There are creatures in the sea that throb and undulate so much like the human heart that the first wet steps of our aqueous foremothers seem inevitable. In their search for the origin of the heart’s beat, scientists look to sea anemones and their archaic fibrillations for clues. Watching them (on YouTube) waltz through the darkness, without ego or direction, aglow with the dance of their own being, I sometimes feel disturbingly divorced from some vivid, essential rhythm in myself.
Which is why John Singletary’s multimedia series, Anahata, feels so important. Anahata is a word from the Sanskrit meaning unhurt, unstruck, or unbeaten. It has to do with balance between opposing forces, like the mind and body. Instead of striking one another in a collision, the opposites cohere. In yogic practice, the anahata is the heart chakra, the site of compassion and unity. In Singletary’s series, video, choreography, and the photograph collaborate in a tableau of unity. Ritual dance meets modern ballet, ballroom masquerade meets the aboriginal disguise—past and present improvise to an unheard music, uninterrupted by difference, and compelled onward by the common heart.