Wakatami - Dancing with Shadows

I am held in the hush before motion begins.

My skin remembers the air first—cool, patient, scented faintly with old wood and wax. Then the light arrives, not bright but breathing, brushing my shoulders like forgotten fingers. Shadows pool at my feet and rise to meet me; they are not empty. They are company.

I move as one does when no one is watching, yet everyone is. A slow unfolding of the arm, as though parting water that isn’t there. A turning of the spine that feels like listening to something older than bone. Each gesture arrives late, after the impulse has already softened into memory.

The dark is kind. It cradles the places where I hesitate, where breath catches and refuses to name itself. I lean into it. I let the invisible ones—those quiet attendants without name or face—guide the weight of my wrists, the drift of my gaze, the tremor that says I am still here.

There is no story, only the texture of being seen without demand. Fragility is not weakness; it is the thinnest place where light passes straight through.

I dance with what cannot be grasped, and in that refusal of possession, something luminous opens.

Mivart Studio, Bristol, 2019.