any artists begin creating out of pain, out of a need to escape a particular reality. The need to go somewhere else puts one close to the unconscious and engenders a reciprocal relationship between life and art that strengthens as we experience higher levels of contact with the "beyond" that we can sometimes reach through the dance.

The 10th anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, inspired Black Madonna, a new evening-length work that embodies the five stages of the mystical cycle common to the world's inner traditions: awakening, fulfillment, loss, mourning, and reunification with the divine. With music by John Cage and Philip Glass performed live by pianist Bruce Brubaker, the performance juxtaposes original living sculptures against video by artist and light designer Christopher Odo. Three-dimensional projections contrast the live movement.

A traumatic childhood event unexpectedly initiated me into dance. My father was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, and I was born on a military base near Yokohama, Japan. When I was two years old, my mother was driving and a man on a bicycle stopped quickly in front of the car. I went through the windshield, causing me to lose the disc between my fourth and fifth vertebrae, an injury that doctors have said could have kept me in a wheelchair. But through an intuitive sense in subsequent years, I began creating dances with slow, sinuous movements. The twisting and untwisting of joints increased blood flow, which perhaps became a gradual method of regeneration and also allowed my body to retain its childlike and idiosyncratic flexibility. This became my choreography.

This incident was the subject of my previous work, "After Eros. Eros was created with Yoshito Ohno, the son of Kazuo Ohno, cofounder of the Japanese avant-garde movement butoh. Butoh, a dance developed in postwar Japan on the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, explores the darkest side of human nature. In After Eros, I collaborated with composer Philip Glass and playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly). Hwang felt that wedding my life story to the myth of Eros and Psyche was an intriguing way to explore themes of human transcendence. The man on the bicycle from my childhood accident became Eros, raising compelling questions about the relationship between eros and violence." My work departs from the butoh "dance of the dark soul" in that my subjects have more to do with a search for archetypal images beyond pairs of opposites: in my work birth and death or pain and ecstasy are present in the same moment. Strongly grounded in my belief in the body's own regenerative powers, my choreography explores the evolution of my wounds in what I consider to be a feminine response, one of facing one's pain and moving through it, with the female body as a symbol for the earth's cycles of regeneration.

That these two very different belief systems would collide was inevitable. When the nomadic tribes swept in from inhospitable regions and saw the abundance of the fertile areas, they conquered the agrarian people and destroyed virtually all evidence of the earth-based goddess cultures. The winners of a war not only write the history, they redefine the sacred. For about 5,000 years, male gods based on the warrior model have pre- dominated. How do we understand both the mythology of the warrior and the values of the goddess cultures that thrived for more than 15,000 years before the existence of wars of annihilation? How can we transcend this contradiction?

Years ago, I had the opportunity to dance in Dream of Kitamura, a play directed by Jean Erdman. After the performance I found myself in an elevator standing next to Jean's husband, the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell. Suddenly he turned to me and said, "Your dance is your transcendence!" This profound, simple statement opened a world to me where the divine is both a personal mythology and a universal expression. Divinity can reside in the body, and the occasional gift of the spirit is where the true self lies, a place where pairs of opposites are revealed as illusions. The contradictory moments that become my dance are my experience of transcendence, a transcendence that we hope to share through the performance of Black Madonna.