Space Like Food

Davida Monk: “I think for dancers particularly, the prairie appeals. The space is so vast. It is a very stimulating effect because for dancers, space is like food.” 

Ashley Johnson: “Once Amelia did a project with Davida in Banff and she found that she couldn't orient in the mountains – her whole vestibular system went out of whack and she ended up having to crawl up the mountain. 

When I'd been training in Davidson about six months, she asked me if I missed my family/friends. I supposed I did. She told me that she didn't miss people, she missed land.  

She'd send us outside on the open prairie to  practice direction of energy exercises, a concept that teaches you to reach beyond, to connect with the horizon, the sky, the earth. The direction becomes the support you need instead, supplanting muscular engagement. She said that once you mastered it you could establish the line of direction and then lie down on it, that's how strong the connection with space would become.”

Patricia Beatty: “The Christian fundamentalism that was in her background could’ve gotten in her way, but she moved past it by working in her body (which they weren’t keen on) and of course ultimately she became a healer, which maybe reconciled her with that. And she eventually moved to that church and taught there on the prairie. I'm just guessing, but she seemed to come full circle.”

Ashley Johnson: “When Amelia was in the hospital she'd get me to come and drive her out on the prairie. We'd go miles on a dirt road until she told me to stop. Then we'd just sit and stare at the prairie.  

It was moving into spring – everything was brown and dead – and I asked what we were doing, and she just answered, “Absorbing the space”, like it was the most normal thing in the world. Then she'd close her eyes.  

We'd just sit there – or she'd get me out of the car to run around, falling through the half melted snow banks and she would laugh and laugh watching me tumble around the ditches.”