The Jesus Horse and Other Lessons in Sacred Flailing
Part One: The Authority of Movement
I am writing this with paint under my fingernails and bruises on my shins from what my mother calls "that ridiculous performance." Last night, I stood in a warehouse in Bermondsey, flailing—arms windmilling, body surrendering to chaos—while 200 people watched. Some laughed. Some filmed. One woman cried.
I am Chijioke, performance artist, former good Nigerian son, current disappointment to relatives who thought my London education would produce a banker, not someone who calls innocent flailing "the last honest movement."
The question driving this investigation: What if our most graceless moments—the flailing, the falling, the Jesus Horse stumbling through existence—are actually our most sacred?
Part Two: The Museum of Failed Grace
Thread One: Present Investigation
Victoria & Albert Museum, Movement Gallery. Dr. Sarah Chen shows me footage from 1913: Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring," the audience rioting because the dancing was "too primitive, too wild."
"They called it innocent flailing," Chen says. "Critics said it destroyed ballet."
"Did it?"
"It birthed modern dance."
I think of my grandmother's church in Lagos, how the women would catch the spirit and move—not choreographed, not pretty, just pure response to something bigger than comprehension. My British dance teachers called it "unrefined." My grandmother called it "letting God move through you without asking permission."
Thread Two: The Discovery Scene
The Jesus Horse appeared during my third performance.
Not metaphorically. Actually appeared.
I was mid-flail when the warehouse door opened and a horse walked in. White, unremarkable except for its timing. Someone's escaped polo pony, we assumed. But then it began moving with us—not dancing exactly, but swaying, stumbling, finding rhythm in its confusion.
Security tried to remove it. It melted into light, reformed as a pigeon, then became the horse again. The audience thought it was projection mapping. I knew better. Sometimes holiness arrives unannounced and refuses to behave.
Maya, six years old, in the front row with her decorated inhaler: "The horse doesn't know how to dance either!"
Her mother, embarrassed: "Maya—"
"That's why it's perfect," Maya continued, with the authority only children possess.
Thread Three: Memory as Foundation
Lagos, 2001. My first school play. I was supposed to be a tree—still, rooted, silent. Instead, when the music started, I began moving. Not rebelling, just responding. My body had its own conversation with rhythm.
The teacher stopped the show. "Chijioke is ruining everything!"
My grandmother, in the audience, stood: "My grandson is improving everything. Trees move in wind. Let the boy be wind."
That night she told me: "Innocence isn't stillness. It's movement without calculation."
Part Three: The Science of Flailing
Research Transformed
At University College London's Motor Control Lab, researchers map "spontaneous movement patterns." When humans stop controlling their bodies—in joy, panic, spiritual ecstasy—we all move similarly. Arms spread, knees bend, spine curves. We become universal.
Dr. James Whitfield explains: "Trained dancers show decreased activity in brain regions associated with authentic expression. They've learned to override instinct."
"So professional grace is actually further from truth?"
"Depends how you define truth."
I think of street preachers, toddlers, people catching themselves from falling—how their movements contain more honesty than a thousand ballet classes.
Part Four: Cultural Code-Switching in Motion
Scene: Nigerian Wedding, Peckham
My cousin's reception. The DJ switches from Afrobeats to British pop. Watch the dance floor: Nigerians who were moving with full-body abandon suddenly become contained, careful, "appropriate."
I ask my aunt why she changes her dancing.
"The English don't understand joy that takes up space," she says. "They think it's showing off."
But Maya is here, the girl from my performance, now seven. She doesn't code-switch. She flails through both songs with equal abandon, her inhaler bouncing in her pocket like percussion.
Her British father looks mortified. Her Nigerian mother looks proud. Maya looks free.
Part Five: The Jesus Horse Returns
The Performance, Continued
The horse—or whatever it was—stayed for seventeen minutes. Long enough that people stopped filming and started experiencing. It moved between forms: horse, light, pigeon, horse again. Each transformation accompanied by what I can only describe as innocent stumbling, like existence itself was learning to walk.
Emmett was there, still wearing his evidence costume from his breathing performance. "It's adapting," he said. "Like us with the air. Becoming what it needs to survive the moment."
The horse heard him—I swear it did—and became a mirror. Not metaphorically. An actual mirror reflecting the audience back at themselves, all of us flailing now, even those who'd been standing still.
Security called the police. The police called animal control. Animal control said, "You want us to catch what?"
Part Six: Varieties of Innocent Movement
From My Research Notebooks
Types of flailing I've documented:
- Ecstatic: Pentecostal churches, raves, children hearing ice cream trucks
- Panic: Missing the last step, almost dropping phones, Brexit negotiations
- Joy: Lottery winners, reunions at Heathrow, dogs seeing their humans
- Confusion: Tourists at Tube stations, me trying to explain my art to my parents
- Sacred: Speaking in tongues, Sufi whirling, whatever the Jesus Horse was doing
Each contains the same element: surrender to movement without mediation.
Part Seven: The Opposition
Scene: Arts Council Funding Meeting
"Your work lacks technique," the panel chair says.
"That's the point."
"Anyone can flail."
"Exactly. That's why it matters."
They deny my funding. I perform outside their building that afternoon, flailing in my rejected grant outfit. Passersby join. Someone puts £20 in my laptop bag. A child gives me half their sandwich.
The panel chair watches from her window. I wave mid-flail. She doesn't wave back, but I catch her foot tapping.
Part Eight: The Vulnerable Distance
Three revelations about my flailing:
Surface: I move this way because I never learned proper technique.
Private: I learned technique and abandoned it because it felt like lying.
Secret: I'm terrified that if I stop moving wildly, I'll stop moving at all. Innocence isn't my philosophy—it's my survival mechanism in a world that wants me contained.
Part Nine: The Complexity Architecture
Let me be fair: innocent flailing can be dangerous.
Last month, a man joined my performance, flailing so intensely he dislocated his shoulder. Innocence without awareness becomes harm. Movement without consciousness becomes violence.
My friend Nivara, watching me ice my bruises: "There's a reason we evolved past pure instinct."
She's right. But we also evolved past so much that kept us human.
The question isn't whether to flail or be still. It's how to maintain access to both—wildness and control, innocence and wisdom, the Jesus Horse and the trained polo pony.
Part Ten: The Final Movement
The Warehouse, 3 AM
Everyone has gone except Maya and her parents, Emmett, and the janitor who's been watching while pretending to sweep.
The Jesus Horse never returned, but something shifted in that space. The air moves differently. The walls remember rhythm.
Maya draws on the floor with chalk: stick figures with wings instead of arms, all of them in motion.
"Why wings?" I ask.
"Because flailing is trying to fly when you don't have wings yet."
Her father, the British one who was mortified earlier, suddenly starts moving. Not dancing—flailing. Authentically, embarrassingly, beautifully.
"I played rugby," he says between movements. "They trained this out of me."
His wife joins. Then Emmett. Then the janitor abandons his broom.
We flail until dawn, five humans and the memory of a horse that wouldn't stay one shape, couldn't stay still, wouldn't apologize for taking up space.
Part Eleven: What the Body Remembers
My grandmother died last year, but her wisdom lives in my muscles: "Innocence isn't stillness. It's movement without calculation."
Every culture has words for this:
- Ubuntu (Zulu): I am because we are, I move because we move
- Duende (Spanish): The dark sound that climbs up through the feet
- Junoon (Urdu): Passionate madness that makes you dance
- Saudade (Portuguese): The presence of absence that moves through you
But English—efficient, contained English—calls it "losing control," as if control was something worth keeping.
Part Twelve: The Integration
I perform weekly now, unfunded but undeterred. The crowds grow. Not because I'm good—I'm objectively terrible by any technical standard. They come because permission is contagious.
Last week, a businessman in a £3,000 suit joined, flailing in his leather shoes until he cried. "I haven't moved like this since I was four," he said.
That's the revolution: not teaching people to flail, but reminding them they never forgot how.
The Ending Turn
The Jesus Horse was probably just a escaped polo pony with weird timing. The melting was probably collective hallucination. The transformation was probably lights and suggestion and London's unreliable air quality making us all a bit dizzy.
Probably.
But Maya's drawing stays with me: stick figures with wings instead of arms, trying to fly before they know how.
That's innocence—not the absence of knowledge but the presence of attempt. Not graceful, not dignified, not Instagram-ready. Just honest movement toward something beyond comprehension.
My grant proposals keep getting rejected. My relatives still hope I'll get a "real job." My body collects bruises like evidence of living.
But every Thursday at 8 PM, in a warehouse that smells like rust and possibility, people gather to flail. Bankers and children, immigrants and natives, all of us moving like trees in grandmother's wind, like horses that won't hold shape, like humans who remember what we were before we learned to be careful.
The Jesus Horse hasn't returned, but sometimes—mid-flail, sweat stinging my eyes, arms reaching for nothing and everything—I become it. We all do. Melting and reforming, failing and trying, innocent not in our perfection but in our willingness to move without knowing where we're going.
And isn't that the most sacred movement of all? Not the choreographed prayer but the stumbling toward grace? Not the trained technique but the honest fall?
I write this with fresh bruises, purple like gospel truth. Tomorrow I'll flail again. Someone will laugh. Someone will join. Someone will remember what their body knew before the world taught it to be still.
The revolution isn't in the movement. It's in the permission.
Flail on.
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Chijioke performs "Innocent Flailing" every Thursday at The Archive Warehouse, Bermondsey. No experience necessary. No technique required. Just bring your body and forget everything it's been taught. The Jesus Horse is optional but welcome.
