Rachel Bunting started making dance and performance as “The Humans” in 2002. Her work, which has been described as magic realism, is episodic and image-based, using mask, object, video and voice. She has always used writing as a tool to converse with and develop her performance work over and through time. A couple of years ago, she decided to start submitting these writings and was thrilled when “Skidrow Penthouse” published her poem, “Two Tiny Moons.” Rachel has received many grants and awards as a dance maker, yet is, and has always has been, reticent to limit herself to just one genre and dislikes titles other than "ARTIST." She looks forward to a continued, curious (r)evolution where dances get to masquerade as films, visual art can whisper in ears, and poetry marches down the street.
Reciprocity
Here, in our brick container,
I seem to be the ruler of mists.
I provide the rain.
I administer the electric-blue milk.
My laugh, in here,
is an extension of apparatus.
It goes into a tiny rectangle
and spreads into an algorithmic sprawling
of spectral mind tubes
that feed the chimerical pain-body
of a female-identifying robot
named Sophia.
I JUST LAUGHED
but from 150 million years ago
as a Stegosaurus
giving birth
to one
bloody
egg
after another
one cackle
resounding
after another.
Those echoes are still here
inside each cell,
deeper than the nucleus now,
inside the quark,
the tiniest particle of life,
for now,
into the never-born
never-dead
rippling,
waving,
breeding, upholding and leveling
of everything living
and true.
In here, I crawl on my belly like a reptile
toward and away from the apparatus
while the dew drops
appear and disappear
on the nose of a dog
outside in the morning.
The huge, juicy cantaloupe is cut.
I am the cutter.
I am the eater.
I scatter the rinds
over the earth
inside their pots:
The Spider,
My gorgeous friends, the Philodendrons,
The stoic, well-dressed Crotons,
Miss Maidenhair Fern,
Pine, from the north country,
Christmas cactus and her cousins, both really plain,
And, you, my dying Bromeliad…
I owe you all more than just skins.