REFLECTIONS ON “A Letter Home for Dad.”–Dr. Jennifer Rouse

Reading Time 6 mins

August 31, 2021

So, I was invited to a gathering, largely of strangers to me, to ‘witness’ an un-authored and wordless ‘Letter´ which was being scripted through dance! Yet the dancer, whom I have known for over fifty years since she was a child, was able to captivate and connect us easily because she was the hub to which we were all hinged at crisscrossing angles, representing various interlocking chapters in her life!

As a trained actress at Juilliard and a Professor Emerita at Kent University, why didn’t she simply write the letter for her dad and assemble us for the reading, following which we would share our views? But that might have proven to be too ordinary and predictable! And that would not reflect the truth of Joanne’s life and journey, which were not ordinary, and in her words, “it’s like living with blind corners at every step!”

Most of us, as women, did not experience the passing of our mothers when we were at the tender age of eleven! She did! And we dare not venture to offer belated condolences now because we still don’t know and will never know what that feels like! Even when she became an adult and I visited her in New York, Joanne bought me the book “Motherless Daughters” and implored me to read it. That was her way of helping me to understand that prism of her matrix!

JKD performing in DARK OFFERING by ASTOR JOHNSON, Queen’s Hall, Port of Spain, Trinidad, circa 1981. Photo courtesy Derek Gay.

While sitting and pondering her dance movements from the silence of my inner space, the choreographed letter for her dad began to make sense, almost depicting a séance! At a chromosomal level, daughters are indexed/ bonded to their fathers in a similar fashion to sons with their mothers. When Joanne enrolled in dance classes (which no doubt buoyed her therapeutically after her mother’s passing) in her pre-teenage years and later performed in modern dance and local theatre in her adolescent years in Trinidad, her father was for the most part absent! She could have counted on one hand the number of times that he saw her dance during her impressionable pre-teenage years. The two occasions which stood out were when she performed at Trinidad’s prestigious Queen’s Hall and when he made her a costume to dance at her primary school.

In her post-pubescent years, he watched her theatrical prowess on local television plays! Yet, he was hardly there to applaud or critique her efforts! And those were critical life-altering years in one’s maturation when relational roles tend to be diffuse in forging one’s ego identity. Therefore, it would be incumbent on the father to not only model the ‘man-child´ but also to protect and ground his daughters! As a result of her father’s chronic absences, Joanne’s aunts, her sister, or her brother substituted but never really filled that void! I met Joanne’s brother, Gregory, at my workplace, mere months before his mother’s passing, and he and I bonded at a mental and spiritual level. Within three years, we established a relationship, during which time Joanne emigrated to New York.

As a young adult, it was pointed out during the admission process to the Juilliard’s Drama degree program that Joanne’s posture was not straight due to a curve in the base of her spine. In hindsight, it would have meant that what she had considered then to be therapeutic dance might well have aggravated an otherwise dormant condition and exacerbated it with suppressed emotions of distrust, doubt, anger, loneliness, fear, and anxiety, borne out of a hostile environment which she muddled through the years for her mere survival! Hence her remark to me once, during a financially-strapped period at Juilliard: “Life seems to set you the exam…and then fills you in with the subject matter after.”

Dance Images Montage from “Dancing a Life” by Chris Laird of Banyan Productions, 2005. Courtesy Chris Laird.

Truer words were hardly ever spoken! Then, in her middle adulthood, while pursuing her graduate studies at Raleigh, North Carolina, Gregory got retrenched during the restructuring of the organization where he worked. He was negatively impacted and experienced acute depression. I alerted both Joanne and her sister to his strange behavior, and within three months, he committed suicide. He was the same age at which their mother passed. It was a tragic, surreal, and cataclysmic period in all of our lives. And yet, Joanne suspended her classes, arrived to assist with his funeral preparations, and returned to continue with her degree program until completion. Little did she know that she would return to Trinidad within a decade after Gregory’s death to bury her sister. And in close succession, the ritual was repeated one more time, when she would return to arrange her father’s funeral.

In her senescent years, she is crowned in speckled silver, in the young-old cohort or the Third chapter of her life on the earth plane. In other words, post-work-life as she knew it. What does one do with all this time?! A significant portion is now spent in reflection, introspection, and self-talks, which may prompt activity or disengagement while wrestling with a physical body that is now challenged by the aging process. But that proverbial pebble is still in her shoe…from her childhood years! So she drafts her assignment, which resembles in part a homecoming. And why not? She felt she had a duty and a responsibility, as the last remaining member of her family still standing!

JKD performing with Pan African Theater Ensemble students of Kent State University at The International Fringe Festival, Edinborough, Scotland, 2019. Photo courtesy, Dr. Amy Rose Forbes-Erickson.

She wants to dance for her father… not just for him to watch her movements… but for him to see HER! To see that, not because of, but despite all the unspoken emotional pain, familial dissonance, and irreplaceable losses of her family members…She often made it through with strangers (some of whom have become lifelong friends) as her audiences! Her body must and will comply with her intention…Because it is an honourable gesture! Where her father is…it is boundless…beyond space and time! She only has to think his name! Words are too finite and limiting! So let the dance express the lyric that has been suppressed for far too long! This is how love does.

In closing, I see Joanne’s salutary and symbolic ‘Dance-Letter’ as cathartic (i.e., a purging of the emotions) in expression, for both her Self and that of her father, which are and have always been indivisible! So that, in her quest for that elusive peace that “passeth all understanding,” or to attain “ego integrity” as posited by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson as the final stage in the human being’s psychosocial development, she knew instinctively that she had to stop!

Her time for reparation and rejuvenation is NOW! Remove the ‘pebble’ (through the dance feature), which would initiate the long-overdue internal cleansing, to align body/mind/spirit with the Source! She had a duty to perform! That elixir of self-effort and living consciously is not for the faint-hearted and is your making! Thank you for inviting me to witness and to be a part of your metamorphosis. Enjoy your journey in what you will discover is, and has always been, a Play of Consciousness!

Click here for books by Joanne Kilgour Dowdy.