Winding Up
karen Krolak
A pale skinned woman lies on a mahogany porch. She resembles a root vegetable with just her dark eyes peeking into the frame which is filled mostly with tendrils of her grey hair stretching straight up.
(Before I begin, I must confess that I have not seen Satelliser: a dance for the gallery yet. However, after following the satellising publication since its inception and hearing Neve elaborate on how she experiences it during performances, I was emboldened to imagine myself as a remote coworker of the piece to develop this essay. As such, I transparently take the reader along on my genuine cadence of tangents, and interruptions. Be forewarned, it can get dizzying at times.
Only after I had launched into a few drafts did I read No metaphorical brackets: Boom! And I’m in it. by Sally Doughty. Part of the brilliance of this project is the way that concepts from artists who have never met entangle and relate through Satelliser. Sally’s Boom moments were an unexpected and delightful counterpoint to my formatting structure. I hope that it is ok that I am echoing her idea here.)
[Boom! And we are in it.]
Gently prod.
Teasing tangles. That seems to be how my projects often start. As the steward of an unruly river of alabaster locks that cascade from my scalp, I begin most days wrestling with at least one tenacious snarl. I have learned to embrace my chaotic knots that defy conditioning and combs. Though textile arts can be viewed as knot making languages, deconstructing these raucous clusters was my introduction to understanding the process of knitting, sewing, and crocheting. Much like my adolescent interest in lockpicking, it also trains my patience, creativity, and tolerance for complexity.
Listen for resistance or release.
Just as I opened a space to write, the squeezing began in the depths of my chest. This is not a metaphor but as I start to trace the edges of the shape of this pain, a management technique I stumbled upon somewhere, I understand that today I can mine this episode for the poetic knowledge it holds.
Forgive me, this will be [Pause for pain.]
Interrupted, glitchy [Pause for pain.]
Two skeins of naturally dyed yarns from A Verb for Keeping Warm, one named Mollusk and the other Indigo Blue Sky, snuggle next to each other on a pleated black floor pillow.
Semi circle of stockinette stitched rows of the Mollusk yarn extend from wooden needles with rusted pieces of hardware serving as stitch markers. This early stage of Tressa Weidenaar’s Shí nalí Shawl reclines on the lap of someone wearing brightly checkered fabric and riding in a car next to a driver in jean shorts.
Pause
And sometimes just like when someone in a digital space is chattering away with their mute button on, my internal dialogue may carry on whilst my fingers are frozen. Blood rushing to the source of the discomfort leaves my hands and feet contracted in fruitless fists. Currently, my canine coworkers are gently leaning their weight into me as a visceral reminder that I do not have to bear all of this alone. [My spouse arrives with medication and water. The aforementioned coworkers follow him out of the room as if to contradict what I had last typed.]
Nurture the Pathways that open
You can't see the edits that just happened. I returned to add visual descriptions, e.g. [Pause for pain.], to clarify my awkward phrasing. It was an idea that popped into my head as I incredulously tapped the period after alone. I was thinking about stage directions. I smirked when I recognized the similarity between the [Pause for pain.] and the bracketed entries in my Dictionary of Negative Space.
The shawl has grown to include rows of the Indigo Blue Sky yarn which becomes the background to a row of the Mollusk colored symmetrical crosses.
[A beat to explain the Dictionary of Negative Space.]
3,965 days ago my parents and older brother were on a genealogical adventure in Vermont. They found something so exciting about one of our ancestors that they crossed the border into upstate New York and set off for a rural cemetery. I will spare you the details of the car crash that happened next. I know too many of them from the police report, the death certificates’ gruesome list of injuries under cause of death, and the witnesses’ testimony at the court hearing. What is relevant is that in one instant, in a place where I have never been, the three people who were my first definition of home, and family vanished. The pillars of how I defined myself ceased to be. [Allow memories to overwhelm me.]
And I was transported to a linguistic landscape where there were no words...how many times did people say that to me? [Deep sigh.]
Although previously able to blather on about almost any topic, my conversations after the crash sputtered like the fiat convertible when I tried to learn to drive a manual transmission in my teens. After about five years of stalling or jerking arhythmically, [a beat to look that up. (How do I still struggle with the spelling of a word that so often describes me?)], I decided that the English language needed about 30 words to fill in the gaps that I kept flopping into. I set about gathering them up but it is very complicated to organize something that you can not name. [Rub your eyes and face at the memories of frustration.]
Now at this point, people frequently ask me, “karen, why didn’t you just name them as you found them?” And my answer at first was, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Isn’t it enough that I am able to identify this problem even though most days I am barely functioning under the weight of my nameless griefs? Do you realize what it takes just to wake up each morning?” But then I softened and chose to explain that leaving the entries unnamed gives people who had never landed in this liminal geography of loss a glimpse into people’s experiences in the canyons of impossible communication that mourners must traverse.
During this 8 minute clip, we watch as the knitted fabric of the shawl is unraveled. The framing makes karen’s pale pink hands appear disembodied. The mosaic colorwork takes clear effort to pull apart due to all the intentionally slipped stitches. When the last row of indigo is removed you. can sense the shift of energy required. Rows of mollusk easily release into a wiggly pool of yarn. As the video ends, she begins the slow process of winding up the tangled mess into balls.)
Repeat
[A brief period of reflection to remember how I had arrived at the Dictionary of Negative Space in this essay.]
Ah yesss, the [Pause for pain.] and the _____[185]. In the moment after Kwaq7aj’ [Pronounced Quacks, the 7 is silent.] [Pause for picture.]
A mature canine curls up under the second draft of the shawl. Now the Indigo Sky Blue is the main color and an ikat dyed black and white wool from Swan’s Island, Maine is the contrast color. Kwaq7aj’, a limited edition mix of Jack Russell, Chihuahua, and Chinese Crested, gazes at the camera with soft eyes to remind us that it is impossible to stay annoyed with her.
A pile of floof is snoozing face first into a pillow. Khan8d-el is a hairy hairless Chinese Crested whose normally black white and grey coat is bedecked with reflected rainbows. She has jauntily draped the blue and black shawl over her back.
and Khan8d-el {Pronounced canoodle. The 8 is a squirrely set of two o’s stacked upright.] [Pause for yet another photo.]
[Escape from the rabbit hole of coworkers and unfinished projects. Backup and start this thought all over.]
Ah yesss, the [Pause for pain.] and the _____[185]. In the moment after Kwaq7aj’ and Khan8d-el left on a quest for kibble, I tried to find a way to clarify how pain was interrupting my typing today and I noticed a deeper level in my typographical choice in the dictionary. All of those bracketed numbers naming entries were, or rather are, pauses for pain.
[Bio break.]
[Review what was written. Tweak and then giggle about the image of tweaking as cognitive twerking.]
Continue as long as you can tolerate.
About 15 months ago I began focusing on a knot throbbing deeper within me. It was created by twists in my family's experiences of immigration, disability, gender roles, and grief. During a conversation in an online class about Integrated Dance at Rutgers University, I mentioned that I wished my paternal grandmother, Sally, had lived long enough to see the 2022 Oscars. Sally was the fourth of six children and the first daughter after three sons. Both of her parents were deaf as a result of childhood illnesses. I know very, very little about her parents other than my great grandfather was a ditch digger. Paradoxically, however, both of my great grandparents were better educated than other family members of that generation precisely because their employment options were so limited. Unlike their siblings who had to quit school at a young age for jobs, my great grandparents were sent away to a school for the Deaf. I have been trying to track down which school where they met and to discover more about the specific sign language that they utilized. So far, none of the remaining schools in the Midwest have records of them.
Sally was extremely proud to be the first of her siblings to graduate high school and to attend a year at a community college before she began working full time on the factory line at Westclox. She lived with her parents until she could afford to buy the house next door to them. For two years, she managed to keep her marriage a secret (at the time women at Westclox were fired when they married) as she and my grandfather scrimped together enough for the down payment. Sally was a devoted and protective daughter and yet, as a CODA, whose first language was her parents’ sign language, Sally had a very complicated relationship with her parents and their deafness. She actively discouraged other family members, including her husband and children, from learning to communicate through sign language because she was afraid of the stigmas associated with disability at the time.
That choice had heartbreaking consequences later in Sally’s life when she reverted back to her first language as her dementia advanced. While I could calm her anxiety by running through the ASL alphabet with her, I only knew a smattering of unrelated signs from her language that I had cajoled out of her in earlier years. She spent hours at her assisted living complex at a table with another resident, Tressie, who had been Morse Code operator for an intelligence agency during WWII. Tressie would tap out messages on tea cups while Sally signed. Sitting with them often felt like I was in between two radio towers who found comfort in each other’s search for souls who could comprehend their signals.
karen is clutching on to the top of a blue podium festooned with the finished shawl. Her face is hidden while her silvery mane drapes down over the knitting.
Victoria Marks and Judith Smith, who were also auditing the course at Rutgers, encouraged me to write about some of Sally’s strands but my pen wouldn’t move when I opened my journal. Curiously, ideas only began to trickle out when Monkeyhouse structured a grant application for Live Arts Boston through the Boston Foundation. My fingers which had napped at earlier attempts to articulate an essay suddenly leapt into a description of a new pop up performance piece centered around an entry from the Dictionary of Negative Space:
”____ [10] – n. ceremony performed in a language that you can not speak or understand: The first funeral she attended was a _____ [10] at a Polish- Catholic church for her grandfather and the experience made death feel even more mysterious.” The outline of my process began:
● “Choreograph a solo dance theater piece about my relationship with my paternal grandmother.
● That solo dance will only ever be performed for the audio describer (Does a dance have to be shared with many to be meaningful? Who has the right to know our most personal stories?)
● Film the dance so that the audio describer can develop an audio description of the performance. (What do you see? Whose memory gets cemented into history?)”
When I passed the first round of the grant’s review, I headed into the studio. I had my grand choreographic plan but I struggled to find meaningful movement or even comfortable stillness. I panicked.
(Video Description: karen’s hands are filmed on a cell phone as she starts the Shí nalí Shawl a second time. She is reusing the Sky Blue Indigo yarn which is now bent from the memories of the last version. The close up on her fingers gets blurry but at times, you can see how the yarn leaves sapphire stripes on her fingers from the natural dye Over the course of a minute and a half, we watch as the footage moves slower and slower. )
Please don't laugh but it was a thread I found on social media that finally allowed me to start raveling this tapestry of intergenerational tensions. A Verb for Keeping Warm posted about Tressa Weidenaar’s Shí nalí Shawl, I felt an instinctual pull. Shí nalí is the Navajo word for “my paternal grandparent” and I recognized it from my Navajo lessons on Duolingo. On a whim, I ordered the pattern. When I read Tressa's introduction “While I was designing this shawl, my paternal grandmother (Shí nalí adzáán) began to decline in health, and shortly thereafter she was placed in Hospice Care. She passed away peacefully in her home on November 5. The name for this shawl is meant to show my appreciation and love for her.,” I knew I had pinpointed a place to start.
Since 2015, one aspect of my interdisciplinary art practice has centered around the idea of knitting patterns as a meditative practice similar to how some people use labyrinths to reflect on a problem that plagues them. Rather than twiddling my thumbs in the SomArts studios, I guessed that embarking on the textile journey laid out in Tressa’s mosaic knitting structure would activate the memories I needed to catalyze my choreography.
My Mollusk and Indigo Blue Sky skeins arrived from A Verb for Keeping Warm, just as I was setting off to Chattanooga, TN for a site visit at StoveWorks for an exhibit of addenda: an exercise course from the Dictionary of Negative Space. Although I was born in Nashville, I have not been back to Tennessee since a 1996 road trip with mom and her best friend. I can never be sure if it was knitting the first section of the shawl or the scent of clay in the soil as we crossed the state border but suddenly gestures, postures, and memories began to light up my muscles. Keenly tracking the movements of my needles, I noticed nuances in my fingers that reminded me of my mother, Sally, and Grandma Moffat. [Pause to request that an older coworker stop gnawing up a box containing a yoga ma[ Pause again to explain that said coworker could find another source of cardboard for her sculptural installation on man’s inattention to canines] Back up to see if you finished typing the word ‘mat’. Nope. Sigh.]
[Oh, and pause for the pain that has returned]
Rest.
Two swatches of the colorwork pattern from the shawl sit on a white sheet. They were made to be haptic access tools for audience members at _____[10]. On the right is a sample in the original black and blue yarns. On the left is a version in cream and the Ikat black yarn from Swan’s Island. It was made in a higher color contrast for people with low vision or color blindness.
Refresh and return.
Knitting, frogging, reknitting, pulling out rows and redoing sections of my shawl at first felt like an indulgence or an elaborate act of procrastination. Over the course of the year that it took to complete, it traveled with me and illuminated how much time outside of the studio I spend conceptualizing performance pieces. Starting rehearsals with adding a few rows or just a few stitches, rooted my research in my hands, my embodied memories, and a renewed appreciation for slowness. The delicate warmth of it on my shoulders has eased me through days when I lost faith in the project. _____[10] is still evolving as my collaborators and I sort through all its felted layers. I wish that I had a way to neatly weave all the loose ends of this essay together but in place of that I will offer my current recipe for detangling. Feel free to use it as a choreographic score, a meditation prompt, or however it seems useful in your life.
Gently prod.
Listen for resistance or release. Pause.
Nurture the pathways that open. Repeat.
Continue as long as you can tolerate. Rest.
Refresh and return.
[Closes this window. Rummages the fridge for something nourishing.]
All photos except the one on the podium were taken by karen. The podium one should be credited to Nicole Harris.
karen is wrapped in three layers of cozy handknits and smiles warmly at someone not in the camera.
karen Krolak (she/her)
karen Krolak is a free range collaborator who lives with a rare chronic health condition, an eccentric little family, and oodles of yarn. She and Nicole Harris are co-founders/co-Artistic Directors of Monkeyhouse, an award winning nonprofit that connects communities to choreography. karen is creator of the Dictionary of Negative Space, a co-producer of NACHMO Boston, co-director of aMaSSiT at The Dance Complex, co-curator of the Malden Dance Mile, a Humanities Advisor to The Black Arts Sanctuary, a Board member for the The Flavor Continues and Boston Dance Alliance, a Sustainability Advisor for Subcircle, a dramaturg for Jessica Roseman and Kimberleigh Holman and a freelance audio describer, She earned her BA in Linguistics at Northwestern University and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Sierra Nevada College.