories into messages to heal the past and create hope for our future generations?

How and what kind of ancestors do we want to become for the future?”

— Dohee Lee
https://www.doheelee.com/