Georgia O’Keefe

I am back in the studio.  Not the arena.  New dances, no horses.  For the past thirteen years, I have been dancing with horses.  That work is still extant, but I am drawn back to the theater.  For the first time in that many years, I am making solo work and duet work.  It feels exhilarating, wild, unhinged in the sense that the horse is not there to shape things, to create a certain kind of boundary, intention and necessity for the work.

I have been doing Authentic Movement more too.  Setting my witness-goddesses in the corner, and letting them hold the space, hold me.  There is weeping,  There is opening, there is stillness and darkness and light and quiet.

When I was teaching at Boston University in September, a student asked me where I start.  How do I begin a dance?  I liked that question, and reached back all the way to the beginning of making work for answers that were as varied as an elephant is from a mouse.  An image, a feeling in the body, a poem, a painting, some music, a dancer’s movement, something observed, something read, something felt, a place, a journey, a memory, a fragment of gesture that keeps interrupting, demanding. Something quiet, something loud, something big, something small.  Welcome all.

I am letting myself be called now.  Maybe it is that I am older, but I am surrendering to these calls more easily now, letting myself be shaped, asking fewer questions, and allowing the wild body to speak.