Joint Stutters drawings and xray • Geneviève Johnson

Since June 2019, when the first pain hit me, to today, day of my hip replacement surgery, I experienced the narrowing of my physical world.

More than pain, the slow restriction of movement is what was the most painful and scary for me to go through – because I started with a wide and free range that I never doubted or questioned before!

But at the same time, I have experienced a widening of my will to creatively do something with it, and keep it stimulating. Listening to my body screaming its materiality in a new and unwanted way, made me reconnect with the present and the presence

• of the world,
• of the body,
• of time passing,
• of myself as one unique changing being.

My degenerating hip made me touch in real time the concept of transformation that I am so fond of.

Of course, things are still scary. I am submerged with questions and doubts: from will I wake up from it to will this surgery give me back all my range of motion?

I have a joke with my sister about doing the split at Christmas… we laugh a lot about it.

But this figurative split is the image of my usual range of motion. The little girl in me is screaming: “I need it! I want it back!”

How can I let this go…

Learning from my year and a half of “physical loss and creative gain”, I will be able to let it go and trust in what is coming up for me.

I am diving into the unknown again, to find new territories in me to work and dance from.

And I promise myself to spring off from where I am when I wake up form this surgery.

Using the soundscape I built for last week’s blog and poems I wrote from the perspective of my degenerating hip, I created a short screendance as an homage to the learning this injury has thought me.

I am entering my vulnerability through the door of my broken body and my narrowing world, one last time before surgery.