Category Archives: the dance

Dec8

silver lines

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Jaguar

From a friend’s post on Facebook, I learned about animal communicator Anna Breytenbach and a black leopard named Spirit who lives at a sanctuary named Jukani in South Africa.  I watched this amazing film about Anna’s work, which ends with the story of her work with Spirit. (Don’t skip to the end, watch the whole thing – it is life-changing.) That film included her mentor, Jon Young, an American tracker and naturalist.

During the film, Young spoke about the intuitive way that he tracks animals, and how at some point, he no longer uses his eyes to look at tracks, but instead begins to see something called “silver lines.”  Later, an African tracker spoke of the same silver lines, and described feeling very distinct guiding sensations in his body that told him which direction to move.  As Young and Breytenbach moved though the landscape, you could see both of them feeling into and opening to the energetic essence of the animal they were tracking. It seemed that they were harmonizing, letting their bodies, the landscape and the animal come into a single, aligned vibration.

Watching, I yearned to be able to intuit in that way, to feel that sense of connection with the animal that exists at the level of quanta, where we are all just vibration.  Then I realized that they were describing the way that I make dances.  I feel into the vibrational heart of the character or movement.  I let myself be moved.  I am listening for a resonance and attunement that tells me when I am “on.”  Those are my silver lines.

With the horses, doing can get in the way.  That is why I spend more and more time in being, even in the saddle.  I love to ride, and I ride every day. I find that more and more my riding goal is about relationship, focusing on balance, awareness and  tracking.  Tracking is being aware of my breathing, the horse’s breathing, our moving connection and our emotional alignment.  Tracking means looking for the silver lines that tell me when we are in sync, where the communication has opened out into pure vibration, below the level of thought and efforting.  When that happens, I feel myself vibrating into joy, here now, feeling it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nov25

performance: mark the date!

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DSC00272Photo:  Pam White

On January 10, I will be performing part of a new solo, The Traveler (moth to the flame) at the Booking Dance Festival NYC.  Once again, we will be at the beautiful Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Time TBA, but probably around 8 pm.

Broadway  at  60th  Street,  New  York,  NY

www.bookingdance.com

I hope to see you there!

Nov19

bad idea

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IMG_1794Photo:  Pam White;  Sculpture:  Gillian Jagger

I am stepping back into the world of horseless dance.  Like Gillian’s sculptures, the ground beneath my feet is marked with hoofprints, indelibly changed from spending fourteen years dancing with horses.  But at this moment, the theater calls.

Besides the time in the studio, besides the dancing, the dreaming, the focusing inward, there is also the parallel underworld of fundraising and booking.  I am trying to make friends with that world.  Not by sucking up to it, but by noticing if there is a way in which it can support me, in which I can offer my work without losing my mind and my soul.I think there is, but viewing myself through that lens can make me question everything about what I am quietly, wildly exploring in the studio.

I went online to one big funding site and looked at a long video of choreography by recipients.  There I found Michelle Ellsworth, whose work so delighted me that I Googled her further.  She is a gorgeous mover, a witty performer and exactly the kind of person I would like to hang out with for an afternoon at Starbucks.  I watched some of her videos online, and this one gave me pause.   What I found intriguing and disturbing was how easily I was convinced that what I had been working on was, in fact, a bad idea.

It isn’t really.  But doubt is the demon that besieges artists, my quicksand of choice.  It is the outfit I wear when I am filling out grant applications, or even thinking about it.  It is the great derailer.  So check it out, if you dare.

MV 103: You Had A Bad Idea from michelle ellsworth on Vimeo.

Nov11

give anyway

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kindness-three

“You’ve got to give before you get. You cannot expect to receive generous rewards and then decide what to give in return. You must give freely and have faith that the rewards will eventually come.”  Napoleon Hill

I spent the weekend in Boston rehearsing a new dance work with Ingrid Schatz and DeAnna Pellecchia.  Two full days in the studio, diving into movement, trying things out, looking for the light, for heat, for brilliance.  I was reminded of what Alex Webb says about taking photographs:  that you may take hundreds and only one will be wonderful.  I have more patience and faith in that process now than five, ten or twenty years ago.  What has to be there, every time, is willingness and teachability. My own and my collaborators.  If that is missing, then we are caught in the sands of resistance, and I am pretty clear that I do not have the time or energy for that.

Directing and parenting and partnering are interestingly related for me.  In all of them, there is listening, opening, guiding, loving.  With directing and dancemaking, it is loving the process, loving the work and the workers, even when it is awkward and raw, unformed and murky.  I am old enough to have a lot of staying power, and a pretty handy toolkit.  I am also more attentive to the guidance of my heart.  That is really important when starting a new project.  The heart has to be there to keep things pulsing, to support the whole system of the making.  And the heart has to guide toward truth, toward a kind of inevitability in the outcome.  Meaning that when we see the final work, it feels as if nothing else could have happened.

Back to giving.  With directing and parenting and partnering that means that I hold nothing back.  And that reminds me of this from Annie Dillard in The Writing Life:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this:  spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book:  give it, give it all, give it now.  the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.  Something more will arise for later, something better.  These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.”