YOUR MOTHER DANCES AND... RANTS

Normally dancing is my metaphor, my way of expressing deep emotions and mysteries. Dancing can be my guru but it also often reveals to me my general sadness and dissatisfaction with the world and my relationship to things outside myself. And then I write. I write because I am driven to communicate and when one complex and abstract vehicle leaves my innards roiling, I need another, more direct way to express things. That’s why we all love Facebook and Twitter; we can get to how we feel in ten words or less and our readers and friends kind of know “where we are” immediately.

Generally, I love sleep--I rarely can get enough of it. But I am up uncommonly early this morning with my noisy thoughts and my melancholy.  My muscles are aching with that good-bad soreness from working in performance, whatever adrenaline or strain accompanies such, and my mind feels kind of the same.

My most recent joy was to dance a dance of Molly Rabinowitz’s called “Joy.”  It is one of the most physical works I have undertaken and simultaneously electrified and terrified me in performance. All the elements of this dance just worked...

There are dances, there are good dances and then there are works of art.  In my experience, the life-changing performances I have been privileged to witness are precious and rare. Most of them have been performed live; some have been on video.  All of them are works of depth and surprise and iconoclasm of some kind--that raging against the machine moment when despite all gravity and natural law, some isolated period of time becomes elevated, isolated, elongated, and transcendent. Four of these said experiences have been performances of The Rite of Spring.

I bear a general awe concerning the history of this work, from the socio-cultural underpinnings of Nijinsky’s seminal version to one I witnessed recently, Marie Chouinard’s unremitting and mysterious treatment.  To see Rite of Spring with no historical context must make the uninitiated heads spin.  Stravinsky’s jagged, pounding rhythms and dissonance are challenging and terrifying still nearly a century from its premiere. The elements of ritual, human sacrifice, the power of the greater group singling out the sacrifice/victim, and the sheer exhaustion and repetition of the death dance all swirl in this unrelenting confrontation between the performers’ embodiment and the audience as...

It has been a while. 

Wow, there are so many contexts in which this statement could be true--personal or professional. It’s been a while since I had time to ruminate, to sit, to ponder. All the rest has been the speeding train of my over-committed schedule intertwined with so many others’ schedules and needs. It’s been a while since I didn’t feel too overloaded or despondent to believe I had anything to write. It’s been a while since I told that nagging, prodding little guilt demon in my head to just shut up and that I intend to indulge in doing very little occasionally (including just writing for the hell of it).

It hasn’t been a while since anything I felt about dance and dancing has changed. Our world has continued spinning drunkenly around its tilted axis. Financial markets crashed, a new president was elected, certain peoples’ hopes for civil equality were dashed, high level executives got bailed out and kept their salaries, benefits and private jets, and regular folks lost their jobs and homes at record rates. Well, nothing much ever changes if you can see the pendulum from a wider angle--one other than the slow...

Generosity. 

So often the word is equated with money or giving of some kind.  In the arts, what does this mean?  We are often asking funders or wealthier arts-minded individuals to be generous towards us so we can continue to do what is not popular. Our culture doesn’t value dance unless it sells something: a product, a way of looking, sex.  I know people who have spent hundreds of dollars on tickets for rock or popular music concerts many times over but complain (even dance students!) if they are asked to pay $20 for a dance concert. 

I finally did my taxes and was a bit disgruntled (ok, more than a bit) to learn that as an organization which is not yet non-profit, if the government ascertains that my “business” (read: small modern dance company) is continually losing more money than it is making, then I am actually the artistic director of a HOBBY and will most likely be audited if I continue to itemize my expenses (read: losses).  I found this pretty funny.  AS IF.  As if I could actually MAKE a profit as a small dance organization. ...

Oh, I feel a blog coming on…

I am averaging one a month (hey that’s more than my kitchen floor gets mopped) but it feels like I always have some kind of running commentary in my head.

Last month is absent a blog most certainly because we were performing and wrapping up an academic semester in the same couple of weeks.  It was a fun time with beloved guests and a program and company of which I was extremely proud.  The new piece was a behemoth but it continued to shape and edit itself as it went along and was as streamlined as it could be at the time. I still waver between remembering this pleasure and the post-show let down—the realization that given the size of the community and with the audiences who showed for other companies, our little gig saw respectable numbers (especially being the 3^rd weekend of modern dance in a row) but not enough to raise the dancers’ pay or put us ahead in any way.

I am always at a continual crossroads and can’t stop asking the question: Why do I keep doing this?  My answer is usually simple:...

What is there to talk about?  Today, people talk too much.  I talk too much, am too opinionated about too many things.  Politics, culture, dance, parenting—you name it, I am sure I have expressed a strong opinion to some poor captive audience.  And yet, even after I’ve spouted, I often feel hopeless and powerless to actually change the things about which I feel strongly.  Words just don’t do it—while they express, illuminate, provoke, and perhaps incite, they can’t outwardly change a person’s life (for better or worse) until they are ingested and become a part of a more intuitive and internal mechanism.  How can words have so much power on one side and yet so little on another? Someone can tell you he or she loves you while he or she is manipulating or hurting you. You can recover somewhat from the pain but you’ll never forget the words: the alternating “I love you’s” with other cruel sentiments and actions. 

I remember thinking very early on that as a dancer, I was relieved from speaking—my voice comfortably silent, my body emphatic and expressive.  Everything in my dance training stressed this. The...

I have been meaning to blog for months of course…

We are well into 2008 and the time has flown by so fast. So much to share at the end of last year so here’s a brief recap:

In October, I saw dance in Milwaukee every weekend.  Li Chiao Ping was intense and deep and physical—a triumph of full bodied strength and contrasting delicate detail.  Her stories and insights are as complex and compelling as the rigorous physicality of her work--I hope for a future collaboration between Wisconsinites. 

I saw American Repertory Ballet and lectured with Luc at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center about gender inequities in the choreographic opportunities in ballet (inspired by Graham Lustig’s “Dancing Through the Ceiling” project highlighting women choreographers).  Just to be clear: in all dance spheres, though women overwhelmingly represent the most meticulously trained and common practitioners in the community, choreographic and leadership roles are held predominantly by men.  Duh.

Also hopeful was the range of bodies represented in ARB—all strong and versatile with some of the most compelling women sporting some curvaceous flesh (relative to ballet dancers of course and not “real” women)....

Have you ever wanted to run screaming from your life?  Have you ever, in the midst of running errands or doing the daily, taken a turn onto a highway and thought, "What if I just keep going?"  What would happen?  There are people who do this all the time.  In the midst of doing their thing, they just break-something in them says, "Enough.  I can't take this anymore.  Do something else, go somewhere else.  Don't look back."  I have understood this in flashes but there has always been that other voice-some would call it reason-that says, "Look, you've felt this way before and you went on and you made it through and it really wasn't so painful or the end of the world." 

In the movie, "The Hours," Julianne Moore crafts this kind of person into somewhat of a sympathetic character though we are incredulous as her character leaves her small son (and then, as we piece together the story, we see how this abandonment has played out so tragically.)  Much of the social disdain for "people who leave" is aimed at women.  You know, those women whose "innate" nurturing or maternal compass has gone askew and they...

This week as I am performing, I am so cognizant of time and its limits.  The time left to perform (oh how I am aging), the time away from the people I love, the time it takes to navigate traffic into an urban center to get to the performance space where we hope a tiny audience will come.  This past week, I took the kids to what would be considered a moderately attended baseball game (during our hopeful bid for the playoffs L).  I think there were 38,000 people there-not much traffic on the way there, easy to get around and in and out of the park, a nail-biting game.  It was pleasant and a lot of fun (until we lost). 

I think of how much trouble I ingest trying to maintain this last glowing trail of a performer's life and I ask myself, "Why do I do this?"  38,000 people in the ballpark and I will be lucky if 600 people see my work this year let alone pay over $15 for a show.  I train, I sweat, I worry, I push myself past limits of mental and physical endurance, I get floor burns and bruises and...

So September is here and we are running. The darkness is sneaking up on us a little earlier each night and I can sense the fall melancholy-that wistful, crisp air that brings with it memories of childhood in autumn and its smells-enveloping my consciousness. For me it is a kind of happy sentimentality to ruminate on the cozy aspects of my life with gratitude. The children are well and the house is somewhat clean and organized-no small accomplishment! The candles at evening flicker shadows in a bedroom that speaks of quiet down comforter warmth, tranquil sitting and reading, snuggles with beloved people and pets, and most of all, love in all its forms from parental to passionate.

Often, gratitude is not present without some experience of suffering. I am sure this is true for many in the month of September. In our country, the month has come to symbolize the depth of loss and human suffering. Strange how for me, the month also carries so much weight over the years of my life--struggles in school and relationships, the crushing realizations and contrasts between who I thought I was and what was actually happening, the overwhelming desire for clarity. So...