Whacking with the brown goddess-woman

Reflections on Today is the evening to strike lightning

By Lee Su-Feh

Image Credit - Marshal To - Image #16

Today is the evening to strike lightning/
Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai
Indian Summer Festival
July 5, 2025
Vancouver, BC
Performed by Simran Sachar
Choreographed by Justine A. Chambers and Simran Sachar

Author’s Note: Today is the evening to strike lightning/Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai is a dance work choreographed by Justine A Chambers and Simran Sachar, performed by Simran Sachar on July 25, 2025 at The Annex in Vancouver, BC, as part of the Indian Summer Festival 2025.

In this response to the work, woven into my feeling/thinking words, are the words of Justine and Simran, who also happen to be my friends, colleagues and sometimes, collaborators, sharing what they were feeling and thinking while making the work. It seems to me that dance is a fluid creature that lives in the space between the making of it and the receiving of it. This piece is an attempt to capture that experience in words.

- Lee Su-Feh

Image Credit - Marshal To - Image #13

There is a woman standing on the balcony. This woman is glistening. Her hair is shining. She is wearing a pale shift that seems to have intricate lace or beadwork, the details of which are not discernible from the distance between us. Her gaze sweeps across us, meets our gaze, grazes over our bodies. This woman is a badass. She breathes and with each breath, her weight shifts, drops certainly, confidently into her pelvis.

Filling the space is a deep low ambient bass sound like the breath of a deep underwater cavern.

The breath of an old old earth.

Time goes on. We watch her watch us watch her. We breathe as she breathes,

Then her arms are slowly rising. Her arms are slowly reaching into space. Her arms are slowly extending into the space above her head. They reach, they wrap, they furl and unfurl around the air, around her head, around her chest. Sometimes her fingers spiral around a tendril of a thought it seems, a wisp of a feeling maybe.

Her lips are moving. She is saying something but we cannot hear her words.

A prayer? A curse? A blessing? It doesn’t matter.

Soon it seems these silent words, as they move out of her mouth, are riding along her arms. Flying into the air above us all. Crackling the air above us.

Simran:

When we were starting to make this work, Justine asked me:

“So what do you want to do?”

I said, “I imagine myself in this large gown that extends into the audience. I imagine myself above everything”

Justine said, “How amazing would it be to have this brown goddess-woman (on the catwalk), and all of us would have to look up to her?”

Justine:

It was clear to me we should think about where we are, what is that space, what does that space have..oooh, if it’s at the Annex, we should use the catwalk

For me, the speaking was like spilling tea. How would you speak to Sophia? How would you speak to other women, gossip? What’s the function of gossip? The function of whacking? When I talk about gossip, I’m talking about this notion of gossip where women would come together to talk about what was really happening. As opposed to what they could say in the presence of men, or in the presence of power, which isn’t always men of course.

In All About Love by bell hooks, there is this idea that women are taught to lie right from the minute you have words: you’re taught to lie, to withhold, to manipulate. I thought, what if this is a moment where there’s no withholding, no lying, no manipulating. We’re just saying this is what it is. The whacking she was doing in that moment was like she was taking those words and she was wielding them, like, there, they’re out now. ..Letting them be public.. There are stories that have to be told, that can’t be told, but must be heard.

Image Credit - Marshal To - Image #1

II

Below the balcony, in the dark performance area, there is a metallic platform. A four-by-four foot square. There is some pale fabric on this platform, seemingly dropped into a small pyramid-like pile just off-centre. Lights flash under this platform, pulsing for several moments. Is the woman from the balcony going to appear? She doesn’t.
(I have questions. The pulsing lights don’t go long enough for me to perceive it as an event. I wonder if there is a technical problem)
The sound of women’s voices fill the air. I cannot make out what they are saying.
I imagine the woman from the balcony moving through the corridors and hallways of this building to come to the platform. I also imagine the women’s voices coming from corridors and hallways of other buildings, other worlds, other times.
(Maybe there is no technical problem)

Justine:

We knew we wanted it to be flashy. We wanted her to look real sharp, we weren’t trying to shy away from flash, or glamour..battling, that’s so much a part of it. Why would we try to abstract it. So (we said), let’s cover it with mylar, Let’s make it flashy and beautiful.

Simran:

That transition (between the balcony and the stage) - I really used that transition to gather myself: I know what’s about to happen but I also don’t know what’s about to happen...I spent that transition conjuring a little bit with my ancestors. My grandparents who have passed away, I always let them know that I’m going to dance for them. That I feel them in the space. Justine and I had also talked about our mothers. Our mothers dancing. All the times we got to see our mothers dancing. For my mom, it was mostly at parties but she also has a history of choreographing and dancing for film. Our conversation about our mothers - it was about their dancing but it was also about their magic. The magic they make. And also the horror they make.

Justin A. Chambers - Image Credit - Rachel Topham Photography

III

There is a woman on the platform.

She is bent over, her hands and feet on the floor. Her pelvis lifted towards the sky.

Slowly, her weight shifts. Slowly, from one foot to the other. One knee bends and then the other. Sometimes her weight shifts slightly forward into her arms, sometimes it falls slightly back onto her heels. The sound of a steady beat fills the air. A groove. There is a chorus of female voices flying, gliding, swooping, over this rhythm, this groove. I imagine they are the voices of our sisters, our mothers, our grandmothers.

The woman negotiates between the drive of the groove and the needs of her body with each weight shift. I watch the ripple of movement travel from her feet to her hands and back again, from earth to earth to earth. It is a geological event, a landscape, a weatherscape of earth pushing up the bones of her legs, curving around the tendons and ligaments of her hips, sliding into her spine, falling into her shoulders, dropping through her arms and into the earth again. Her breath like tides rising and falling.

She lifts her head, we meet her gaze. We breathe together.

Simran:

We spoke a lot about finding the functions within whacking … That inversion position … I’m whacking but in a position upside-down … a lot of skin, flesh, bone feeling in the body, of transferring within the body .. jolts of energy that were going though my legs, and my stomach and then my hands, my neck over and over again, switching direction.

Justine:

The proposal was to explore the interior space of her body. To trace, to feel volume, to track.

Simran Sachar - Image Credit - Marshal To

The woman is standing with her back to us, swaying.

Her arms are probing the air. Sometimes we don’t see her hands but we know they are spiraling around a tendril of a thought, reaching for a wisp of a feeling, sending her silent words out into the air, the air that is crackling around us.

At some point, I’m not sure when, she puts on a jacket that used to be the pile of fabric on the platform. (I have questions. Why was this act of putting on a shirt necessary? Were we supposed to make meaning out of the pile of fabric? Out of the act of putting on a piece of clothing?). At some point, I’m not sure when, she is facing us.

Her feet shuffle. Her feet shift. Step, together, step, together.

There is a jerky quality to this step which ripples through her legs into her spine, ending in sudden locks and sharp stops in her torso, reverberating into her arms and hands. Her hands are at first limp and shake with each jerky lock but they eventually start to take on more agency, more certainty. The tendrils and wisps become commands.

Her arms are stirring the air, swirling the air, striking the air. The air crackles.

Her torso buckles. Her spine undulates.

Her pelvis rocks, drives, thrusts.

Time goes on. Rhythm goes on. Rhythm builds.

Simran:

When the first step happens, there is this feeling of power I had inside. I felt like I shook the earth with the first step. It deepened my pelvis. Whenever my pelvis deepens, and grounds, I feel very confident in the training I have had. I know my training has been so different from so many of my peers in this city. It used to make me insecure but that first step makes me feel like everything had to happen that way for me to get to that first step. We call it the fucked-up two-step.

When the hands slowly come into a bit of a form, it feels like when a witch or a wizard starts to get better at honing their craft, honing the power. Feeling like I made that light turn on, I made that curtain move. That is happening over there because I’m doing this here.

It feels like Justine and I are calling in the rhythm. Calling in the beat.

Justine:

Simran was holding both our beings.

This woman is a rocking, thrusting, whacking, undulating, glistening, ancient badass goddess dancing like a motherfucker. She is the conduit between the thumping of the earth beneath and the electricity in the sky around us.

Justine:

This moment can only be made possible by everything that has come before.

Simran:
Everyone who has been a part of my journey and my story has really taught me how to dance like a motherfucker.