Category Archives: the dance

Feb17

shadow dancing

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I have been shadow dancing this morning.  It is a strategy that I suggested to some of my students:   to overcome creative inertia, try dancing around it.  Or diving into it.  Or changing the station.

Dancing around it means that I am doing the opposite of honing in.  I am shifting focus, paying attention to whatever is flickering at the edge of consciousness and being lighter, more fluid and delicate in my physical self.

There is a tendency when writing or working here – in this digital place where we meet – to get stolid, turgic, thick-feeling in the body.  So finding ways to bring in lightness and less density is a good way to shadow dance.

How do you engage your playful body as you are working?

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Feb13

my heart, our hearts

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Painting by Pam White                                     This painting is FOR SALE (Contact the artist for details).

Today like every other day
We wake up empty and scared.
Don’t open the door of your study
And begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of way to kneel
And kiss the earth.

                                                     Rumi

I have been reading Jon Katz about Valentine’s Week.  This post touched me deeply, because I too live with an artist, and when I see the light shining from her studio windows, my heart leaps.

Lately she has been painting hearts.  They are ecstatic, wildly beautiful.  I have already picked out mine.  “That one,” I said,  “That one is mine.”

2012 marks 26 years together.  That seems an impossible number, and yet there it is.  The years, the days, the minutes are a complicated dance, a beautiful improvisation, a meditation on listening, on moving, on being moved.  Being a love warrior, which mostly means learning to love oneself deeply enough to love another.

Feb12

bodyscape

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(I apologize to the photographer, Marconi.  I cannot find a really good link to his work.  If any of you have one, please pass it along.)

I don’t usually include the work of other photographers in my blog.  It feels dishonest, a little like cheating.  But that is just an old tune in my head. When I find something this beautiful, it has to be shared.

Here is what I love about this photograph.  It is completely kinetic – when I look at it, I can feel the contours of the landscape in my body, can feel the breath and music of it so clearly through my terrain of skin, muscle and bone.

When I was just out of college, I took a dance improvisation workshop with the great choreographer Trisha Brown.  One of the things she asked us to do to create movement was to “read” the a wall in the studio with our movement, to translate what we saw into dance.  We all got busy dancing the basketball hoop, the windows, the bleachers, the sky beyond.  That experience kicked open a door to something that has always stayed with me – connecting what is outside with what is inside – finding that creative, generative impulse from everything around me.

I teach a workshop called Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  Here is a recipe for you:  Sometime today, maybe right now, stand up and face a direction you usually don’t.  Let your shoulders or your hips or your nose “read” (translate) whatever you are looking at into movement.  Do it again, but this time slow it way down.  Do it again fast.  What are you feeling?

Tell me about it!

 

Feb7

the mirror

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Photo:  Jeffrey Anderson

I will say right from the start that it feels strange to post this picture.  Even though I am a performer.  Even though I was for a number of years, a model.

About ten years ago I stopped wanting my picture taken.  Age?  Probably.  Something else in the mix as well, I am sure. Something to do with hiding.  However, I am redoing my website, and it was suggested that new headshots were a good idea.  So I trekked to Glen’s Falls and Jeffrey  (with wife Laura and new baby Jeffrey in attendance) took some pictures.  I am not shy with Jeffrey.  So it felt ok to let myself be seen.

The reason that I bring this up is that I wrote yesterday about seeing the Wim Wenders film, Pina.  What I was aware of as I watched the astonishing dancers of her company was the absence of mirror in their dancing.  Their pure, wild absorption in the movement and the moment.  From their words, I understood that Pina was their mirror and their witness.  The big, allowing container for their movement that let them push themselves off precipice after precipice of their dancing and their fear.

As Shunryu Suzuki says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:  “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”

Today when I was in my studio, I turned my big mirror around, so that it was only the space and the music holding me.  At first, this was disconcerting – we dancers are mirrored creatures, seeking reflection, affirmation, information.  But then the movement began to tumble and spill.  Almost as if Pina herself were in the room, urging me to dance my longing, my love.