Experimental Performance as Spiritual Practice

The Dislocation Express, V-Blog #11: David Ryther and Mantra Plonsey

2011-07-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

After the performance of The Dislocation Express on Wednesday night, David Ryther and I were in front of the Ed Roberts Campus, waiting to go inside and pack up. We were standing where the whole performance journey starts, and now there was no sign we had ever been there at all.

I shared with him that this project feels especially poignant in terms of its impermanence. It takes a huge effort to get going each night, with a complex web of time syncs for when each aspect of the journey has to be set up, performed with, and then cleaned up. And after we've come from wherever our lives had led us earlier that day, to the Ed Roberts Campus to start the performance, then to the BART platform, onto a BART train, transferring at MacArthur station and onto another train, and then another BART station for another set up, performance and clean-up, then back to the station, onto a train, transferring to another train, back to Ashby station and back up to the Ed Roberts Campus--after all that there's a potent sense of the fleeting nature of what we do.

Where does all that energy, expression, connection, passion, effort go? What do we have to show for it? Years of planning, 150 hours of rehearsal, endless dialogues about how to best chip away at the unnecessary aspects of the piece, meetings, multiple publicity campaigns, photo shoots, break-downs, headaches, countless hours in the car hauling props and costumes, and the facing of all sorts of fears and inner demons that stand in the way of sharing our vulnerable truths, all lead to the end of the performances, when hardly any remnants are left, and we all go back to our ordinary lives. It leaves me feeling quite existential and empty.

And when I shared this David said, "Well that's basically what all of life is...so why not spend it doing this thing that we love?"

Yes!

It's a great feeling to be able to say "Yes!" to this whole process. To plunge into a completely ephemeral project, commit to it completely, and watch it washed away as soon as it manifests.

The Buddhist Diamond Sutra has a line I love: "Like a flash of lightning in the dark of night."

To me this describes both the impermanence of every single phenomena (including enlightenment,) and the raw power of moments of insight. And it is a great metaphor for performance. Together, with all the combined energy of everyone that has touched any performance project, including the audiences, we bring this flash of lightning into the night sky and witness it together for that brief moment. Both the lightning and the darkness are important. They define each other, lead to each other, make room for each other to exist.

It's a strange path that we artists are on, but a beautiful one, and I'm so fortunate to travel it with such "mensches."

Here's the last of our introductory v-blogs for The Dislocation Express. During the flurry of activity in our last few rehearsals we didn't have time to interview David or Mantra, so this is a look at the two of these firestorms in action. I continue to learn so much from both David and Mantra. They commit to everything they do completely, and while they are both virtuosos, they maintain this sense of newness in performance--always hungry for learning and growth and always seeking higher and deeper levels of mystery.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhK4PAolbxY

The Dislocation Express, V-Blog #10: Sebastian Grubb

2011-07-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

I love risk in performance. Whether it's physical risk, emotional risk, conceptual risk or some other category entirely, I find that when the stakes are high onstage I feel indisputably alive.

The Dislocation Express contains a great deal of risk. We're performing with a highly diverse ensemble in multiple, unpredictable locations. And we're pushing up against the boundaries of what we thought each of us could do. This manifests as performers trying on new artistic mediums (dancing, singing, speaking,) as well as choreography that includes a great deal of danger: barely controllable pathways, high velocities, flying guitars, crashes, falls, and collisions. We're pushed to the limits of our endurance and comfort and we have to keep going, traveling on BART in outlandish costumes that draw a lot of attention and public response.

It's invigorating!

This level of risk is only manageable for me when there is also a strong measure of reliability and structure. In addition to large doses of chaos, I need artists around me that are firmly grounded in their own bodies and performance techniques.

It's a great pleasure to work with Sebastian Grubb for the first time on this project. His dancing harnesses great momentum, power and surprise--and does so with great precision. He has become one of the "rocks" of The Dislocation Express--but a rock that instantly can transform into fire, water or air, and then just as quickly back to total stability.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBtvWTtmZrY

Coming Full Circle - The Dislocation Express: V-blog #9, Nils Jorgensen

2011-07-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

I first met Nils Jorgensen in 2008, when Dandelion Dancetheater and AXIS Dance Company were sharing a program in the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

I just happened to sit next to him in the audience to watch the AXIS piece and somehow we got to talking. There was something there right away. I guess we could call it chemistry. And I fell in love with the sound of his voice. I told him that we should put him in a piece sometime, as his deep, rich voice could be perfect for the stage. He was mildly interested. I think lots of people had told him great things about his voice, so my idea might not have registered strongly on his radar.

A little while after that I decided to track him down. When I have a strong gut feeling about someone being right for Dandelion work, I tend to follow it. In these instances I rarely know how the person will fit into any particular project, but my intuition tells me that she/he is somehow in alignment with the values that guide my work. This almost always ends up taking me somewhere new and expanding the work.

Through friends in AXIS I found Nils' contact info and started pursuing him to join the cast of a piece I was starting, Tongues. I guess I became his "stalker." As usual I could only get this prospective performer to commit to coming to one rehearsal to check it out and see what he thought. Also as usual, once he was there he jumped right into the mix.

Nils became a crucial member of the cast, both as a performer and as a contributor of ideas, props, questions, and contexts. He performed with us in the Bay Area, in Southern California and in Washington D.C. when the piece went to the Kennedy Center.

Since then I have asked Nils to come in as an artistic consultant on a number of projects. Nils is a wheelchair rugby player, and now teaches and coaches rugby and fitness at the Embarcadero YMCA in SF. He has a mind that easily moves "outside the box" and he has taught me a lot about merging performance with design and aspects of athletics.

We brought him aboard The Dislocation Express in our final stages of creation, and as I had hoped, he's propelled the piece forward with new ideas, acting, gadgets, props, and that fabulous voice.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxytMx9PmjM

The Dislocation Express, V-Blog #8: Sonsheree Giles

2011-07-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

There is a lot to be said for accessing our creativity in more than one artistic field. I have based most of my research over the last decade on interdisciplinary performance creation and have found it consistently challenging, growth-inducing and rewarding.

And lately I have focused on how to make the Dandelion ensemble as self-sufficient as possible--handling not only the performance of dance, music and theater, but also the video editing and projections, lighting design, set and prop construction, costume design and collective approaches to production management. I feel energized by diving into new artistic situations in which I am way out of my league, but have to somehow create something.

And while it's empowering to be able to do all of these things "in house," it's also exhausting. I find for myself, and for my collaborators and students that taking on many of the aspects of performance directly allows us to move forward with limited resources, but it also very easily over-extends us. We end up going to rehearsal and working hard, then heading home to construct or design things, edit, brainstorm, and more for hours on end. Without a lot of awareness and self-care this could be a recipe for early burn-out.

But even in the midst of mega-multi-tasking, I prefer to stay outside of traditional artistic boundaries--bringing what I learned from decades of serious dance training into my encounters with music, theater, visual art, writing, video and anything that a production seems to call for. And I love working with artists who do the same.

Sonsheree Giles is one of those artists. Not only is she one of the fiercest dancers around, but she designs and constructs costumes for many of AXIS' pieces, has taken on the role of Associate Director for the company and comes to rehearsal each day in outfits that are works of art in themselves. She brings a great integrity to everything I see her do, and is able to remain attentive and open even in the most trying of times.

Link to v-blog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMRjhLbaPfI

On the Other Side of Exhaustion

2011-07-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

I sent out the following to all the performers and collaborators of The Dislocation Express today and then realized it could be worthy of a blog post. This collaborative piece by Dandelion Dancetheater and AXIS Dance Company opens tomorrow. Info at:
http://axisdance.org/TDE.php

"As we move closer to our world premiere (tomorrow,) I'm starting to shift from thinking logistically about the piece into more philosophical aspects of what we're doing. So bear with me as I share some of the things I'm pondering. It helps me to understand more deeply what we're doing if I voice some of the insights I'm having.

Since yesterday I've been reflecting on the amount of hard work, commitment, trust and sheer determination it's taken to bring this work to life. We started planning it in 2008 and I feel we've been rising up to this moment in many ways since then. Any devised dance/theater production takes an exhausting amount of effort, but this one is in a class of its own.

In addition to rehearsing things over and over, learning orders and then having to throw them out and learn new orders, dealing with costumes and technical problems, navigating our personal lives--we also have to maneuver through three highly uncertain sites AND sustain performance energy over a complicated location-hopping journey.

I am exhausted after each rehearsal AND I feel exhilarated. There's something deeply satisfying for me about pushing past my limits and having to then push even further. Both body and mind are stretched to their max. I'm hungry, sore, probably dehydrated, unable to keep track of all the details, distracted by the public, concerned for everyone's safety and well being, attempting to both stay present in performance mode and make mental notes to give later, and tripping over my costume and cords. It's too much. I can't keep it all together.

And so I have to eventually surrender to the insanity of it all. I enter a somewhat psychedelic state. I meet myself anew and perform from a place of power and truth that I can't find until I've exhausted all other strategies for control.

This process is what has kept me in this field with so much commitment for so long. It has become a central part of my spiritual practice. I am continually in search of methods for performance-creation that border on vision quest, shamanic ritual, meditation retreat. The Dislocation Express certainly fits into this category. It's kicking my butt and I'm thankful for that. "

In the Thick of it: TDE v-blogs #5, 6, & 7

2011-07-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

I'm in the thick of the final phases of giving birth to The Dislocation Express.

A teacher of contemplative theater who I have been reading lately, Lee Worley talks about the director's role in a piece as being like a midwife at a birth, helping it to come forth in it's own way--getting hands dirty when necessary, and letting nature do its work whenever possible. I love that vision. However, I feel more like the mother than the midwife most of the time--every movement forward on the journey is painful and takes immense effort. And I feel deeply connected to this entity that I'm sharing with the world, like it's a part of me. I'm not so much witnessing it be born, I'm being born with it.

We're a week away from the premiere of this piece and I'm drowning in details. The piece takes place at three different BART stations, with plans for how we travel between them as well. We're making a movable theater in a sense, and have to cart along props, instruments, costumes, supplies, volunteers, audience, permits and more.

I love site-specfic work. I love the surprise of it, the seeing of places in a completely new way, the evocations of wonder and the feeling of participating directly in the art by watching it unfold somewhere unusual.

But I'm remembering why most dance/theater performance happens in spaces already set up for such things. It feels like we're starting from scratch on this, at each location, on each day. And since the way I work involves shaping and crafting the piece right up until curtain time, trying to balance the obsessive quality of figuring out the truth of a piece with all the logistical, mundane details is quite a task.

Luckily, I have a top-notch team of performing artists working with me. I'm going to have to rely on their skill, presence and creativity for so many aspects of this piece that I think will be impossible to figure out beforehand. Not only are we working with a lot of physically risky, technically complicated and emotionally tender material, but we have a whole host of uncertainties in working outside in public spaces. The form of this piece echoes the content--looking at dislocation, displacement, travelling, home being nowhere and everywhere at the same time, having to create our own sense of rooted-ness with whatever is available in the moment. And the ensemble echoes the content in that we are a widely-varied group of people, with very different life paths, sharing an epic journey in the same "train car" for this brief flicker of time.

Our v-blogs have backed up a little bit while I've been immersed in finding the artistic through-lines of the work. So this post contains three v-blogs to keep us caught up.

Julia Hollas is one of those rare people who can simultaneously manage a complex list of administrative tasks and mental processes while throwing herself wholeheartedly and with great abandon into art-making. She excels at both with potent strength and integrity. It's wonderful getting to work with her so closely in the rehearsal studio, after many years of working together on the daily grind of keeping a company together.

I find Rodney Bell to be an artistic "soul-brother." He rarely follows "the rules" and ends up discovering images and relationships in the heat of creation that move the whole piece along in ways I could never have come up with. And he brings his spirituality into the studio in a manner I would like to emulate--creating a seamless flow between art and spirit and everyday interactions.

Dana DeGuzman is one of those performers who can make anything work onstage. Trained as a musician originally, he took to dance like a fish to water. Everything that I ask him to do he dives headfirst into, and through that commitment he brings it to life. He reminds me why I follow this crazy path.

All videos by Nicole Da Roza

LINKS:
Julia Hollas v-blog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoM703L80kE
Rodney Bell v-blog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODGnl27fjD0&feature=related
Dana DeGuzman v-blog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A_FuIWTfec

The Dislocation Express, V-Blog #4: Janet Das

2011-07-12T22:42:00.000-07:00

I love the serendipities that sprout up all over art processes. I learned tonight in watching our latest Dislocation Express V-blog that this is both Janet Das' last new project with AXIS, and that her first new project with the company was one I directed as well, back in 2008. What an honor to be a pivotal part of a cycle like that and to get to work so closely with such a talented and generous artist as Janet.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bs21GdZAFI

The Dislocation Express, V-Blog #3: Kimiko Guthrie

2011-07-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

The further I sink into my particular ways of making art, the more I appreciate having collaborators aboard who bring complementary and sometimes contrasting perspectives.

Kimiko Guthrie and I have been working together since 1991 and our artistic partnership has changed dramatically many times. I feel very fortunate to have had the chance to collaborate in all kinds of ways, and to be continuing on with our joint artistic research in The Dislocation Express.

Kimiko is writing an evolving, interactive script for the work, as well as contributing movement and sound material, and serving as an outside eye that is sometimes on the inside.

There are many ways that our styles of working support each other. In this project I'm excited about the interplay between my love of chaos, rawness, abstraction and dreamlike energy play colliding with Kimiko's facility with clarity, narrative and focus.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrUwO-rlA5c

The Dislocation Express - V-Blog #2: Cristina Carrasquillo

2011-07-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

Cristina Carrasquillo, a member of the Dandelion Dancetheater ensemble is the central figure in Act I of The Dislocation Express.

In rehearsal we call this Act "Circles" and it was originally inspired by CORE's piece Ice/Car/Cage. CORE was a collaborative performance group made up of artists that have had a huge influence on my work. Ice/Car/Cage was created by Jules Beckman, Jess Curtis and Keith Hennessy and involved a car driving in circles in a parking lot for a half hour--with performers dancing, playing, and going through all sorts of physical risk-taking around it.

I saw this piece in a San Francisco parking lot in 2000 and it blew me away. I've been haunted by it ever since and wanted to make a response to it. I had an image of Cristina going in circles for a long time, and we started there, and then a complete piece grew from this impulse--very different from Ice/Car/Cage, but linked in my mind.

I'm moved by Cristina's focus, stamina and risk-taking in this piece. Cristina came to Dandelion through her connection with AXIS Dance Company, and so her presence in this joint work points to a sharing of resources between our companies and the kind of communality that I think is needed to survive as an artist or ensemble these days.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_qZ2s8ADSw

All Aboard The Dislocation Express!

2011-07-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

I'm in the final weeks of the creation process for The Dislocation Express, an interdisciplinary work that's been in the making since 2008 (in terms of visioning and planning) and since February of this year (in terms of actual time in the rehearsal studio.)

A collaboration between AXIS Dance Company and Dandelion Dancetheater, The Dislocation Express will take place around Bay Area BART stations July 24th - 30th.

We've been looking at the nature of place, displacement, home, wandering, location and dislocation within the context of our imaginings of hobo life and the uprooted qualities of contemporary internet/mobile culture.

As usual, I'm finding myself challenged and pushed in interesting ways through this process.

How do we bring two companies intensively together that share many values and also are used to working in very different ways?

How can we create a work in the safety of the studio that then comes alive in highly unpredictable, site-specific locations?

How can we connect to a culture (American Hobo) with a specific time and place without getting lost in our fantasies and projections about it? How can we use whatever material arises, both factual and fictional to learn more about ourselves and our relationships in the present?

How can we find artistic coherence in an ensemble of people coming from diverse performance backgrounds (dance, music, theater) and with a wide range of abilities/disabilities?

How do we make a piece that is both accessible to people with very little exposure to contemporary performance and that remains mysterious, provocative and unsettling?

As we navigate the final stage of wrestling with these and other issues, I'll be posting video blogs created by Dandelion intern Nicole De Roza and myself, documenting our journey.

Enjoy the ride!

Video Blog 1 link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAbeT-tsHPk

WonderSlow Reflections 1

2011-06-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

We recently completed our first cycle of the WonderSlow project: 15 hours of continuous performance by Dandelion and friends dedicated to explorations of slowness. There was so much learning for me in this grand experiment in regards to:

slowing down
immersive performance
inclusive community
safety and risk
letting go of control
moving through and past distraction, boredom, resistance
levels of trance-states
meditation
pushing past beliefs about limits of energy and abilities
setting up conditions for magical things to happen and then letting them arise in their own time and manner
and so much more

I'll be processing this for a long while, and plan to write about it more down the road.

For now, here's a video tour of the event:

(link to video if needed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFBi5aaJpN4 )

And what I wrote as an introduction to the event:

The Origins of WonderSlow

by Instigator and Co-Director Eric Kupers

WonderSlow began with a big green sign. The sign has the word “Wonder” on it, and originally referred to a town in Oregon by that name. But through the years, the sign came to mean so much more to my family, and eventually sparked this community performance.

My account of the story of the “Wonder Sign” has no doubt been shaped by my many tellings and retellings, as well as my own biases and desires. I offer this to you as one possible way to enter into the WonderSlow performance today.

In the 1960’s my parents were passionately involved in the American counterculture. They were particularly active in left-wing, progressive, political movements—and I think they believed that some kind of revolution was coming soon to this country, to change it for the better. Their passion led them to many demonstrations, organizations, meetings and artistic beacons of hope. They loved the poem “I am Waiting” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and particularly the lines speaking of Ferlinghetti waiting for “a rebirth of wonder.”

One wintery night they were driving back to Los Angeles after picking up my uncle at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Out of the snowy darkness, in the middle of nowhere there suddenly emerged a big green sign that said simply “Wonder.” I can only guess at what a potent moment that was. This must have seemed like a sign from the universe, a confirmation of faith, a symbol of deep connection and meaning, a revolutionary battle cry. My dad and uncle jumped out of the car and my mom was the “getaway driver.” They unscrewed and took down the signs that it turned out were on both sides of the road, jumped back in the car and drove home.

After that fateful night, my uncle took one of the signs and my parents kept the other. My mom says that they would use it as a kind of barometer for guests in their house. They hung the sign as “found art” in the living room, and based on people’s reaction to the sign when they entered the house, my parents would know whether or not they were of like minds.

Eventually my parents’ Wonder sign was passed on to me, and I hung it in my bedrooms in high school and college—the sign remaining a testament to creatively embracing the unknown. And then at some point the sign was put into storage.

A few years ago I discovered it again. It now sits in our backyard, just outside of the Dandelion rehearsal studio. I love the sign. It’s heavy and awkward and very simple. And it gets right to the point, “Wonder.” That’s it. No population numbers for the town of Wonder, Oregon - no instructions about how to practice the techniques of wondering - no indication that anything else matters outside of this basic commandment.

The aesthetic of the sign as it decayed seemed to call out for a performance piece to arise from this artifact of a fertile, forgotten time. It took a few years for dreams of the work’s shape and structure to percolate. And now it has turned into something that reaches far beyond this one story, this one poem, this one sign.

The spirit of my parents’ hopes and dreams, and the instruction to “wonder” has encouraged me to experiment with large-scale community performance in a way I never have before. It has pushed me to question my notions of time on the stage. It has evoked a curiosity for me in what possibilities lie in long periods of waiting.

I’m very interested through WonderSlow to investigate further how performance can be a ritual of healing, grounding, connection, new ways of seeing, waking-up and spiritual practice. I am inspired in the creation and implementation of WonderSlow by my parents, Buddhist meditation practice, the work of Anna Halprin, Contraband, Andy Goldsworthy, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and the courageously creative group of collaborators participating today.

WonderSlow was created with support from the City of Oakland Cultural Arts and Marketing Program, the Clorox Foundation, the CSU East Bay Department of Theatre and Dance and a Theatre Bay Area CA$H Grant. Special thanks to all the performers and volunteers, Jim Macilvaine, Luiza Silva, the Oakland Acupuncture Project, Essential Balance Bodywork, Theatre of Yugen, Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater, A.V.I.D. and all of you joining us today.

Fermented Art

2011-04-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of fermented foods and drinks: sauerkraut, tempeh, kombucha, rejuvelac, kim chee, wine, beer and more. It's fascinating to me how completely new nutrients and beneficial bacteria develop when we let things settle for awhile. And then how new food and drink is created, not necessarily better than what was originally there, but different and fulfilling other needs.

I'm realizing that I love fermented art too. When a project first appears to complete on closing night, I feel a great sadness at "losing" my connection to something that is immensely nourishing to me. And yes, I am saying goodbye--to a particular lens for experiencing the project, to the material that makes it up and to the magical time with the collaborators.

But as the project ferments--as it sits for awhile--new gifts sprout up from its remains. I'm able to view the piece (through video, memory, reflection) with a greater sense of calm. I'm able to discover new things in it. I'm able to integrate the insights, the shifts and the sheddings that the piece offers up to me.

Today I re-watched one of my excerpt videos from Friend. I was moved in a completely different way than I was moved when performing it, or even than when I first edited the video. But in a way that feels just as important.

I could follow the trajectories of the piece as if listening to a juicy story. I could watch without the same attachments. I could let myself be taken for its rides. My guess is that this will only deepen as the work ferments. When I look at some of my earlier works now, I notice and feel new things in a way that delights me.

Art that is created through intuitive processes always holds more than initially meets the eye. And in order to digest all of its gifts, we must revisit it at different stages of our own life experience. One can't "get" it all in one viewing, or even one month or one year. There are things hidden in each piece that the creators don't even know about while creating. There are mysteries waiting to be investigated, and will wait as long as is necessary.

In a recent post I wrote that I am shifting my view to think of the performances of a work as just the midpoint of the project--that the same time that was taken to create it is needed to integrate it. However, in some ways, the performances are not the mid-point, but the "beginning" of a project. And then the project ripens, matures, ferments throughout the rest of our lives. It's like when a redwood tree first sprouts out of the ground--that is the performance portion. And then the many centuries of growth of the tree is what happens after the performance as the art expands in our hearts.

Often we take trees for granted, like we take art for granted. It's there, I saw it and I don't need to pay attention anymore. But we miss so much when we do that. There's so much to discover every time it crosses our path, and each discovery is fresh and completely new.

(video from this post is my second set of Friend excerpts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf-lwL7GgYY)

As the Light Fades

2011-04-07T23:59:00.000-07:00

Transitioning back to ordinary life after a performance run is difficult for me. And this particular transition out of performances of Dandelion's Friend has been particularly difficult.

Ram Dass wrote and spoke about how as he began to get in touch with larger and more beautiful spiritual experiences--as he got "higher" each time--the accompanying falls afterwards became increasingly painful. These performances were especially "high" for me.

I made some big breakthroughs artistically: editing more fiercely, trusting my inner feedback over outer feedback, and delving deeply into musical, lighting and visual art elements. And I made some big breakthroughs spiritually: reclaiming performance as a vehicle for healing, trusting my inner feedback over outer feedback, stirring up and riding a storm of emotional energies and letting go of a lot of worry and doubt.

I had a strong sense over the four performances and the week of tech rehearsals that led up to them, of the sacredness of performance. My intellectual understandings of performance as a spiritual practice and even religious gathering place were transformed into direct experience of something quite palpable. I noted many times during the weekend a sense of finally beginning to "get" what going to church is all about. I felt invited in, embraced and empowered.

I can think of a lot of causes for this string of experiences:

I made a conscious choice after my friend Sharon died to direct my art-making more intentionally towards healing, connection, friendship and my own spiritual growth.
I was working in Friend specifically with powerful emotions and energies surrounding grief, loss and deep love.
The residency at CounterPULSE provided me with a great deal of logistical and ideological support, allowing me to focus more than I have in a long time on the art-making itself.
The combination of artists collaborating with me in the Dandelion ensemble brought a maturity, a willingness and a unique collection of personalities and talents all adding up to great artistic chemistry.
I've been working towards many of the realizations I've had during this project through many years of experimentation and hard work.
And then there is the mysterious nature of grace that seems to grant us new levels of insight and integration when we are somehow ready--keeping all of this outside the realm of control and formulas for action.

Because of all this, the energy crash after the performances has felt like finding the "Garden of Eden" and then being cast out. The world that we wove together onstage (and throughout CounterPULSE) was rich, juicy, inspiring, sensitive and beautiful. I felt a great freedom and a great power. I moved up to my edges and beyond them musically, theatrically, visually. I discovered a ritual for "cooling down" after the performance--the playing of live music until I have settled enough to coherently engage with audience members. I felt a sense of clarity and connection to purpose. And then we had to clean up and go home.

I've realized that I need at least a week of no plans after performances like this--to decompress, integrate and rejuvenate. As it was, I had a day. And then it was off to errands, meetings, deadlines and the return to teaching.

The week leading up to our performances was the first week of Spring Quarter at Cal State East Bay. This is always a crazy time, but compounded with the stress around this production it feels insane. And adding to this, I have had a leaky tire on my car because of a screw stuck in it for over a week now; The piles of emails, mail, papers, "to-do's" and miscellaneous stuff on my desk have become daunting; I'm choreographing an opera for the Cal State Spring Dance Production that opens in one month; I have over one hundred students this quarter; I'm directing a major collaborative project with Dandelion and AXIS Dance Company that starts up rehearsals again tomorrow. I can barely find room to walk in my office because of all the props, sets and lighting equipment from Friend that I now have to find spaces for; I need to find time to practice my mandolin to get ready for some upcoming musical gigs; I haven't had my car washed in a long time; I can't find my "To Do list;" and to top it off, I need new socks. It's a lot to pick back up again when I'm feeling this raw, depleted and emotionally spent.

Everything seemed so much clearer last weekend. My job was simply to show up as fully as possible and give myself to the art. I'm grieving the loss of that energetic space, and wishing I had a lot of time to sit with this grief rather than run around trying to get caught up. My colleague Nina Haft remarked at one of our work-in-progress showings that she experiences loss like the tearing off of a scab so that all the past grief-wounds come pouring up once again to mix with the present one. This is the clearest description I've found of the grieving process over my friend Sharon's death, and it is proving true of my grieving over the loss of the Friend project.

I've seemed to be fine this week when I'm at home, feeling safe and having time to rest, snuggled up against my partner and/or our dogs. As soon as I have to go out into the world to take care of business, I feel a weight descend on my whole insides. I get tearful over the smallest things and feel a mounting sense of anxiety the farther I get from the house. Everything seems overwhelming. Somewhere inside I know I can handle all the details, especially when I think of them one at a time, but the contrast between this post-show struggle and the immersion in grace during the show is poignant.

I realize that a big part of my suffering this week is rooted in my wishing things were different--wishing I was back in performance mode with my ensemble or at least that I didn't have to do much of anything as I transition. I seem to be wishing my time away, instead of settling into how things actually are right now, amidst the exhaustion and overwhelm and grief.

There are a few things that seem to help and so I've been turning to these as much as possible:
1. Organizing and putting away props, costumes, instruments, lights and other paraphenalia from the performances keeps me connected to the experiences I had while also physically moving me forward into my life.
2. Editing video of the performances reminds me of the experiences, gives me new perspectives on what we created and re-engages my creativity.
3. Cleaning and organizing the non-show items in my life grounds me and seems to refresh my environment. I'm reminded of Jack Kornfield's teachings from "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry."
4. Writing and talking about what I'm going through with friends, my partner, and this blog cuts down on the alienation and the stagnation of my thinking.

And most importantly, a specific shift in my perspective on all this has been getting me through and reconnecting me to the power of the processes I've been engaged in. I've heard Buddhist teachers say that it takes about as long to integrate a meditation retreat as it takes to do the retreat. So a two-month retreat will take at least two months to transition back into ordinary life from. A three-year retreat will take at least three-years to transition back from. I have found this to be a very helpful way of looking at performance projects I direct. Friend took four months of pretty intensive rehearsals to create. So I think it will take at least four months of active reflection to integrate its insights, gifts and emotional reverberations into the rest of my life. This means that the closing night of performances is not the end of the project, but the mid-point.

Each time I view my present experiences from this perspective I relax and feel great relief. I'm still doing the necessary work of the project as best I can. I plan to continue sharing post-show reflections as they come to me as part of this next stage of Friend.

Here is my first draft of video edits from Friend, taken from footage shot by friends throughout the weekend. I love watching this for new perspectives on the work, especially since up til now I've only seen it from inside:

( Video can be seen directly at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQwOPxKOFgk )

Impermanence Made Visible

2011-03-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

My current favorite definition of the word "dance" is:

"Impermanence made visible."

That seems to cover the immensity and the minutia of this slippery form.

I'm particularly in touch with impermanence as Dandelion moves into our premiere of Friend tonight. It strikes me as odd how performance is what I pour my most extreme efforts and longings and strivings into--and then it's gone so quickly after it arises. This is particularly true in the experimental dance world wherein we often work for many months, seasons and/or years on a particular project and then perform it for one weekend (or if we're lucky, two.)

Where does the work go? Where do our efforts live after we've made them? How does something that feels so important to me pass away before my eyes? I can feel it leaving even before we begin our opening night.

I do believe that the impermanence of live performance is the key ingredient that gives it power. We have to show up completely to make it work, and we ask the audiences to show up completely to share it.

All performances--but especially Friend which feels intensely personal--get me really excited as we move closer to the moment when "it's time" to head to our starting places; and also stir up great sadness the closer we move to the final moments of closing night. Performance for me is like a blender that shakes, swirls, crushes, blends, releases and renews our insides. And depending on the level of vulnerability required to birth each piece, it's a blender set on high, medium or low power.

Today as I start to get ready to head to the theater I feel great anticipation, joy, gratitude, sadness, fear, queasiness, and a sense of adventure. I'm reflecting on the many profound moments of impermanence I've experienced with the Dandelion ensemble over the last number of years and am looking forward to adding this one to our swirling artistic field of visions.

Bringing a new work onstage is always scary to me. It helps somehow to remember that I've done it before so many times, and to "huddle" with my team by rewatching some of those instances.

(If you don't see the embedded video, here's what I'm watching today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EfYewQgTnQ )

Entering The Temple of Tech Week

2011-03-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

I've come to love tech week--the week leading up to a performance run in which we have tech (technical) rehearsals, dress rehearsals and last minute scramblings to finish.

I notice that during this time I am highly energized with a mix of anxiety, anticipation and joy. And I notice that the main thing that keeps me grounded is spending as much time as possible at the theater.

I like to get to the place we're performing hours before each event, taking time to set up, putter about and sometimes work on a project like the lobby installation that is continuing to evolve for our shows this week at CounterPULSE. I start to feel a very strong connection with the theater and experience this connection as the closest thing to church that I've known.

The theater becomes sacred space--the hours and hours of labor that goes into getting it ready for performance generates a palpable sense of presence. I feel "extra-alive." Every nook and cranny is illuminated with the wonder of creativity. And in the midst of all the work to be done, many windows of just "hanging out" arise as we're waiting for a tool or finishing up a task or taking a break.

While I'm always also exhausted and stressed during these times, I'm also rejuvenated and in touch with profound gratitude for the artistic path I've found myself on, the ensemble that travels this path with me and the ever expanding community we are a part of.

Here's a few moments from our load-in at CounterPULSE on Monday night:

(Video can also be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ffNgQbLUg)

Showings, Feedback and Protecting Clarity

2011-03-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

The showings that Dandelion has been doing as part of our residency at CounterPULSE have taught me a lot. Here's an incomplete list of insights, reminders, clarifying moments that I've gathered so far from the three monthly public showings of our Friend project:

1. Public showings are crucial to the development of the kind of experimental performance we create. They force us to get things together on a deadline, to try them out and then to retreat and re-tool. There are so many great ideas in experimental creation processes, but it takes showings to clarify which are the ones worth developing.

2. It helps my anxiety level to have other things being shown next to my work. I've loved sharing the showings with Kegan Marling as he develops his new work. It's easy to feel very alone in the midst of the extreme vulnerability that arises when showing a piece in progress. Having someone else going through something similar at the same time makes it much more bearable. And it takes the attention off of me and my work long enough for me to re-ground myself.

3. My relationship to feedback is shifting. I've found at these showings that it's been more difficult than usual to listen to a bunch of feedback about my work. I'm a big believer in getting outside feedback on what I create, and I've found it to be crucial for much of my art-making. However something is changing. Perhaps it's the personally vulnerable material I'm investigating with Friend, or maybe it's a new phase in my artistic development. I'm finding that a little bit of feedback is helpful, but that during the big public feedback sessions I easily lose touch with my creative center and get wrapped up in other people's ideas, desires, aesthetics, etc.

I've been reflecting on the different needs we have as artists at different stages of our path. I find myself more and more drawn towards doing whatever I can to discover my deeper inner feedback--and doing whatever I can to not get hooked by other people's views on my work. I feel that I'm on the verge of discovering some important new piece of my inner artistic truth and more than ever I don't want to be swayed by things closer to the surface.

4. I was able to feel more clarity when I didn't take notes at the last feedback session. Sometimes taking notes is helpful. But sometimes trying to write everything down keeps me in an analytical state. At the most recent showing I decided to try just letting feedback flow over me without trying to hold onto or remember any of it. I trusted that what was important would stick and the rest I could let go of. And then about an hour after the showing, I had many powerful insights about the piece and wrote them down then.

5. I have trouble setting boundaries when receiving feedback. I tend to think that it's very important to hear whatever people have to say. I see so many works that I believe could have been made much stronger if the director/choreographer had listened to more honest feedback from colleagues. I fear that my work will suffer if I don't let everyone tell me every single thing they want to in response to my piece.

In the feedback structure that CounterPULSE uses at these showings, there is a time when responders can say that they have an opinion about something, and ask me whether I want to hear it. And then I can say yes or no. But it turned out that most people would just say they had an opinion and then they'd roll right through saying it. I didn't feel I had a choice.

But I do have a choice, and could have said I wasn't interested in opinions. That would have been more honest. I knew that I could ask for the opinions of my close collaborators and trusted advisers later, but instead let the opinions of a large group of people keep coming until I was completely overwhelmed. And once I'm overwhelmed, there's not much that gets through.

I want to work on noticing sooner when I've had enough feedback and letting people know that. Along with that I want to work on trusting the process enough to know that the piece will reveal itself to me even if I don't hear what everyone has to say about it.

6. Showings seem to always fuel an explosion in my work, even when they're uncomfortable. Sometimes these explosions turn everything upside down. And sometimes they gently peel away an unnecessary layer so that more of the work's truth can come out.

Here's some images from the rehearsal we had the day after our most recent showing. Ideas were flying and the ensemble was riding them beautifully. We created a new section that night in which I gave a series of action words and everyone made a phrase from those. We are playing here with unison movement that doesn't necessarily look the same, but that has synchronicity in the energy patterns:

(Video can also be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz9Ib3HOLrw )

Art vs. Fundamentalism

2011-03-27T22:14:00.000-07:00

For Dance Anywhere Day this year we performed a minimalist movement structure in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland. Ensemble Member David Ryther led us in an improvised piece based on a street performer he had witnessed many times in Santa Cruz.

We traveled slowly around the plaza, waving and looking back and forth with a highly exaggerated and slow motion smile.

There happened to be someone shouting what sounded like Fundamentalist Christian doctrines on the plaza for a good half hour before we started. We decided to pass by him with our movement. I thought it would be an interesting balance of energies for a performance piece. I was looking forward to moving in slow motion behind him as he continued ferociously and with great shouting speed.

As he noticed us approaching, he closed up shop and left. We couldn't even get near him. We must have scared him somehow. While I was disappointed that we didn't get to "collaborate" for that moment, I also felt elated. It was a victory for Art over Fundamentalism. And we won because of our inclusivity. His material worked great for our piece. It added dynamic tension. We embraced what he was doing. But he didn't have room for our expression in his, and so he go pushed out of the space.

A reminder of the power of inclusion and openness.

(Video excerpt at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cBE-ePU8U0 )

Falling Apart / Piecing Myself Together

2011-03-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

It's been longer than I would have liked since my last post. I'm in the final stages of "birthing" our Friend project, and these past few weeks have felt like the major hump to get over. As I catch up with myself and the work, I'll be posting some eclectic reflections from the adrenaline-fueled final phase of this particular creation process.

Here is a post I started two weeks ago, when I felt right in the middle of the fire, and it seems quite relevant today as I am officially one week away from opening night:

I feel overwhelmed and stressed out. It's the last week of classes for Winter Quarter at Cal State East Bay. I have two performances I'm supervising and getting off the ground at school, plus a final work in progress showing of Dandelion's FRIEND project. Even though these are just informal classroom culminations, and even though this weekend's showing is just a showing, they still require the immense energy output that any performance requires. There's so much to do and no way to slow down the encroaching deadlines of "lights up!" I don't know how I'm gonna get everything done and I'm stressed about it.

What I've been noticing about my stress is that it's like a fast-spreading fire. And the fuel for that fire seems to be my own neuroses. Yes, there's an impossible amount of things to take care of. And yes, my mind is racing from event to event, task to task and concern to concern. And yes, I'm working really hard and staying up too late in an attempt to get caught up.

But all of this doesn't have to be stressful. At least 50% of my exhaustion and tension seems to stem from my worry, self-doubt, self-criticism and tightening up.

When I suddenly remember a whole category of things I need to take care of "yesterday," I then go into a litany of inner complaints: What's wrong with me? Why did I let this get out of hand? What if I let everyone down? Why does my work seem mediocre? What if what I do is meaningless? Why aren't I happy if I'm doing the things I love to do? Why can't I work harder and get more accomplished? Why do I work so hard and try to accomplish so much? And all of it can be summed up in a general feeling of shame for what I've done (or not done) up til now.

Instead of just noting a remembered list of tasks as something I forgot but will have to address now or at a later time, I berate myself for getting into the situation I'm in. For being right here. For being myself. I feel like there's something wrong with me. And this slows me down, increases my anxiety, makes it harder for me to do whatever it is I'm doing in the moment--fueling the fire of overwhelm and stress.

There's a Buddhist teaching about getting shot with an arrow, and then in an attempt to get the arrow out, shooting oneself with a second arrow. The first arrow (pain and discomfort) is a given, but we don't have to add the second arrow of self-inflicted blame and worry.

I'm doing my best to practice not shooting myself with the second arrow. Or when I do, at least not shooting myself with a third arrow to get rid of the second. And I've noticed some progress--mostly in moments that in the past would have been completely stressful for me and instead I'm now able to joke with my ensemble a little bit more.

Each little bit seems to be important. Each little bit shifts the momentum that much more towards relaxing with this wild, uncertain ride that is art-making.

Surprise Gifts

2011-03-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

There always seems to be surprise gifts that come from creating a performance work--things that enhance my life and/or art making that I didn't expect to receive from the project.

With the Friend project, a major gift has been a reminder about the joy of making stuff. By stuff I mean visual art (sculpture, collage, installation, etc.)

This gift has come at me from two sources. My friend Sharon was a visual artist at heart, always making sculptures of various kinds and also picking up odd objects to set out as pieces in their own right or to use to make something else. To honor her and get in touch with her artistic spirit, I've been making a series of sculptures to use in the performance piece and also to populate an installation in the CounterPULSE lobby.

These started with what I am calling "brain boxes"--old suitcases that I have turned into dioramas of a sort. I see these as intuitive sketches of the human brain. They have complex patterns of materials, varying amounts of layers and then small treasures hidden within.

At first I was building them around small sculptures of Sharon's, but they have expanded to include many different materials: woven wicker balls, scraps of computer innards, small sculptures I have made, and lots of lights.

I have also become somewhat obsessed with the wire sculptures that Sharon made in her last few years. I think these came out of her strong draw to welding, and when she wasn't capable of getting to The Crucible to weld anymore, she switched from more solid metal to wire she could weave at home. Most of her wire sculptures, and some of her welded pieces contained small wire balls within them. Sometimes the balls were singular and sometimes they were built inside of each other like layers of russian dolls. These inner balls resemble tumors to me, but also pure inner cores, untouched by illness.

I've made about 8 wire balls now, and will probably make some more. Some will hang in the space during the performance, and some will stay dedicated to the lobby installation I've put together, which can be viewed here:

(Or see it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDIC2Fn7oHg)

In my choreography, writing, music and now visual art I find it very helpful to have a "jumping off point" to start at. It's like a step-stool to get me to a level where the creation takes over and creates itself. In this piece that jumping off point has been Sharon's art. It's opened a door back into a part of me that has been very important, but has gotten ignored along the way.

As a child, the first thing I knew I wanted to be "when I grow up" was an artist. And this was before discovering dance and performance, when I was very shy and preferred to stay as far away from the spotlight as possible. I wanted to draw, paint, sculpt. Then as a teenager I found dance and fell in love, but I kept returning at different parts of my life to focusing on visual art. That's happened less and less in the last decade, so this nudge back into this field of creation by Sharon has been a blessing.

I've also been given this gift by ensemble member Mickey Kay. Mickey majored in Art at UC Berkeley, and has been pushing me into the realms of building and designing since we met. With this project Mickey initiated the creation of a giant wheelchair sculpture, that would have a kind of roll cage to send the wheelchair user upside down and all over the place. It's turned out that this moving sculpture won't be part of Friend, but rather some other upcoming piece. However, Mickey has led me into making stuff as much as I can. Some of the things that I've come up with in our art sessions together have been useful experiments but won't be included in performance works for now, and some have become integral parts of my current creative life.

I've used a part of one of Mickey's sculptures in the lobby installation: a wooden box with a motor and rotating gears, and Mickey has created shoes with lights shining out of the bottom, his own "brain box" and more things that I'm sure are on their way. What I like about Mickey's art making energy is how much he loves the process of experimental creation. It's not so important that every idea comes to fruition, but rather that I immerse myself in curiosity. I don't have much training in sculpture or design--but that doesn't so much matter for this approach. What matters is that I have a hunger for making stuff.

I'm liking that my performance work has led me back into the world of visual art. I used to experience both of these art forms as things to bounce back and forth between. But now they seem to be merging into one inquiry, much larger than the sum of its parts.

Refueling

2011-03-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

Being a person is hard work. And then being a person who is living as an artist adds a whole new layer of difficulties.

A lot of the time I pride myself on being able to keep on keepin' on, no matter how hard the traveling becomes. And I am committed in my creative work to not settle for easy answers, but instead to approach challenges directly, even inviting them to come forward. Developing capacity for great emotional and physical stamina seems crucial for surviving as an artist in this world.

And in addition to all this, I find it so important to find regular ways to refuel. Sometimes this means that I take time off from my creative work. And just as often this means finding ways for my work to refuel me while I'm in the middle of it.

A couple of weeks ago I had one of these "within the work" refuelings at the CSUEB Queer Dance Festival. And it's still giving me energy and heart-power as I struggle through finishing my Friend project.

I love performance that is dark and deep and intense. And I also love this kind of thing, lightening my load for awhile:

(the link can be viewed here as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCiDHLMrqP4)

Reflections on Queer Dance

2011-02-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

The following is my introductory note in the program for tonight's 2nd Annual Queer Dance Festival at CSU East Bay, followed by some related videos. This felt like an appropriate exploration to share here:

Reflections on the Nature of “Queer Dance”

By Queer Dance Festival Director Eric Kupers

February 17^th, 2011

University Theatre, CSU East Bay

I want to attempt a definition of “Queer Dance,” (even though I believe that these two words are ultimately impossible to pin down.)

“Queer” is my favorite way to identify myself. The word has a lot of complex connotations, as it has been used historically (and still today sometimes) as a way to put-down, insult, repress and attack people who seem different. Many people are triggered when they hear this word—remembering feelings of hurt and anger. However, I love that the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and affiliated communities have reclaimed the word as a symbol of our empowerment.

At this point in my life I have spent equal amounts of time in intimate relationships with men and women. In this sense I identify as Bisexual. At the same time, I am married to a man that I have been with for over ten years (and plan to be with for the rest of my life.) In this sense I identify as Gay. And still at the same time I am a non-conformist artist at heart, and so feel that any label, identity or definition of myself is limiting and inaccurate. The closest I can come to whole-heartedly identifying myself is to just say, “I am.”

For me the word “Queer” includes all of this—even the non-conforming parts. “Queer” points to the aspects of us that are beyond labeling, while at the same time acknowledges the oppression and empowerment of us who live outside of mainstream heterosexual and dualistically gendered roles.

“Dance” is a word that describes movement when viewed from a particular perspective. It includes choreography, performance, creative movement, what we do at parties and clubs, as well as the interactions of the cells, fluids and organs in our bodies, the relationship of the planets and solar systems, the combined movement of all the people in an urban area at any one moment, the flight of birds and bugs, and so much more.

I think of Dance as a point of view rather than a phenomenon itself. It is rather a way of experiencing any phenomena from a slightly larger frame of reference—acknowledging its flow, exchange, and interdependence.

What you see tonight onstage is “dance” just as much as what you are doing right now with your body as you read this is “dance.” From this understanding, there’s absolutely no way anyone could truthfully say, “I am not a dancer.” Dance is impermanence made visible.

“Queer Dance” is therefore immensely open, inclusive, fluid, ambiguous, and omnipresent. It takes great courage to live in this universe that is at its core uncertain, ever-changing, mysterious and impossible to pin down with any definition or concept. When I am able to embrace this sense of cosmic insecurity, and perhaps even celebrate it, I am practicing the basics of Queer Dance.

Tonight we have gathered together a concentrated burst of Queer Dance for you. I encourage you to not take any of it too literally and instead to listen with your whole being like you might listen to poetry, or like you might remember images and feelings from a dream.

AND A VIDEO OF EXCERPTS FROM THE FIRST QUEER DANCE FESTIVAL AT CSUEB:

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_QhRCj-s4 )

AND A VIDEO OF THIS YEAR'S FEATURED ARTIST JESSELITO BIE, WHO WILL BE RECEIVING THE 360 AWARD:

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqU98G2_wIM )

Investigating Mysteries

2011-02-14T19:18:00.000-08:00

I love mysteries. I love mystery novels and movies, and mysterious stories and myths. I love when spiritual teachers refer to the divine as the "Great Mystery."

More and more these days I'm seeing my performance work as a series of mysteries I'm immersed in. Each new performance project at times seems like something I've conjured up with my collaborators, and at other times like something much bigger and mysterious that we are entering into. I much prefer the latter perspective. And when I engage from this perspective of entering a mystery, I think the work that comes out of it is much stronger.

In mystery novels and movies we join the central characters as they uncover clue after clue that leads them onward to some great revelation. This revelation might be the identity of a criminal, or the origins of a powerful force, or the exposure of some ancient lineage that is shaping our world today. Usually these mysteries (when they are skillfully executed) end in a kind of unresolved resolution--the immediate problem is solved but there is much that remains to be discovered. Along the way we empathize with the formal or inforrmal detective(s) through feelings of fear, anticipation, triumph, betrayal, anger, understanding and so much more.

I think these mysteries are potent for us emotionally because of the tension they generate and the ways that this tension brings us into the present moment. If we could just find out "who did it" right at the beginning, we probably wouldn't care so much. Whatever we already know isn't the heart of mystery. The heart is what draws us onward.

I remember one of my mentor/teachers Joe Goode saying once in a workshop that if he can already envision the piece he is about to make, then it doesn't need to be made. I take this principle very seriously. I see all of my performance projects as mysteries that unfold from a particular jumping off point--a theme, story, image, feeling, intent--but then take me and everyone involved on a journey we could never have planned. I believe that the piece itself is always more interesting and complex than what I might have imagined.

Often this means that the product-oriented approach that much of the arts funding and presenting is based on doesn't translate for what I do. The performances are always just one small chapter in the mystery of each performance project.

Many Buddhist teachers speak about the value of "don't know mind"--that state of mind in which we hold questions lovingly and are able to relax with the uncertainty of all life. Creating performance works helps me practice my "don't know mind."

I am struck in the "mystery" I'm "investigating" right now, Dandelion's Friend project, with how I'm more patient than ever to let the piece reveal itself to me. I'm finding lots of clues, and then following the leads that these clues offer, to further clues. And at each step I feel I understand what the piece calls for a little bit better.

Perhaps I'm finding it easier than in the past to be patient with not-knowing because this piece is connected to my friend who has passed on. I notice myself waiting for small hints she might give me from the other side, so am more focused on listening with my full being than on trying to figure it out myself.

And perhaps I'm feeling the fruits of my practice of being patient with the questions. This is something that has never come easy for me and so I have practiced it vigorously all of my adult life.

Some of the clues I've discovered so far for Friend are:

My friend Sharon's metal and wire sculptures--I've been using these to develop my own sculptures and also to design the use of space and light.
A fascination with the brain--Sharon died from a brain tumor and we often talked about the mysteries of the brain. I'm thinking of this piece sometimes as a surrealistic journey into a brain. We're using MRI x-rays, stories about brains and tumors, inner body imagery and more.
Music driven creation--Sharon was a wonderful artist, and this came through most clearly to me through her singing. This piece seems to be most strongly driven by sound, which is a new way for me to work.
Reflections on Friendship--It just so happened that some dear long-term friends have come back into my work for this project, precisely at the moment I'm wanting to explore the nature of friendship. This synchronicity seems like a strong clue.

I believe that I will follow these and other clues with my fellow travelers (a remarkable interdisciplinary ensemble) and that they will lead us to greater insight and beauty and healing of some kind. And I believe that the end of the project will feel unresolved. All my projects do.

And so each project becomes a clue in a way, towards unraveling the mystery of who I am, of what meaning and fulfillment there is to be found in this life, of who my collaborators are, of what our artistic longings are leading us towards.

And then my full body of work (and that of each artist) becomes a clue in some larger mystery about the nature of existence and the human journey towards wholeness.

I'm sure this keeps expanding outwards infinitely in spiraling circles, (and probably inwards too) with each mystery and all it's clues being one small clue in a greater mystery.

I write all this at the risk of sounding grandiose. My intention is not to assign great importance to my own work, but rather to place everything that I do as an artist (and that all artists do) in a context that feels inspiring and connecting. Thinking about art-making in this way encourages me to both journey forward with great gusto and to let go of trying to figure anything out or get anything done. It makes me want to engage fully and at the same time view my real work as just getting out of my own way so that the art can make itself.

When I look at my current project as a mystery I'm investigating, I'm more open to feedback and the opinions of others. Each thing that each person communicates to me about their experience with the work becomes just another clue. Sometimes it's an insight or interpretation that helps me understand more fully something we created intuitively. Sometimes it's a suggestion that doesn't resonate with me and so validates the direction I'm already moving in. Sometimes it's an image or idea that I couldn't have come up with, but that shows me another angle of what I'm working with.

And each obstacle, set-back and seeming failure becomes itself another clue. Investigating a mystery is no piece of cake. It calls forth everything we have and tests us constantly. And I think we get back in proportion to how much we put in. Sometimes what we discover won't really make sense to us, but could make sense when seen by others from other perspectives.

In this way I like to think of each work as "not-mine." Perhaps I'm directing it and committing to it's manifestation in the world. But I'm more of a shepherd for it, rather than owner. I'm interacting with the work more regularly than anyone else, but that doesn't mean that my ideas on what it's "about" is right, or that I know more than others about the piece. Sometimes I feel like I know the least about it of anyone, and that I'm just a caretaker, keeping it alive so that others can come and immerse themselves in it.

It's so exciting to me to witness a work come into being. I still often mistake the performance as the essence of a project, but I'm learning more and more to value the step by step uncovering of each clue.

And when I feel confused, I like to remember that confusion is only painful because I think I'm supposed to know something. From the perspective of "don't know mind" every confusion can be reframed as an enticing mystery.

This One's For Friendship

2011-02-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

One of the things that is shifting in me in response to the recent death of my friend Sharon Mussen is a re-prioritizing of friendship.

I had a professor in grad school tell me once that I should never direct my friends in my projects--that the roles become too confusing. Even though I respect this professor very much, that advice somehow confirmed for me how much I operate from exactly the opposite view. I love creating experimental performance precisely because I get to do so with my friends.

Most of my closest friendships have developed through working together in Dandelion Dancetheater. Even if some of those people aren't able to work with our ensemble on a regular basis anymore, the ways that we bonded while creating and performing together run very deep.

I don't socialize much outside of rehearsals and performances. When I have time off, I usually want to spend it at home with my partner or alone. There's so much to process from all of the artistic adventures I engage in. I find I need lots of down time just to catch up with myself. Therefore regular rehearsals are my social lifeblood.

Yes, the roles in a performance company are complicated--especially the power dynamics and issues around money, schedules and decision-making. I sometimes get confused about being the "boss" of my peers who are the same age and sometimes older than me. But all friendships have issues. These just happen to be some of the interesting ones we have to wade through.

Many of my collaborators in Dandelion have been important people in my life for 10 - 20 years now. And I'm loving the friendships that are developing with the newer ensemble members.

However, I sometimes lose touch with the friendship part of my art-making and get caught up in the less fulfilling parts.

Yes my career, and everything that goes along with it is important to me. Professional recognition, financial support and growing opportunities for Dandelion to create and perform work are all things that I want to see develop. But these are not the heart of my artistic life. Rather they are supports for what I see as the "real" work at hand, namely a journey towards wholeness.

I'm finding that our Friend project is serving as a reminder to return to the deeper currents of my art-making. I started this piece as a kind of tribute to Sharon, and an exploration of friendship. I've realized that in my relentless striving for success I missed out on a lot of opportunities to be with Sharon.

She was my one close friend who was a regular in my life but with whom I didn't collaborate on artistic ventures. Sometimes that meant we didn't see each other for months. I had a hard time slowing down enough from all of my work to connect with her, especially when her brain tumor forced her to speak and act extremely slowly.

I don't know if I'd call what I'm experiencing "regret," (as I prefer to think of all the choices that I've made as the best I could with the information I had at the time) but rather as a wake-up call.

I don't want to get so immersed in grant proposals, social events, meetings or things that I think might advance my career, that I forget about my precious time with my friends. I don't want to turn my art-making into a bunch of goals and achievements. I don't want to get as stressed out as I've been in recent years over what people will think of the work that I do. I don't want to get too serious about my work.

Yes, my career is as an artist, but I don't have to adopt the attitude that my career has to be something separate from my love and connection to spirit, or from my friendships. I'd rather that the majority of my time in rehearsal and performance with this amazing collection of friends is spent with a sense of joy and gratitude.

In this Friend project I'm looking for as many opportunities as possible for prioritizing friendship over any kind of external marker of success or validation. In this spirit I asked my CounterPULSE residency partner, Kegan Marling to dance a duet with me in the work-in-progress showing of Friend yesterday.

I didn't know how this fit in aesthetically with what we are doing, or whether it was the most interesting and innovative direction to go in. But I knew that I feel great love for my friend Kegan (who I've known and interacted artistically with for many years) and that I wanted a chance to "hang out" with him within the magical realm of the stage. I wanted to celebrate our friendship in one of the most powerful ways I know how to celebrate anything--through performance. It became a ritual marking our friendship, and through that invoking the power of friendship universally within the piece.

I'm so glad that we took this risk. It gives me faith in the transformation and re-prioritization I seem to be in the middle of--and excites me for what discoveries are around the next bend. Ironically it felt like a perfect compliment to the piece's aesthetic.

Here's a look at our first draft of this duet from our showing today:

(You can also view it at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIXupqAzsQs )

Conditioning

2011-02-12T02:05:00.000-08:00

I'm humbled to see how deep so much of my conditioning runs.

I've been learning about and experimenting with inclusive dance techniques for almost a decade now. I'm continually looking for ways to make the ways I perform, think about, create and teach dance/theater inclusive of people with diverse mobilities.

And still my conditioning asserts itself over and over. I fall back on how I learned to dance. Sometimes this is wonderful and provides a storehouse of movement approaches and remembered choreographies. But sometimes this keeps me blind to who is actually with me in the room and what is actually presenting itself to be investigated.

A few rehearsals ago four of us created what I am calling the "Head-Wall Phrase." We took turns teaching the group movements, stacked on top of each other in an accumulating sequence. It was unplanned creation and I loved the energy that it brought along with it.

The next rehearsal had me wanting to teach this material to a larger section of our ensemble. I gave the instructions and we began. And right away Mickey remarked on how it can be so frustrating to learn movement material created by people without physical disabilities and then to have to take on the responsibility of adapting it to his body every time. Cristina agreed and I saw once again how much I was letting old habits dictate my rehearsal process.

While I do find that creating movement on my body with its particular mobility needs is a way for me to circumvent too much thinking and access my intuition, I would like to remember that I don't have to teach that movement to others just by showing it and having them imitate me.

There are so many ways to share movement in more inclusive ways. I've discovered some, and plan to keep discovering more as long as I am involved in this kind of work. What I find over and over again is that exploring ways to relay material in as inclusive a way as possible is not only important so that more people can be included, but it is also always more interesting aesthetically to me in what it produces.

Once we figured out that we should teach the "Head-Wall Phrase" through words that each person could interpret through the filter of her/his kinetic intuition, we created dance that sung beautifully, rather than just accomplished a successful sequence.

Here is our before and after versions:

(The video can also be found here if the embedding doesn't work for some reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHauNhnxWdw )

I look forward to watching this phrase evolve further as we include it within our larger structure, and as more ensemble members create their individual versions.

Birthing Pains

2011-02-12T01:36:00.000-08:00

I see the creation of each art work as a kind of birth. There's both great connection and great pain in this process, and I often forget that the magnitude of how connecting a piece is directly relates to how painful its birth can be.

Last week we tried out a structure for performing a lot of the most salient material we've been developing in our Friend project. It's a difficult feat to imagine how to collage together all the disparate strains that develop in an experimental creation process, but I always do my best. The order of events that I came up with seemed very powerful when I envisioned it, and I was excited to get into rehearsal to try it out.

After talking through the two-page sequence of sections we gave it a try on Sunday night. There were some moments that resonated with me a great deal, and many unexpected images that moved me. But there were also long passages that felt awkward and confused. Those were excruciating.

Even though I know this is an important part of the creation process, I forget that in the moment when we're doing a first run of things. I feel ambushed by material that seems unformed or over-formed. I panic, try to push things into a more interesting state of relationship, try to speed everyone up, insert all sorts of new ideas or lighting angles and generally try to resist what is actually unfolding. I get mad at myself, the performers, circumstances. I feel disappointed and doubt my abilities as an artist.

Now that I've been directing ensemble-based performance steadily for over a decade, I can recognize a little sooner than before that I'm in a "first draft" experience and that it is usually painful. I'm able to relax with the process more. But it still hurts. Somehow the gap between my visions and expectations, and what actually comes out in an early run-through is always shocking.

This time I got a glimpse of insight into the process. I was able to watch myself as I went through the pain of pushing that first draft out into the universe, and then saw how I took that experience and transformed it into a second draft. Sometimes the second draft is as challenging as the first. But there are also times when it feels especially magical--forged out of the fire of disappointment into nuggets of performance electricity. This was one of those times.

Our next rehearsal was inspired. All the performers dug into the material at a whole new level. I was able to get the action moving and then watch as it seemed to create itself. The powerful material developed not in spite of, but directly in relationship to how painful our run-through had been.

Here's a look at that next step as it unfolded for us this past week:

(If you're unable to watch the embedded video, you can just go to this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igF9Vr7gdR8 )

We have a public showing tomorrow of our project as it stands at this point. I know that there is no way I can tell how all our material is working until we try it with an audience. This next step could be any combination of painful and joyous, and both are probably equally helpful (even though my preference from where I sit now is definitely for an experience more on the joyous side of the spectrum.)

It feels good to be able to remind myself before going into this public showing that my intention is for the work, myself and the ensemble to grow from this experience--and to invite the pain or awkwardness as part of that growth if that is what the cards hold for us this time.

Injury as Teacher

2011-01-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

I'm often able to tell other people when they are injured how much every injury can be a teacher. When it's not me having to hold back from moving with physical abandon, I see the benefit of learning about our limitations and our vulnerability through our injuries. When I have an injury, my vision is a lot murkier and I have to wade through a lot of resistance before I come to some kind of acceptance of what happened and a curiosity about what I could learn in the new situation. So it helps me to have concrete instances to remember when I'm having a hard time getting the "message" in an injury or obstacle.

Yesterday we had our first showing as part of my CounterPULSE residency. Even though it's supposed to be a low pressure event, I nonetheless found myself wanting to impress whoever was there in the hopes of receiving a lot of validation about where I am in my process. (Art-making can be such an uncertain path sometimes, and one fraught with insecurity. It's interesting for me to notice how much I seek affirmation from outside--and how soon after I get such affirmation I'm already "jonesing" for more.)

We had a few things to show, some farther along than others. One that I was especially excited about is a duet I created collaboratively with performers Mickey Kay and Anne-Lise Reusswig. We had made it on the very first day of the residency. It is an exciting duet, with lots of falls, catches, turns, sweeps through space and risky partnering moments. Mickey let me know before the showing that his shoulder was still really bothering him so he shouldn't move much. I was disappointed by that, but figured if I gave them the assignment to re-craft the duet so that it felt okay with Mickey's shoulder, but retained as much of the original energy as possible, that probably they'd end up being able to do most of it.

I underestimated Mickey's injury. Moving athletically was completely off the table for him, and he was thinking that he shouldn't really dance at all. So I told Mickey and Anne to just do what was easy for them, and to think of it as a duet in which not much could happen. I thought we'd return to the more full-bodied version of the duet as soon as Mickey was ready.

Then it hit me that a big goal of mine for this next phase is to edit my choreography way down--to create things with lots of space, stillness and silence in them. Perhaps this was an arena to experiment with that. And I love what they came up with. Yes, I love the high-powered partnering and momentum of the first version as well, but it was something that is more familiar to me. In having to minimalize their movement, Mickey and Anne found a partnering relationship that drew me in. Rather than blowing me away, it whispered softly and invited me to lean close and witness something much more vulnerable.

Mickey's injury guided me to a place as a director that I could not have found on my own. There was lots of stillness and understated movements. The physical form of the duet became quite minimal, and that seemed to encourage these dynamic performers to reach out with their energy.

I love the new form this duet has taken, and feel that it's given me a foothold for the entire work. I can trust spaciousness in choreography, not just theoretically, but from a place of lived experience. I've just seen it at work and been touched by it. I was reminded by this duet how presence is really what I'm interested in from performers, and that sometimes we can access presence more powerfully by "doing" less.

Without this injury we probably would have done the duet yesterday as we had first choreographed it. And I'm sure it would have been wonderful, but not nearly as much as it ended up being by holding back. I don't want Mickey to have his injury, or anyone for that matter. But I am grateful for this lesson, and the many more that I'm sure lie ahead.

Here is a video of some brief excerpts from our showing, followed by the duet I wrote about in this post.
(Note: If the video seems narrower than it's supposed to be, it might be cut off by the blog's formatting. You can just click on the video and it will take you to the YouTube site's version, which should be full size.)

Public Showings

2011-01-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

We have our first work-in-progress showing for my CounterPULSE residency this coming Saturday, Jan. 15th. Even though we're still at the beginnings of our creation process, I'm very glad we have this showing to work towards.

There are many reasons that I find public showings of performance works in progress useful. These include:

--forcing us as artists to make some decisions about what we want to show

--giving a deadline to a particular segment of our creation process

--encouraging everyone in the cast to show up at a certain time (Many performers might miss rehearsals due to scheduling conflicts or illness, but few will miss a "performance" of any kind.)

--clarifying what is working or not working in the piece by trying it all full out --receiving feedback from audience members' experiences while witnessing the work and then getting to integrate that feedback into our process

--deepening connection between ensemble members by going through something scary together

--getting to know the space we're working in through a different perspective

--opportunities for bringing friends and loved ones along for our artistic journey

--a chance for all of us to get a better sense of the material we may or may not have already witnessed in rehearsal (Different people come to different rehearsals, so this is one of the few times we're all together.)

--and many more...

There is a particular benefit of showings that I want to explore this time. This is a more personal, intimate benefit. Our showing this Saturday is giving me the opportunity to practice staying mindful while in the middle of the stress and chaos of performances.

One of my personal goals is to merge my spiritual practices with my art making. Some of this is inherent in art making, and some needs to be consciously brought in. In particular I'd like to feel more calm, groundedness, confidence and equanimity on performance days.

I'm good at "making it work." I can handle a large amount of chaos, distress and unexpected obstacles with some amount of grace. My adrenaline rushes and I enter a hyper-focused and highly energetic state. That's all fine and good, but it leaves me feeling very drained afterwards. Also, I find that I become reactive and sometimes even defensive in this super-charged state. While I do get a lot done, sometimes it's a productivity that is disconnected from the deeper parts of my heart.

--I'd like to draw in some of the principles I practice in Tai Chi and mindfulness meditation.

--I'd like to trust the natural unfolding of each performance day.

--I'd like to see everything that arises as momentary expressions of the process, rather than treasures or obstacles that I need to cling to or push through.

--I'd like to stay more in touch with the flow of energy leading up to and during performances.

--I'd like to experiment with trusting a larger sense of identity, and see if things happen when I relax that might even be more interesting than what I could come up with in my striving.

These are not easy tasks for me. A gift of mine is great determination and a strong will. When I want to make something happen, I usually can. However, this limits my experience to include only the things I can think of myself, or that I know I want. That remains a somewhat bland and overly familiar category of experience.

Relaxing into the process further requires a deeper faith in uncertainty. It requires a recognition that I can't control everything. Again, not my natural inclination. Many people report that they think of me as a particularly calm, open and relaxed person. I think that I do have some skills in this area, but most of those come from continual practice. I'm always working towards being calm, open and relaxed--but rarely feeling so. A lot of the time I am able to embody the forms this would take, but my mind rages against the walls inside of that form. I think that performance days are excellent arenas to try to sync up my intentions and my experience.

And an actual "performance" comes with so much baggage that I am usually swept along helplessly with the anxiety and ecstasy. A showing on the other hand is something I can experiment with more freely. The stakes aren't as high and so there is room to make more mistakes.

--What would it be like to stay in touch with my breathing and bodily sensations throughout the whole day, even when a myriad of details are flashing before my eyes?

--What would it be like to trust the process of the preparation, showing and feedback sessions so much so that I don't have to improve them at all?

--What would it be like to allow myself and my ensemble to truly experience whatever arises, familiar and unfamiliar?

--What would it be like to think of the work that we show as not mine, or ours even, but as a creation of the universe manifesting specifically in this moment?

--What would it be like to not take feedback (positive or negative) personally?

I'm not sure, but I'm interested to find out.

...And here is our third interview webisode with Cristina Carrasquillo, right after her first rehearsal with the group and 5 days away from our first showing...
(If the video gets cut off on the sides while watching it on the blog site, you can click on the video and it will take you to the YouTube version of it, which should be complete.)

Synchronicities

2011-01-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things about the creative process is synchronicity. I follow intuition above all else in my art making and find myself continually rewarded by the ways that relationships I never could have dreamed up appear all of a sudden.

Until recently I was planning on making a piece called Don't Suck! Cycle II as part of a four month residency at CounterPULSE in San Francisco. The recent deaths of my close friend Sharon and my grandmother moved me to reflect on and reorganize all aspects of my life. I've shifted my creation plans to making a work inspired by my friendship with Sharon, called Friend.

In the original plans with Don't Suck!, one of the things we were going to be exploring was working with interactive metal sculptures designed and created by ensemble member Mickey Kay. These were going to be things that each of the contestants in our mock reality TV show would compete on--seeing who could interact with the sculptures in the most innovative and compelling ways.

When we shifted the plans for the piece to work with what I'm learning from the loss of this very important friendship, I realized that the metal sculptures made more sense than ever. Sharon was always a creative and artistic soul, picking up interesting found objects on the trails she walked, and creating paintings, collages and all sorts of artworks throughout her life. In the last 10 years of her life, she had become very involved with welding and metal sculpture. She spent a good deal of time at the Crucible, an Oakland metal-work community, and was committed to developing her welding skills as much as she could.

When her brain tumor related symptoms became too intense a few years ago, she had to stop welding completely, and then her love of metal-work led her to making small wire sculptures. Mickey's welding projects (and some experiments I'm doing with using thin wire to make small objects we'll use in performance) seem to be riding on Sharon's spirit and artistic visions.

This kind of unplanned confluence gives me great faith in the artistic process, and immediate confidence in the direction we're moving in with this project.

The Best Laid Plans…

2011-01-07T21:41:00.000-08:00

A particularly challenging and fertile aspect of being a creator of experimental performance is that I often have to describe a project in detail many months or even years before I start on it. When working with 10 or more ensemble members and needing to plan out schedules and spaces that are accessible for dancing, instruments, wheelchairs, props, sets and more, I have to do a lot of advance planning. I joke often with my husband about how I have things planned for specific weekends three years ahead of time, while he’s often not wanting to make any set plans for three days from now.

The foundational priority for me in art making is staying connected to my sense of truth as it unfolds. And in order to make sure I have the time and resources to do that work, I have to make a lot of guesses as to what my truths will look like in the future.

For the past 6 months I have had a very clear picture of what my four month residency at CounterPULSE would look like. While I knew that many of the individual moments and images I explored with my ensemble would change, I knew that we were making a piece that both satirized and drew from reality TV contests to investigate the dynamics of competition in each of our lives. I knew we were continuing the work we started in “Don’t Suck! Cycle I” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center this past summer. I knew that we were going to set up every week of rehearsal and the final performances as actual competitions, where we would be forced to confront our hopes and fears around winning and losing in front of audiences and for an online community. I was excited about facing the difficulties such a project would evoke and excited to attempt to transcend some of my personal competition hang-ups.

And then, two days before our first CounterPULSE rehearsal, one of my best friends died. This changed everything. Even though it wasn’t a sudden death in the usual sense of the word--she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor 10 years before—I am in a state of shock. Death is bizarre. I’ve never lost anyone this intimately connected to my life before. It feels sudden.

I talk about death a lot. Most of the performance pieces I make are in some way addressing the nature of impermanence. I’ve lost a number of people from various parts of my life. At first when Sharon died, I felt a kind of calm joy. I had this sense of her moving into some state of freedom that was in total contrast to the constriction of her body and voice as she existed in a near-coma for the past couple of months. I felt sadness and loss, but also relief. I thought that I had prepared myself for this and was just going to be able to move through the experience of loss organically. I spent my first few days in the studio at CounterPULSE making short pieces in honor of my friendship with Sharon, and friendship in general. I thought I would return to the competition material in the new year.

My grandmother died the next week. It was much the same as with Sharon. Grandma died in her bed in her home, on a Sunday morning, with some loved ones nearby. I felt a similar warmth of freedom at first when I thought of Grandma after death. Her body and mind had offered her mostly pain for the past few years, and at her burial last month it felt like her spirit expanded immensely above us—clearing the clouds away and giving us a powerful rainbow, before allowing the rainstorms to return.

And like with Sharon, I was at first more conscious of our continued sense of connection than of my loss of this person in my life. It was about 3 days after the second death that I crashed internally. Since then I’ve been feeling alternating waves of grief and acceptance, sadness and courage, exhaustion and inspiration.

It’s become clear to me that I need to shift my artistic gears. My original ideas for the residency were provocative, extroverted, spectacle-inducing, dizzying and terrifying. In general I love this sort of challenge in a performance project. But there’s no way I can generate the kind of energy that project calls for at this time. These deaths have triggered a great deal of reflection and priority rearranging for me.

The most potent method I know of for integrating and transforming the troubling parts of life is art making. I feel a powerful call to make art that addresses all that has been evoked by these losses. Sometimes it’s a sense of interest or curiosity that drives a line of artistic inquiry. But this feels more like acknowledging unavoidable emotional/spiritual gravity. There doesn’t seem to me to be any way to move forward except for addressing these losses in my work.

I’m going to try and face one of these deaths at a time, even though I know that art making exists beyond any attempt at categorization and separation. I’m sure both deaths will figure prominently in my residency project. But I am starting with an exploration of my friendship with Sharon Mussen. I met her in high school-the one year that I lived in the Bay Area, in between the rest of my growing up in Los Angeles. We came together as part of a group of friends all drawn to exploring issues of consciousness, spirituality, death, art and sexuality. It was a powerful convergence of freaks and free spirits and we delved together into all sorts of mysterious areas of our own beings and our connections with each other. Sharon was the only person from this group of friends that I stayed in touch with consistently for the past 20-plus years. She remained one of my closest friends.

Her death on Dec. 5^th, and the illness directly leading up to it brought a bunch of us from that group of friends back together again. We’ve all grown up in some ways, and in some ways are falling right back into the dynamics of our high school adventures.

Sharon was also one of the only close friends I have that is not directly connected to my creative and professional life. Most of my social life and intimate friendships happen within the context of the ensemble I direct with Dandelion Dancetheater. It’s wonderful to be able to be with my friends in a creative setting—as art making feels like my central life path. But I’m realizing it was also wonderful to have friends that are slightly more removed from this area I focus so intensely on.

Losing Sharon has disoriented me. And reestablishing ties with this larger group of friends feels serendipitous. I sense the possibility that some of these folks can become friends of mine outside of my “work,” in a similar way that Sharon was. But developing friendships in this way is something I’ve forgotten how to do. I did so in high school, and even college. But after that my quest for intimate relationships was almost always funneled through my art.

So my new work to be created in these precious months at CounterPULSE will explore my friendship with Sharon, through the larger vehicle of an investigation of friendship in general. How does each of the ensemble members hold friendship in our lives? How have friendships developed for us? What role do our friends play now? Do we actively seek new friendships? What friends have we lost and how did we process those losses?

Over the last few years I've made increasingly large and anarchistic ensemble performance works. I've played with multiple layers of community diversity, chaos versus control, busting the format for performance wide open, and courting wildness in as many ways as I could. It seems suddenly very appropriate to me that I'm now on the other side of such a cycle. I feel myself called to turn inward and to seek intimate, tender and hidden truths.

The work will be called simply “Friend.” It is a comfort to me to be looking for Sharon somewhere in this creative project, and to think that I might connect with her spirit in a whole new way.

Sharon's Passing

2010-12-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Sharon died on Sunday Dec. 5th. She has been one of my closest friends since high school and so losing her is evoking all sorts of reflections on life, death, spiritual path, friendship and more. I'm devoting this post to processing this transition. I'm writing it mostly as a focus point for my disoriented experience of loss.

This is my first experience of losing someone that had a very central place in my life. I'm not quite sure how to deal with this kind of thing, so am doing my best to just move gradually through each moment, and to write down everything that comes to me. So this is longer than usual post and less organized, as I have a lot to integrate.

Sharon Mussen had a kind of transcendence about her. I noticed this from the first time I met her on the corner of Center and Shattuck in downtown Berkeley. She had just returned from a year in Israel and had come back to Berkeley High School for what was our junior year. She seemed in culture shock and mostly just observed at first, quietly. But she had a power about her. I associate that power with her very long, very full, classic "hippie" hair. It reached out from her head in all directions, much like the energy that emanated from her at all times. It was an energy of calm, of fairness, of unflinching honesty.

As I got to know Sharon over the course of that year--through countless treks in forests, late night jam-sessions/hang outs and all sorts of other adventures--she became a kind of touchstone for my own integrity and kindness towards myself. Almost everyone who has met her mentions her special presence. I'm still holding reincarnation as a mystery, but Sharon is one of those people that encourages me to believe that our spiritual essences travel through many births, growing with each one--and that Sharon was a particularly "old" soul.

I had a particularly tumultuous year at Berkeley High, and returned to Los Angeles for my senior year. Sharon was the one friend that I maintained close contact with from that time forward. I saw her on each of my trips to the Bay Area, and we each visited each other during our college days. I remember my times with Sharon during my late teens and early twenties as a kind of regular spiritual path check-in. Being with her always reminded me that I'm on some sort of inner journey and that I have fellow travelers to share with along the way. I remember her getting out a guitar each time we reconnected and playing me whatever song she recently wrote or learned. In her music I was always transported to a world existing beyond time and form. She evoked a kind of mythological landscape--ancient, yet totally present and palpable.

Sharon was an artist through and through. I don't know if she ever even considered art as a career path. But she saw the world through the eyes of creativity and wonder. Her music had a kind of purity that cut straight through to my heart. It rang with the vibrations of forests in the rain, long open paths, stories of long ago told around the fire and the longing for deep connection. And she was always sculpting, painting, welding or creating something that brought together the natural elements and strange, discarded objects found around the city. I treasure the small sculptures she made for me. I don't think she distinguished between art and spirituality or art and daily life—it was all one flow.

Sharon moved slowly and mindfully. Not out of some concept of meditative practice, but rather because that seemed to be her nature. Perhaps if one is to have as much integrity and truthfulness as Sharon has, one has to move slowly. Once she got her brain tumor diagnosis and began her series of surgeries, she slowed down even more. This often took me awhile to adjust to when we were together. My life is so speedy that I had to apply the brakes dramatically when we would spend time with each other. Beforehand I would always think that I don't have enough time to spend this much of it on something so basic, but then as we talked or walked or sat together, I would drop into another time zone. I would come back to a part of myself that I lose all too easily. I would reboot.

I treasure the memories of my meanderings with Sharon over the last decade. When I first heard that she had died yesterday, I found myself walking slowly around downtown Berkeley, in the rain for a long time. I felt the warmth of her presence each time I reminded myself to slow down whatever I was doing. I reflected on countless times of walking arm in arm, smiling with the joy of just being together.

I remember Sharon staying by me that night in high school when our group of friends went to the Jimmy Cliff concert at the Berkeley Community Theater. I had fallen off a railing when trying to slide down it earlier that day and was scared to try again. Sharon asked me if I wanted to conquer that fear and I agreed. She patiently walked up and back down with me as I slid the length of one stair, two stairs, three stairs, all the way up to a full staircase. We celebrated together when I could once again slide down a railing with abandon.

I remember a kind of lesson she gave me once at her house on Derby Street. I think I was spending the night, or at least there very late. She shared with me her ritual of pre-sleep snack. It was an improvised combination of things like Amazake, granola, yogurt, kefir, soymilk, etc. It seems to me still to be the perfect dessert to please and calm the body simultaneously.

I remember trekking through the woods behind UC Santa Cruz, in the rain with Sharon and her friend Jennie. We didn't know where we were going, and might have even gotten lost. But with Sharon there was this sense of "nowness" that made getting lost no big deal. We were together and we could trust that. Eventually we'd find our way somewhere helpful.

I remember going to find her in the audience at one of the performances of mine she came to earlier this year. Her speech was already very broken-up and slowed down because of her tumor, and her body had become increasingly frail. But she joined me onstage for the big community dance at the end, with great joy. I am reminded of a significant lack of self-consciousness that she displayed then, and on so many occasions. Whether or not she knew what was going on or was confident about what we were attempting, she was game to give it a go, with seemingly no concern about how she would appear to others watching from the sides.

I remember the warmth of her smile and the genuine bubbling of her laughter. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting by her bedside, as she floated in and out of sleep and unconsciousness. I had my banjo and was attempting to sing songs to her that I thought would bring comfort. My banjo skills are very limited, and I kept playing the wrong chords for the Grateful Dead song "Ripple." For a while I would try to just keep going and ignore the mess-ups, but after awhile I acknowledged that I didn't know what I was doing, laughing self-consciously. And from her otherworldly state, with eyes still closed, she smiled and all the tension was completely lifted.

I remember countless walks with Sharon. Walks around her parents' house in North Berkeley, around her house in Oakland, around the house I bought with my brothers that she lived in for a time and around each place that I've lived as an adult. These were like time outside of time--breaks from my otherwise very hectic schedule.

I remember the house concert I organized as a benefit for my company, soon after Sharon's first brain surgery. I had asked her to sing a few of her songs, and she got up there with her guitar and then completely blanked out on the chords, the words...everything. And she smiled that smile of hers and let us all know that she wasn't going to be able to sing that afternoon. We talked a lot after that about what that experience was like, and I based my opening monologue for our piece "Drop" on that event. In the monologue I slowly lose my train of thought until I get to a place of complete blankness and then the lights go out. I thought of Sharon each time I did that and she "got it" in a way no one else could.

I remember waiting in the downstairs lobby during her first brain surgery. We were all so nervous. And then going up to see her after it was done, with half of her beautiful head of hair shaved off. It was a shock to see, as that hair had seemed like something that would never go away. And then hearing about the surgery from her, how they woke her up in the middle, with her skull cut open, to find out how close the tumor was to her brain's speaking center. Talking about this kind of thing with Sharon was a kind of research for me into the very nature of consciousness.

And in a way it makes sense to me that Sharon was the first of our group (of spiritual explorers that came together quite powerfully at Berkeley High in 1987) to approach death. She was a quiet leader for us always--keeping us on track when we would get too caught up in one concern or another. I feel so grateful to have spent regular time with her in these last couple of months. Sitting by her bedside, in silence or in song or simple conversation has touched me deeply. Even if I arrived worn out from my week, I felt refreshed by her energy in the room. It was definitely sacred space.

I felt my connection with her stronger than ever once it moved beyond words like that. She would open her eyes every now and then and communicate so much through brief eye contact. I don't know exactly what she has been experiencing during her in-between time--her many weeks in altered consciousness in that hospital bed. And I don't know what she's experiencing now. But I had a strong sense of peace. She gave me the most powerful message about what it means to die during these recent sessions. It's not anything I can really put into words, besides saying that it seems like such a natural and wholesome process. It seems like it will all be okay.

This blog post has become a kind of altar to Sharon for me. I find myself writing a little, then going about the other things I need to do, then coming back and writing a few more lines, then doing something else. It's a container to pour my feelings and questions and memories into.

When I first heard the news yesterday that Sharon had died, I felt a kind of warmth--a mixture of joy and relief. Joy that seemed to be a direct connection with Sharon's spirit, and relief that her long struggle with this brain tumor had ended. But as the day went on, and then as the next day came, I found myself moving through all sorts of different emotional landscapes--feeling combinations of gratitude, sadness, emptiness, desolation, fear about my own death, curiosity, the meaninglessness of life, the meaningfulness of life, anxiety and a kind of disconnection with myself.

This death is bringing home to me my own mortality in a way that no other death I've experienced has. Sharon and I are the same age. We've gone through so many important life transitions together. We've been teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults together. As friends we've been through psychedelic trips, emotional crises, relationships starting and ending, marriages, a divorce, a brain tumor, seizures, brain surgeries, loss of speech, internal evolutions, and more. I'm 39 years old. Sharon died at this same age. The fragility of my own life is brought front and center.

And I'm aware of how important creative projects are to me. The only thing I can think of to do to help me through this is write about it. Probably I'll make other kinds of art from this experience as well. I'm struck by how much art for me is about processing all the complexities of living and dying, much more than it is about a finished product of any kind. This writing right now is an outlet for me, a way to plug into my connection with the universe. Whether or not anyone reads it ever, I need to write it.

And I need to publish it. Somehow just writing for myself isn't enough at this point. I need to put my creations out there--and in many ways I'm unattached to it reaching anyone else directly. The important part of the public sharing for me is the sending it out. It's a kind of acknowledgment and letting go. I say this all the time about performance--that once we put it out into the world we have to let go of it and people will receive it in whatever ways their complex personality structures filter it. But there's another level to this letting go, that's more essential than anyone's reception. It's the intention that goes into creating something to share. That intention is one of my primary connections to the universe around me. Even if I never share something, that intention as a starting place allows my truth to come forward.

Perhaps there'll come a time when I don't need that public sharing part as much. Perhaps I'll eventually be able to feel that deep connection with the universe more steadily, even when things are private. But for now it's a lifeline. I think this is why dance, more than anything else, has rescued me from my darkest traps. It's that moving both outward and inward at the same time, that is I believe one of the most healing parts of art making.

If I wrote all this in a place I was planning on keeping only to myself, I wouldn't care so much about how the words and sentences organized themselves. This care is a kind of attention that forces me to stay present with what I'm sharing. This care keeps me coming back to write and rewrite. This care keeps me on track in a way that I have trouble staying in just a diary. I'm writing to you, the reader. But more importantly I'm writing to myself, to Sharon, to a mysteriously unfolding universe. All of creation is an audience, all of the time. But it's useful still to have deadlines, show times, curtains rising to reveal this particular art-moment.

I saw the importance of music in a new way by Sharon's bedside. My meager musical skills, which might not be enough to keep a large audience engaged for long, were plenty to connect with my friend in her subconscious retreat. Music felt like the only thing that made sense in those visits. Each time I tried to talk it ended up feeling artificial, or like the words I've heard others say at a deathbed. but when I played my banjo and sang simple folk songs, I arrived fully into that room, and I felt Sharon's presence most.

Dandelion at BAC - And Still More Reflections

2010-09-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

This is from collaborating performer Julia Hollas:

Opting Out/Diving In
I hate competition. There's something about the required and unabashed self-assertiveness in it, the will to prove yourself as "better" than another, that I find constitutionally distasteful. My parents say that when I was little they taught me not to kill ants and have been watching the ramifications of that lesson ever since, from a declaration of vegetarianism at age nine, to marching in anti-nuclear protests in high school, to the (thus far) final definitive moment when I quit my degree program in college, declared myself an artist, and moved to San Francisco, from then on out to be forever involved in the "process" of art making. A clear statement: I would not be climbing up the ranks in a high-powered company.

Why didn't I choose New York? The better known dance mecca of the U.S., that's really the spot for a young dancer who wants to make it big. Honestly, I went west because the vibe suited me better. New York felt too polished and defined: a successful dancer in New York evokes an immediate image in my mind, and the process of getting to that image felt like it would be too cut throat. I didn't want to refine myself based on external criteria of what it meant to be successful as a dancer, I wanted to find out why it was impossible for me to not dance, and pursue that to the end. The amorphous Bay Area dance community seemed as if it would support that quest more.

Competition: succeeding in it means both being able to pursue the idea of yourself as better than another and accepting an outsider's point of view of what is and is not valuable.

So, as we entered in to a project based around competition, I immediately decided not to compete. I opted out. I didn't care whether I won or lost, but I was clear that I wanted to create a valuable experience for myself. To me this meant creating a piece of choreography that had been itching my brain for awhile, diving in to the physicality and emotional content of the material I was given to perform, and using every opportunity I could to find a sense of center and focus.

Then I realized that, by opting out, I was doing exactly what one does in competition. I was choosing myself.

From then on I began noticing what came up. I saw how others played the game. How some people played by sizing up the other players, what they were making, how they could make their own creation different. How some played by considering the judges, their aesthetics, what they might like. Others play indirectly: a show of sportsmanship, while it could just be good sportsmanship, could also be a play to gain points for the behavior. A complaint against circumstance, while valid, could also be an attempt to bend the rules in one's favor. Deciding not to compete and just focus on yourself could be just a tactic to refine your own machinery for warfare. Whether we know it or not, we all play, and we all play differently.

I did come away with an incredibly sense of clarity from the residency. I spent the time diving in to my own process. I found more ways than expected of choosing and asserting myself. I won the creative competition and came up somewhere in the middle in the performer competition, facts which continue to remain relatively meaningless. (Relatively... I am in fact proud of my win.) I've found a bit of acceptance in the fact that by asserting myself, I will occasionally be, intentionally or not, nudging myself above others, stepping on some toes, and taking things for myself. I live and struggle with my all-too-human selfishness. I trust that the search for balance will be a rich one.

5771 New Year's Resolution

2010-09-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

We just passed through the turning of the Jewish New Year, as well as the Autumnal Equinox. I start the new school year today. Seems to be a good time for setting intentions.

My New Year's resolution for year 5771 is to edit. I'm going to focus my resolution on editing my performance work, but I think it's really a project that will spread out over all aspects of my life.

Editing is usually not easy for me. I like to say "Yes!" to things, which in some cases is a wonderful approach (if I may say so myself) and in some cases leads to too much stuff, chaos, overwhelm, messiness and a difficulty with letting go. Like most of us, I think my strengths are inseparable from my weaknesses, and it's this particular weakness that I want to challenge this year.

I've worked for many years to strengthen my ability to say "No," to not take on too much, to throw out what isn't working, to simplify. And I'm making progress on this front, slowly but surely. But I'm up against many years of habit and conditioning and probably even DNA in this struggle. I think that this year I'm ready for a more dramatic leap.

And this is where my performance practice and my spiritual practice fuse. I'm going to work on what I need to change in my life, through my creative work. I feel more confident about my ability to try out a radical change of approach in my art, than I do with my personality. I'm going to conduct a bold experiment as my New Year's resolution, within the laboratory of the pieces I'm working on this year.

I often find that I access a more "enlightened" part of myself when I'm choreographing and directing. Things that are hard in my ordinary life, come much more easily and intuitively in rehearsal and performance. When I'm making art, I have a much clearer sense of larger perspective, of working towards something that's bigger than just me. I thrive on the crisis mode that is part of putting together any live performance. No matter where we're at in our process, the "show must go on," and so I have to be present. I have to show up. I have to let go.

When I'm in my "day to day" mode, I can easily get wrapped up in insecurity, indecision, or regret. I'm working to hold a larger perspective here too, but it doesn't come as naturally for me yet. Sometimes I've thought of this seeming split in my personality as a problem. Either I'm being disingenuous in one area of my life, or I have some kind of psychological disorder. But more and more I'm seeing it as the different parts of myself teaching each other.

I've noticed that a little clarity, can lead to more clarity. So rather than berating myself for not being able to hold the same states of mind in my art-making and other selves, I can celebrate and take advantage of whatever clarity I do find, anywhere.

Now, editing is something that is still a big challenge for me in my art. But I feel heartened by the fact that I at least "sense the possibility" of editing in this area. I can sense the first steps of such a transformation, and feel encouragement from within to take those steps. My intuition tells me, that whatever I learn from my experiments with editing my performance creations, will be vitally relevant to the rest of my life.

So, I begin. My first idea is to share with my performance ensemble my resolution and to let them know I'm going to be taking some big risks with simplifying our creations. I don't want to limit what we do in rehearsal. I still want to do hours upon hours of improvisation, composition, and interdisciplinary experiments of all kinds. The difference for this year, is I want to let go of the compulsion to use all of what we come up with, or even all that I like of what we come up with, in our performances.

I want to attempt to only include the material that feels necessary to be shared. I've seen that there are many different ways of defining "necessary," so I want to limit what we put onstage to what feels necessary for the truth of the piece itself, not the inner processes of the creators/performers. This will not be easy.

I believe deeply in performance being healing and meaningful for everyone involved. This often leads me to leaving parts of my pieces intact that might not serve the full piece aesthetically, but that I feel are important to my collaborators for various reasons.

I'm going to have to continue to challenge my desire to have everyone in my projects be happy and approving of my choices. I'm going to have to challenge my desire to include everything and everyone--to try to represent the diversity I so love, at every turn. I'm going to have to challenge my desire to have every great idea our ensemble brings forth (and there are always tons of them) realized onstage.

For many people, this might seem like a piece o' cake. In some ways, it's part of the "ABC's" of choreography. But my artistic path has been about rejecting as many models laid on from the outside as possible. I've tried to only take on the practices that I've found to be helpful through actually experimenting with them in rehearsal, and to let go of what handed down to me solely because of tradition.

So I've been forging my own path, and experiencing both the positive and negative aspects of having the deeper aspects of my personality define my work. And once again I've come up against a limitation I want to address. I feel good about approaching this from a sense of wanting to find what works most skillfully, rather than try to fit into how I think it's "supposed" to be.

I'm sure it will be quite an interesting wrestling match between this new intention and my current artistic momentum. I'm sure I'll write about it often through this blog.

I wish everyone reading a joyous ad clarifying 5771!

Dandelion at BAC - More Culminating Reflections

2010-09-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

As we returned to the grind of daily life back home, reflections on our BAC Residency have been trickling in. Here are a few more:

MICKEY KAY(Collaborating Performer) For me, "Don't Suck" was such a strange and powerful mix of things. New York City - somewhere I've never been and a place that completely overwhelmed and intrigued me. Competition - something I crave and love in certain contexts, but am deathly afraid of in others. Dance - where my inexperience both helps and hinders. All this smashed into two-and-a-half weeks of 8+ hour days, alongside an eclectic mix of very different people, away from my girlfriend for too long each day, in the midst of a 3-month road trip, subsiding on a diet of too much falafel and not enough water. The challenge of the whole project felt immense and exciting, and I've come away from this process very satisfied with what we've created and experienced.

JESS HOOKS (Costume Designer) I strongly feel that this could be one of the more pivotal projects I've worked on in recent years. It gave me an opportunity to revisit working with a movement-based company from the bay area that now I know was formative to my career and practice. Specifically I was able to ask questions and explore what it is to work with a designer in a devised / ensemble format as well as compare notes on making work in New York versus the west coast. I found that the cultures on each coast generated the same sort of problems with devising - both the gaps between the way designers and performers work as well as the challenges of time & money that exist creating in a collaborative way. I expected the performers to have a more relaxed relationship to competition than what I'd expect from a NY based group and what came up was surprising: I feel that the expectations we put on ourselves and how we compare and define our work against each other exists unanimously, regardless of art-making cultures. Its not just a NY thing. Its an art making thing. I also explored the relationship and use of the audience in these projects and was able to really experiment and try new things out on how to engage and understand how performers work with the audience. Being able to create work on the dancers which came out of my intuition and these experiments will hopefully integrate into my practice and I'm psyched to continue on with this. I think a lot will come out of it - and it was fricken awesome that Baryshnikov showed up & stayed for the whole performance.

Dandelion at BAC - The Final Score

2010-09-13T02:31:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, Sept. 7th, we had both our BAC residency culminating showing, and the final event for our NYC 2010 "Don't Suck!" Competition.

It was a thrilling evening. I felt that we transcended the notion of performing "for" people, and instead were able to connect at some other level as a group of people meeting in studio 4B at BAC at that particular moment, having a set of experiences together.

I think the fact that our performance was a structured improvisation (like a sports game) where a winner and loser would be found based on things no one could predict; and the fact that Mikhail Baryshnikov came to the show and stayed the whole time; and because our 2.5 weeks of intensive 8 hour days in that studio had built up a lot of energetic momentum for us--all made the evening a powerful one.

Once again, picking a winner and loser was difficult. Judges before the show said they would be able to score performers easily, and then during the show reported that it was much harder than they had anticipated. Particularly challenging was picking a loser. When looking for winners, I had the audience vote, and most did so. When looking for a loser, only 4 or 5 audience members were willing to raise their hands. It seems like we've discovered some interesting focus points for our future investigations.

But we did have decisions by the judges. Julia Hollas won the creation competition. She had faced off against David Ryther and Mantra Plonsey. Each made a piece, 5 minutes or less, and performed them for the judges and audience. It was a very close race.

Dana DeGuzman won the performer competition--also a close race. Mantra Plonsey came out on the bottom and got to do the loser dance to close the show.

Like our whole time in residency, the culminating performance stirred up a lot of interesting shadow-aspects to explore further. I'm very much looking forward to the next stages of this journey.

Here are some excerpts from the performance. (If you look closely you can pick out Mr. Baryshnikov sitting in the front row. I was very inspired by his humble presence and his support of young, experimental choreographers. Perhaps he will be the subject for a future post...)

Dandelion at BAC - Day 12 and 13 Group Summaries

2010-09-13T00:57:00.000-07:00

Now that we've come home from the NYC residency, and are returning to "ordinary life," I'm starting to post the things I would have like to have posted earlier, but was too caught up in all the details and drama of our culminating performance to get to.

Here is the group summary for Day 12:

And here is the summary for day 13 -- just one day before the final competition at BAC:

Dandelion at BAC - Culmination 1

2010-09-11T23:39:00.001-07:00

Dandelion Dancetheater has now completed our “Don’t Suck!” residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

We had a public performance/competition Tuesday night, Sept. 7th, and it was a huge success on many levels. It was both a rich evening of interdisciplinary live art, and an experiment yielding very important data. We learned a tremendous amount and have our work cut out for us during the next leg of our journey with this project.

A particular luxury of this residency is that we scheduled the culminating performance a day before we left the center, giving us a day of processing and integration—as well as more relaxed clean-up. I’ll be sorting through all that I have learned for a while to come. Below are parting refletions by some of the ensemble.

I asked everyone to respond to these questions, or else to write anything that felt important to them to share:

WHAT DID YOU WANT OUT OF THIS RESIDENCY?

WHAT DID YOU LEARN?

WHAT WAS HARD?

WHAT WAS SURPRISING?

DID YOU GO THROUGH ANY KIND OF TRANSFORMATION?

DAVID: New York. I wanted to work hard and learn something about myself. I also learned something about rats and how they all work hard to survive. I did work hard and I think I learned how fun that can be and how days off are much more satisfying when you’re working 12 hours a day. I was surprised at my competitive streak and had a lot of compassion for the millions of people and rats and roaches who work hard everyday to all get along and compete for space and resources. We all had to find a way not to suck and we didn’t. Mr. Baryshnikov stayed for the second half, so there must have been something there.

HEATHER: I wanted to gain further physical strength, modern dance training and discipline for working long hours toward a divine art piece. What was difficult was that I am someone who wears her heart on her sleeve & I had emotions that rose swiftly and intensely during the competition like some kind of inconsiderate tempest. This caused me to struggle through a period of self-doubt/hatred and as usual I wanted to run away . . . but I didn’t. Loving people talked me through it as did the lovely part of myself and I came to a place where things were clearer and thusly felt safe. I believe that all the hard work we each put in made the ultimate performance (in front of Mikhail Baryshnikov himself) a veritable transformational gift to the audience. I am infinitely grateful for the NYC “Don’t Suck” residency experience!

CLEVELAND: When I came to New York I was happy that I knew it would end. I liked being there but I didn’t like knowing what was waiting for me when I got back. I had a guide that took me to uninteresting places. I think it was mainly because it was more convenient. My piece turned out very well. Better than it should have. That was pleasing, probably the best part of the trip. I mean it's not that the dancers are bad , its that i'm not the best choreographer. In fact it wouldn’t have turned out well if it wasn’t for the amazing dancers. Uh ran out of things to say… Okay I just remembered that

I went to the beach twice and never got in the water. I didn’t even have swim pants on either occasion. The hotel we were in was so fancy and had such a spectacular view that I stood up all night watching the sky change color. That was worth the trip. It was a good trip and now I can say that I went somewhere for summer vacation.

MISCHA: I had a good time in New York. Me and my bro’s piece were the best I think. I spent most of my time walking around . I’m scared about the homework to catch up on. But I’m also happy that I’ll get back to my house. It was fun to meet Misha.

The apartment was nice there was a grate view.

DANA: I had always dreamed of moving to New York, so I looked forward to this trip to begin with. Although I wasn’t able to see all the tourist spots around the city, I was perfectly fine with it and actually preferred this. I felt like a real New Yorker, staying in Brooklyn, taking the subway to Manhattan, and working for 8 hours a day for six days a week, just creating and dancing. I must admit that this was the most dancing I had ever done in my life, but loved every moment of it. But its nice to come home.

STACZ: The physical demands were harsh and I wish to train more in endurence. As for strength I was surprised that I have become much stronger. It all had an expected surprise to it, so I don’t know if I can consider it a surprise because I know I will be asked to do something I hate and have to do it anyways. But in the end it will be a dynamic show. I have nothing else. That’s it.

A Review of David Ryther's "The Untempered Violin," guest-written by Mantra Plonsey

2010-09-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

At his concert at The Tank last week, David Ryther made me remember why I love music.

Which is worth stating, because I feel claustrophobically threatened by practically every other composer-performer I know.

I avoid going to see live music, theater, dance, and independent film, and refuse to listen to any recordings made after 1999, or read anything by someone I know, used to know, or anyone who lives within 100 miles of me.

I am selfish, cowardly, self-centered and insecure, that's why, so stop inviting me to things, all right?

Consequently, I don't have the guts to invite anyone to performances I'm in, since I'm such a terrible person who doesn't deserve to have any friends at all, especially radiantly talented ones.

What if they're worse than me?
I'll be bored! And worse, I won't know what to say to them afterward-- oh, dear Performers A, B & C-- your glowing, proud hopeful little faces, sweaty with effort! "Wow," I say, "I haven't seen anything like that for years! Thanks for inviting me! That sure was something!" Big hug, and gotta go now.

Or what if they're BETTER than me?
Then I must tell them so, from the bottom of my heart,
and go home, dank with despair, and spend a bleak, unproductive month or so wondering why I was born-- what is the point of keeping ME around when there is Performer X: to adore, give awards to, and rave about in the New Yorker?

But back to David.

Not only do I know him, I've had the intoxicating honor of sharing the stage with him for years in Dandelion Dancetheater.

My toxic jealousy evaporates in the presence of his talent, which is genuine and modest, and which is one of the outstanding features about a really nice guy who, incidentally, works pretty darned hard to know himself.

The discipline that informs his violin playing is apparent as well in the way he moves in the world-- yes, he dances as well, but I mean the way he relates to people. Maybe when you spend 3-6 hours per day practicing one of the fussiest instruments on earth it has a way of leaking into the rest of your life. Or maybe it's all that yoga.

At the show on August 31st we were audience to the sort of program you usually have to pay seventy dollars a ticket for-- and that's in the cheap seats.

(When I rule the world, David Ryther will be paid one million dollars a year, and the evil businessmen at the Fox network will have to scrape along somehow.)

The program, nearly one and a half hours long:

The New York premiere of David's concerto in a series of etudes.
A storm, a lament, a tragedy, a poem.
It's a masterpiece, and would take at least the length of this review over again.

A solo violin piece, composed by Ryther, played during a duet with the modern and classically trained Julia Hollas, also with Dandelion Dancetheater. Ms. Hollas, a thrilling and incandescent mover with a sinuous, powerful style, takes emotional and physical risks which excite and engage the viewer. She teaches ballet in San Francisco when not on tour.

(Did I mention that David, also a fluid improvisor, plays while dancing? We were treated to the rare spectacle of a man wielding 15,000 bucks worth of wood and horsehair while balancing his partner on his back, while turning, on the floor, and in the air...)

Also heard were a number of rare miniatures, performed solo by Ryther and joined also by his colleague, violinist Deborah Katz. These impressionistic works from the era of Luciano Berio and other experimental composers showcased David's facility with extended technique.

Whereas one can frequently find Stockhausen and Berg, etc., performed by new music ensembles monthly in New York, San Francisco, Berlin and so on, we don't always have the good fortune to see new (read: "difficult") music performed live with inspiration and expression. (And, just for good measure, with good old-fashioned bearded, Bohemian, wild-haired fervor.) Too often, it's just damned dry-- perfect technique, zero fire: a dismal advertisement for classical music, let alone the outer limits of composition.

It is a centuries-old form of praise to declare that an artist is "divine", that he channels some rarefied light outside of him; for me, Ryther proves that the eternal genius of art originates within, and that each of us contains that flame.

--Mantra Plonsey

A clip from "The Untempered Violin"

Dandelion at BAC - Entering the Final Stretch

2010-09-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

We've had quite a ride with the ups and downs of our residency this past week. I feel thoroughly challenged and tested by the weather, broken air-conditioning, the difficulty of navigating and guiding a group through emotionally-charged material and trying to acknowledge and integrate all the feelings and images and memories that have been trickling up from my subconscious as we probe into competition dynamics.

We have one more day of rehearsal, and then we're at performance day. I think it's all gonna accelerate really quickly now towards our sharing with the public--and our culminating competitions.

The few days before performance are almost always exhilarating and terrifying for me. There's this palpable sense of hurling towards an explosive end.

I question at this point why I ever thought art-making was a good idea, and especially what I was smoking when I decided to plan this particular performance. Everything comes into doubt, nothing seems ready, and there's never enough time to prepare. We're at the top of a roller coaster summit about to plunge into rickety depths that are hidden in darkness, and there's no way to stop it.

We did a very rough run of all our material yesterday, and as always, I'm completely surprised that it seems to flow and actually be the sketch of a complete piece. But of course, there's a ton of work still to be done.

Now is the time for me to call upon great courage. And great courage can only manifest when there is great fear. Performance seems to be courage cultivation practice for me--and the fear never seems to go away. There's always so much at stake in performance, and I think that is a key factor in my love for this path. It wakes me up and stops me in my tracks, over and over and over.

Here's our ensemble at work. This is Mickey helping our guest choreographers Mischa and Cleveland Plonsey with their ideas for a piece they co-created with us:

And then here's the report from our four judges for Day 12:

Dandelion at BAC - A "Don't Suck!" Residency Overview

2010-09-01T22:14:00.000-07:00

For anyone who wants a little more explanation of what we're working on in this creation residency that I've been blogging about recently:

Dandelion at BAC - Day Eight Judge Summary (Stacz)

2010-09-01T22:11:00.001-07:00

Dandelion at BAC - Day Seven Judge Summary (Mickey)

2010-09-01T22:10:00.001-07:00

Dandelion at BAC - Inviting Challenges

2010-09-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

Our residency at the BAC has gotten intense. We're all weary, the air-conditioning is broken in the building, we've moved more and more into intimate emotional places with each other, and we're delving into our shadow-sides. I find myself often at a breaking point--raw and unsure and anxious. This alternates with feeling a sense of "rightness"--like I'm on the path I'm supposed to be on and things are unfolding in a powerful way. At my most difficult and groundless moments (which are more and more familiar to me now as part of the process of experimental creation) I am working with reminding myself that this is a necessary part of creative discovery. I found myself saying this to the choreographer/composer contestants who felt stuck preparing for the competitions this week, and now I have to walk my talk. Here's some thoughts from Day 8 of the "Don't Suck!" residency, by yours truly:

Dandelion at BAC - A slice of lunch break

2010-09-01T21:39:00.001-07:00

Dandelion at BAC - A moment with Mantra

2010-09-01T21:38:00.001-07:00

Dandlion at BAC: Elimination #1 (posted a week late)

2010-09-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

Today we have our first showing of the individual pieces each ensemble member has been working on, and the first elimination. Two of the pieces will be voted out of the competition for what is performed in our culminating show.

Once again, what we all came up with together as a structure, and what we saw as a skillful means towards accessing our feelings about competition, has turned into a high-stakes contest. I guess that means our plan is working. But we always seem to forget how scary this aspect of competition can be.

Ensemble members started reporting feeling anxiety about the upcoming elimination, feeling stuck in their creative process, worry about whether they'd be able to make their pieces into something, and more.

I view these kind of emotional obstacles as necessary steps along a creative path. Of course it's a little different each time, but it seems to me that creativity is born out of being stuck in some way. Creativity is an enlivening response to a limitation or block. Without something to push up against, or through, or around, or in the opposite direction of, our creativity isn't as important. And I believe that creativity is one of the most important things there is.

Many people say, "I'm not really creative." Or, "That person is so creative." I think this is based on an illusion. Creativity is our birthright. It's a meeting of our authentic self and everything else around us. What we wear each day, how we drive moment to moment, every word we say, every action we do is a creative act. It's not that some people are more creative than others, it's that we are all creative, and we all have a unique path to follow to access greater and greater amounts of that creativity.

I'm so curious to see what creative breakthroughs might occur today in the crucible of competition. Each ensemble member has had 3 sessions to work on their individual pieces. And each ensemble member is in three other pieces. They all get a final 30 minutes this morning, and then we perform them for each other, in whatever shape they're in and vote. We'll vote off two of the eight pieces. Monday we vote off two more. Tuesday we vote off a final one, and then we are left with the three pieces that will compete against each other in the first half of our residency performance, judged by our celebrity judge panel.

The stakes are rising.

Dandelion at BAC - A moment with Julia

2010-08-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

Julia and Mickey talk about a dilemna I'm wrestling with: whether or not to be an official contestant AND direct the whole project. I like the idea of me being pushed to face my issues around competition through going through similar things as the rest of the performers. At the same time, I feel that the stakes are really high for me every time I direct a piece, and that I might not be able to guide it as clearly if I'm in the throes of fears about losing and fears about winning...

Dandelion at BAC - Day Six Judge Summary (Mantra)

2010-08-30T22:10:00.001-07:00

A summary of day 6 of "Don't Suck!" at the BAC in NYC, by the judge of the day, Mantra.

Dandelion at BAC - Day Five Judge Summary (Keith)

2010-08-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

A summary of day 5 of the Dandelion residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center, by the judge of the day, Keith.

Dandelion at BAC - Day Four Judge Summary (Julia)

2010-08-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

A summary of Day 4 in the "Don't Suck!" competition by judge of the day, Julia:

Competitive ZING POW BOING

2010-08-28T05:32:00.000-07:00

We first learned the game ZING POW BOING from Leese Walker of Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble. In the game we pass energy (and build energy) around the circle through a network of nonsensical voice/body gestures.

It's a great way to strengthen an ensemble and generate rehearsal or performance energy.

We decided to subvert the structure as another way to play with competition. Instead of focusing on our connection as a group, we're pitting ourselves against each other. It's interesting that this has then proved to be one of the most ensemble-harmonizing exercises we've experience in the residency.

The game is evolving. Here's our latest version:

Creating a Container for Shadow-Play

2010-08-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

I learned very directly the power of play from one of my most important mentors, choreographer Della Davidson. In her rehearsal processes we would do long improvisations, that often started out feeling artificial and forced, but then eventually, if we could just hang in there, would lead us to deep, dark places in our psyche--and allow for some kind of transformation of what we found there.

I felt in those improvisations that I was able to access parts of myself that rarely come out even a little bit in my public persona. Violence, perversity, extreme silliness, manipulation, terror, domination, effusive sexuality, absurdity, and ecstatic pleasure. The space that Della created with her simple structures and her somehow magical quality of witnessing were very healing for me.

I found myself doing a lot of "shadow-work" in these worlds that she would open for us. I was able to own so many parts of myself that never see the light of day otherwise.

I feel so fortunate to have experienced this with Della, and then to have been able to carry my own version of this type of exploration into my work with Dandelion.

Lately we've been doing 20 - 50 minute improvisations every Dandelion rehearsal. Things can get very bacchanalian sometimes, diffused and unfocused at others, and then there are those moments where it seems like something cracks open and undeniable truths leak out. The whole energy of the room shifts at these moments. Time seems to slow down, or disappear altogether, and my whole being comes alive, quivering in response to whatever is being revealed.

These are often then the moments that I want to bring forward into a performance piece. Sometimes they are born fully formed, and sometimes they are just the seeds of ideas. But I sense power in them and feel that my next step is to allow that material to teach me how to shape it. I have to listen with all my creative facilities to hear what is important in this image or movement or collision of elements, and how can I facilitate its development into a communicative performance moment onstage.

Here are a few moments that felt particularly alive to me so far in our residency. In some of these it is a particular image with a particular person that grabbed me, and in some it was the whole collage...

Improv Images #1

Improv Images #2

Dandelion at BAC - Day Three Judge Summary (Heather)

2010-08-26T21:16:00.001-07:00

Dandelion at BAC - A Tour of the Costume Department

2010-08-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

BAC Residency - Day One Judge

2010-08-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

We have to figure out how to score each of the participants in our competition. And we have to figure out how to do this in a way that pushes us to face our feelings about winning and losing, but also supports us to not feel overly self-critical.

I'm tremendously inspired by the Harry Potter books. I just finished my 8th or 9th re-read of all the books this summer. I mention this because the scoring system used in the competition between houses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is a very loose template that we're following in our scoring system development.

Just like at Hogwarts, how each house can get points for all sorts of things (Quidditch wins, service to the school, intelligent class responses and more,) our contestants will get scored for all sorts of things by all sorts of people.

We're definitely figuring it out as we go, but one system we've put into action is that we will have a "judge" for each working day of the residency, who will score all other ensemble members for their work that day on a scale of 1 - 10. These scores will put each ensemble member ahead or behind going into the performance on Sept. 7th.

The "judge" will also give a summation of the events of the day, from her/his perspective.

Day One's judge was Dana DeGuzman. And here is his evaluation:

Dandelion at BAC - Day Two Judge Summary (David)

2010-08-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

A summary of day two of our residency at BAC, by Tuesday's judge, David...and guest.

BAC Residency Day Two

2010-08-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

During our residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center Dandelion Dancetheater will be creating the first draft of a piece titled "Don't Suck!" as part of our larger look at the inner workings of competition.

We had a fertile day of creation and play today. There was lots of physical aggression in our improvisations, we pushed the risk factor for many of our group in our Contact Improvisation training session, each of the ensemble members (contestants) began work on their composition/choreography assignments to be included (and evaluated by a panel of judges) during our performance, and we had a good deal of fun--as evidenced by the following video, which was shot just after we all got first access to a vibrant pool of costume materials. It's amazing what happens when performers get into a costume.

This is our first attempt at introducing each of the competing ensemble members. We will likely try different ways of doing this again throughout the week.

First, the introducing of the assignment:

And then the introduction to our introductions:

We intend to use the reality TV format as a "Trojan Horse" of access onto the radar for folks who aren't usually interested in experimental dance. Where mainstream reality TV tends to use high-drama interpersonal tension as their "hook" to attract viewers, I am more interested in other methods to widen the scope of dance audiences. Humor, vulnerability, absurdity, underbelly explorations, new understandings of virtuosity and the power of community collaboration are what draw me in. Perhaps these elements could be what we use to compete with mainstream TV.

We can't out-glitz Bravo or Lifetime or NBC, but we can find ways to use the TV medium for truth-telling, shit-stirring and perspective-expanding. It's gonna be a long road for us to travel to sort out where our anarchic, inclusive approach to performance intersects with the TV phenomena, but it feels like a worthy journey to undertake.

Day One of BAC Residency

2010-08-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

Well, as these things tend to go for me, I planned to do way more than I'm able to actualize. I had wanted to edit short videos every day to go with these blogs during our Baryshnikov Arts Center residency. But with everything else going on while we're here, I'll be lucky to just get out two or three videos in our whole 2.5 weeks at the center.

But I still intend to write at least a little each day.

We had an inspiring first day of orientation to the space, regrouping as an ensemble and beginning to experiment. I was jet-lagged, overwhelmed and in a mind-haze for the first couple of hours. And as usual when I'm feeling blue, I can't imagine a time when it could ever end. So I was trying to come to terms with the fact that I would be slightly depressed for our whole residency, when we got into dancing and extended group improvisations.

Immediately as I made contact with my moving body, and felt myself arrive physically and psychically through colliding with this wild group of artists, I felt better. And not only better, but slightly ecstatic.

I'm reminded for the millionth time it seems, what a good friend dance is. In little ways and in huge life-changing ways, dance has been what gets me through stuck places, dark corners and times of despair. I always seem to forget that it has this power, but somehow-call it grace or fate or just plain luck-I find myself dancing again, and this dancing saves me.

It doesn't make anything go away. Rather it embraces whatever is present in my experience, and transforms it into fertilizer for something large and powerful to blossom.

An Introduction to the Competition

2010-08-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Our upcoming exploration of competition at the Baryshnikov Arts Center will take up where this previous experiment left off. We staged a one day artistic competition in December of 2009 that was intended as a whimsical mockumentary, but turned into an emotional explosion of issues relating to winning and losing.

Austin Forbord and his RAPT productions made this short preview video for the larger project, drawing from our first disorienting venture...

LINK TO VIDEO: ANDM Preview 1

There was a winner and loser, high-tension drama, and lots of hurt feelings. Juicy stuff, but dangerous--so we approach our next attempts with courage, caution and a trust of the artistic process.

It's Not Whether You Win or Lose...Maybe

2010-08-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Greetings All,

If all goes according to plan (or at least somewhere close to plan) then I will be posting much more frequently over the next few weeks.

I'm about to embark with the Dandelion Dancetheater interdisciplinary ensemble that I direct on a 2.5 week residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City. I'm very excited and a little fearful.

We're going to be exploring the nature of competition, winning/losing and success/failure. And while I would like to say that I live by the old quip "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game," in reality I am a slave to the drama of winning and losing.

In my experience, competition can be a very healthy and inspiring fuel for powerful action. However, I find myself wrestling with deeply ingrained habits of unhealthy competition--of judging and comparison and feeling somehow unworthy. Usually competition is painful for me.

When I'm clear and grounded, I see artistic practice as something that is far beyond the binaries of comparison. Art is open and free and ultimately a non-dualistic vehicle for truth-seeking.

But I compete in my mind over grant awards, festival invites, popularity, attention, integrity, ability to not seem competitive and more--with all the artists that ironically also make-up my closest and most important community of support.

Why do I look outside myself for validation? Why does one person's success so often seem like my failure? Why am I so hungry for positive feedback, awards, recognition, praise? Why do I get so focused on "winning?" And why, when I do seem to "win," does it end up feeling empty so quickly?

Somehow my beliefs and deep-held values are in direct conflict with many of the unconscious workings of my mind and my sense of self. And I don't seem to be alone on this. In Buddhist practice there are four Brahma Viharas, which are seen as highly skillful qualities to develop. One of these is Mudita, or "Sympathetic Joy." This joy in the happiness of others almost always eludes me. I'd like to feel it. I believe in it. But I'm usually so focused on my own gain and protection, that I have very little space inside for true happiness for the good fortune of others.

H.H. The Dalai Lama says (and I paraphrase here,) "If I am happy for the happiness of others, that means there is a six billion to one chance that I'll be happy. I like those odds." And he calls this kind of view something like "Skillful Selfishness." One of my teachers, Sharon Salzberg told me that the main way to work towards Sympathetic Joy is to fully experience my own joy. Of course, these things are easier said than done.

The closest I've been able to come to "Skillful Selfishness" is to include people around me in a group I identify with, rather than another opposing group--and so making their gains my own. For instance, when a San Francisco artist that I secretly compete with receives a big honor, I think of myself as a San Francisco Artist, and so a member of the group receiving the honor, rather than a New York Artist or a London Artist. And then if a U.S. Artist becomes famous for an innovative discovery, I think of myself as a U.S. artist, and so a member of the group that made the discovery--rather than a European Artist or an Asian Artist. This feels like a step in the right direction, but still very dualistic and competitive.

I've struggled with these issues throughout my life. I'd like to transform my relationship to them. And so I turn to my most trusted of transformation devices, artistic exploration. I can already see that this is going to be a long and grueling journey, with many pitfalls along the way. But it is a journey I feel ready to undertake. And I'm so grateful to have such a fabulous group of Dandelion artists to accompany me.

These explorations are part of a Dandelion project that is currently titled "America's Next Dance Maverick." In collaboration with filmmaker Austin Forbord, we hope to create a reality TV show that emerges out of the world of experimental dance. In December of 2009 we did our first experiment with such competition structures, and it was terrifying to see how quickly we each switched from a sense of making fun of competition, to being completely caught up in it.

This residency at the BAC is our next step. Through the creation of the first draft of a performance piece (titled "Don't Suck!") we will be pushing ourselves to face all of our hidden and not so hidden relationships with competition.

I see this step as a descent into our shadows, both individually and collectively. We'll be doing lots of improvisation, discussions, inquiries and group-processing. But we'll also be involved in a competition. Based on a complex point system (modeled after the point system at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry) we'll be competing against each other throughout the residency, to eventually name a winner and loser. And then this will be part of a larger competition held throughout Dandelion's activities for the whole year, that will culminate in a grand prize winner (and a complete loser) at our CounterPULSE Residency performances at the beginning of April 2011.

All of our egos are threatened, and our defense systems are popping up all over. And we're using this as an opportunity to dismantle these systems, so that eventually competition isn't as painful for us.

Please join us as we delve into this sticky swamp of emotional baggage, uncovering long-held insecurities and surprising treasures of the psyche.

We'll be attempting to post a written and video entry on each day of the residency. We intend for this to be interactive, so please stay tuned, and write responses, and even vote on who you think should be winning and losing our various competitions. We want all parts of this process to be both profoundly investigative on the part of our ensemble members, and transparently accessible to friends and colleagues. While we're not yet crafting the final version of the reality TV program, we are beginning to make research-based simulations of high-pressure competitions that will lead us towards some larger and more widely shared performance/video project. We welcome your feedback and ideas.

On our marks, get set, GO!

Structures with Missing Pieces

2010-03-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

NOTE: It’s been awhile since my last post. I think I’ve fallen off the weekly blogging track, and now will be writing whenever I can or whenever something seems to call out to be shared.

****************

As I journey along my path of artistic and spiritual development, I more and more often have the experience of encountering some idea about art-making that either is no longer relevant for me, or never really was. I have so many outdated ideas about what I’m “supposed” to do as a choreographer/director. Some of these ideas might be very appropriate for others, but I want to let them go if they’re not resonating at a deep level for me.

A major idea that I’m letting go of is that of the choreographer/director as someone who knows where a piece is headed and knows what it should look/sound/feel like. I know many choreographers and directors who are very good at planning, and are able to see fully formed visions of sections of or even complete works. This is not a skill set I have.

I get an intuitive “hit” on a direction we might go in, but it’s usually very blurry and fleeting. What I seem to be interested in and skilled at is creating malleable structures and containers for performers to inhabit that have many holes and missing pieces. And it is in these holes and missing pieces that I encourage the performers to discover some truth to fill in with.

And my experience is that the truths that we find collaboratively, are never fixed in space or time, but rather need to grow and evolve every time they are encountered.

As much as I would like to know what something needs to look/sound/feel like for any particular moment in a piece, I don’t. I only can be as present as possible, and listen to my intuition. I have a felt sense of what “works” and what “doesn’t work.” This is of course completely subjective. But I like to think that the clearer I get in my own sensory systems, the more I am able to intuit performance moments that feel true to more people, more consistently.

No one moment, no matter how grand, seems to work completely every single time it is performed. There’s always an exhilarating risk of each moment falling flat or taking flight. This risk creates a tension that nourishes me as an artist and art witness.

I am unable to answer most of the questions that performers ask me when I’m directing and choreographing. I can only say when a choice they make “feels right” or not. I don’t want performers preoccupying themselves with wondering what I’m gonna think about something. I don’t know any more than they do most of the time. I’d rather performers focus on what feels true, at as deep a level as possible.

And then, we might agree, or we might disagree about any one choice, and then the arguing is part of the clarifying process. None of us in the ensemble hold complete answers. All we can do is grope along in the dark, put our pieces together and discover our way, moment by moment.

I like the image of directing as similar to Zen Buddhist Koan practice. My understanding of Koan practice is that the teacher gives a student a seemingly unanswerable question. The student lives with that questions, mulls it over, chews it up, spits it out, ingests it again, wrestles with it, and then after some time, comes back with a response. There is no right or wrong response to be found, so what the teacher looks for in a student’s “answer” is a sense of authentic engagement. If it feels authentic and alive, the student is allowed to move on to the next one. If it feels thought-out, not embodied or somehow faked, the student is sent back into intimate relationship with that same koan.

I want my pieces to be like koans. I want to offer the performers unanswerable questions and assignments to wrestle with, and then be a sounding board for their responses. I want to discover the truth at the same moment with the performers, and struggle alongside each other when things aren’t revealing themselves.

And then I want us all to offer structures and containers to the audiences that have no inherent answers. I want to create environments for witnesses of performance to fill in the holes and missing pieces with their own truths. And I want to be able to sense together, with as many people in the room as possible, (audience, performers, tech crew and more) when we hit upon a moment of truth. It’s like we’re mining as a team and suddenly drill into something.

I can never know what exactly that moment of truth will be like. We might have choreography, text, staging, compositions and the like pre-planned. But in order to use them as effective tools for mining, we have to inhabit them every time with our full presence, and our full capacity for not-knowing.

It’s that “Don’t-know-mind” that makes performance a living, breathing, changing vehicle for awakening, embodying and connecting.

Teaching Myself

2010-02-14T22:37:00.000-08:00

Stephen Levine, one of my core spiritual teachers, would often tell us that we had to "teach ourselves the Dharma." By "Dharma," I understood him to mean "the Truth" as it manifests in our own lives.

I love this teaching.

I have spent (and still spend) countless hours listening to spiritual teachers talk, reading books on meditation, going to workshops, etc. I'd say that 80% of what I hear resonates with me and helps me a lot in my development. The remaining 20% however, pushes my buttons. It might be that it has a tone of judgement, or "should," in it, or it references religious terms or concepts that I don't identify with, or it sounds exclusive or hierarchical. Or it just makes me feel bad.

Sometimes I'm able to just let those teachings that don't feel right slide on by. But often I get stuck in them, mulling them over, obsessing about how I must be missing something or doing something wrong. This is when teaching myself the Dharma is really handy. And this is also why I've found it hard to subscribe to any one particular path of spiritual development completely.

And because I've had to forge my own way spiritually, I've needed to do a lot of translating of various teachings into my own ways of understanding. And because I live a life as a Queer artist that is often very far outside the mainstream, and very hard to find models for, the translating is sometimes complex.

Writing, like I'm doing in this blog, is especially helpful in this area. While I would like to be able to call myself a spiritual teacher (since many of my heroes are in that line of work,) I feel too much of a spiritual mess to claim any kind of authority on the matter. I spend too much time in doubt, fear, and anxiety to feel confident about sharing my wisdom. I'm too unsure of myself to sit up on that cushion in front of hundreds of people and tell them about the nature of reality. So in some ways, writing a blog like this feels improper. Who am I to lay out my philosophies for anyone to come across and project some kind of wisdom onto? Who am I to say I know what's going on here?

But I find as I write, that I tap into some kind of intuitive wisdom, that I maybe am not always able to put into practice yet, but that is still in here somehow. I haven't been able to find a model to follow, someone who practices art in the way that I do, that also combines it with spiritual practice in a way I relate to. And so, I'm attempting to be my own model. I'm attempting to call upon whatever wisdom I have accumulated so far, to teach myself how to be more mindful, more spacious, more accepting, more connected.

In some ways I'm playing the "character" of a wise-person when I write. So far, it is helping. I'm referring back to the things I wrote about when I encounter real-life conflicts and trouble-spots. I'm using my own teachings as reminders in my life. Maybe a lot of spiritual teachers do just this. Maybe not. But it is how I've found my way as an artist, and it seems to be how I'll find my way as a meditator. In a sense, I've got nowhere else to turn.

The other day I was feeling particularly down and unmotivated about going to teach a dance class. So I sat in my car for a half hour and wrote an essay on how to bring everything, including the unpleasant, into the studio for rehearsals, classes, performances. I wrote about the aspect of art-making that I find so powerful--the fact that everything I feel, think and do becomes compost for rich art. After writing about this for a half hour, I followed my own advice, and brought my "bad mood" into the studio with me. And it immediately transformed. The feelings didn't go away, but I wasn't fighting them, so I felt much more energized and much more at peace. Staying with the truth of my experience in that moment allowed me to use it as fuel for what was next.

I'm glad I have this blog now as a container for that very process. And thinking that some people might be reading it as I write it, or come across it later, gives that much more support to my teaching of myself--that much more urgency (like performing does) to whatever it is I'm working with at the moment. If I just wrote all of this in my journal, I wouldn't be investing it with the same hunger for clarity. I wouldn't try so hard to express my intuitions accurately. It's an interesting cycle: I write this to teach myself, and the fact that I have to craft it for others to read, makes me teach myself all the more clearly, and then that hopefully can be of that much more benefit to others.

Regarding Practice

2010-01-31T23:55:00.000-08:00

I like the term "practice" for describing art-making. It reminds me that there is a larger perspective from which to view my creative process, and that a finished piece or a performance, is just one small part of what is going on.

"Practice" implies that I'm getting better, or seeking to get better, and that probably there is no final destination. "Practice" gives me room to experiment, make mistakes, fumble in the dark as I work on my art; and through my art, work on myself; and through working on myself and working on my art, work to transform the world.

The practice part of experimental performance doesn't necessarily have a form. I see my experimental performance practice as doing my best to follow a calling to make work. Sometimes the call comes through loud and clear, sometimes it's a teeny voice across a great distance. In the following of it, I encounter everything I need to encounter, to work on in myself.

It's very much like meditation--focusing on the object of meditation (for me it's usually the breath,) I become aware of all the things that get in the way of that kind of concentration. I notice the thoughts, the feelings, distractions, impulses, and I get carried away by each of these in different ways. And then, I return again to my object of meditation and start over. And I start over again. And again. And again. And it's a "practice" to keep returning like that. And slowly, over the years, I've gotten so I can return quicker, and more deeply, and with less effort.

In creating experimental performance, my "object of meditation" is the desire to bring forth something true and mysterious and healing and unexpected. And I get distracted from this focal point over and over. I get lost in thoughts, fears, plans, obsession with success, obsession with failure, other people's feedback and ideas, competition, comparison, and so much more. Sometimes it takes me a long time to come back to my intention to bring forth something true, and sometimes I notice right away when I have strayed.

This desire, or intention, or calling is like a path that I travel, and along the path are all sorts of obstacles. I keep going, and the farther I go, the more the obstacles come from deeper places in me: old wounds, long-term holdings, core personality conflicts. And it is returning to my desire that guides me consciously through these obstacles. As I move through them I learn a little more, let go a little more, and deepen my courage as an artist.

Common obstacles for me are:
--Thinking the performers in my ensemble are bored or don't like what I'm having us do.
--Comparing myself to others, particularly when something great happens for other artists around me, but not me.
--Wanting everyone to like my work.
--Wanting everyone to like me.
--Thinking I should be somehow different than I am.
--Being afraid to ask for help.
--Focusing on outward symbols of success.
--Focusing on opinions about my work, rather than the felt sense from within the work.
--Trying to hard and forgetting to trust the process

All of these are made much less of a problem when I can somehow embody my deeper intentions in art-making. And just like in meditation, over the years, I've gotten better at knowing when I've strayed from my path, and better at returning.

My teacher, Stephen Levine, encouraged us to regard our neuroses, compulsions, fears, and unwanted mind-states by saying "Big surprise!" Big surprise, here's some fear. Big surprise, here's shame. Big surprise, here's (whatever's up at the moment.) For me the idea is to not get so freaked out when my "michigas" (craziness) comes up, but to welcome it and move on. So much of what gets in the way of our progress is our resistance, rather than any particular quality or mental state or situation.

Reminding myself that this is a practice helps me to not take it so seriously, and at the same time, to engage with it in a much more meaningful way. I recently heard Alonzo King speak about his practice and it inspired me immensely. He was featured on the KQED Arts Program, "Spark," and said:

"Dance is what I've chosen as a profession and as a career. But what I'm really working on is me. As wonderful as dance is, it's almost the subplot, because, whatever discipline you're choosing, it's gonna be the same process--of development, of difficulty, of revelation, of dry spells...You know, we're working on ourselves. And so, regardless of what we say is our profession, what we're involved in is self-reform. The profession, if that stopped for any reason, the real work would continue. You know, that's what's really happening."

That just about sums it all up for me!

Art-Making and Friendship

2010-01-24T11:37:00.000-08:00

I listened to a talk today by a Buddhist meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal. He was talking about Spiritual Friendship and mentioned Kalyana Mitta, which is a Pali phrase that refers to a spiritual teacher. The phrase is translated as "good friend" or "beautiful friend." This seems quite profound to me.
Rather than a spiritual teacher being separate from (and somehow above) our personal lives, that person can be a genuine friend--and our friends can be our spiritual teachers.

He also spoke about the many ways that Buddhist sutras (scriptures) quote the Buddha as talking about having good friends as a crucial part of the spiritual path. I understand these teachings as pointing to the reality that spiritual practice is extremely difficult at times, and that having a community of people around us that are also dedicated to practice can help us keep going, can help us see things that we might be ignorant of otherwise, and can help us by being models and mirrors for our own growth.

Gil spoke about monasteries and spiritual communities being places that are not necessarily peaceful and inspiring all the time, but rather are places where we can practice together, and help each other along. Sometimes that help is through conscious assistance, sometimes it is through conflict and disagreement within a conscious container of community. Always it is a vehicle for experimenting with relationships as part of our practice. And the commitment that all of these "friends" share to a path of truth-seeking, acts as a structure for these experiments, making spiritual community a powerful learning environment.

So much of Buddhist and other spiritual teachings focus on what we can do as individuals to work on ourselves--how to meditate, how to eat consciously, how to behave, how to work with thoughts and emotions. And while this is very useful for me, I am also a social being, and so having my friendship-life reframed within a context of spiritual practice, is very helpful for me

*****************************

We've had a big gap in funding for our Dandelion Dancetheater this year, which interrupted the steadily increasing artist fees we've been able to pay since 2002. And while I don't think any of us were spending hours in rehearsal exclusively for the modest fees we could pay, I know it did make a difference. It's been very important to me to pay all the artists working with me and so this gap has been unsettling. It's pushed me to reflect on why we do what we do. Creating and performing experimental art is grueling, and takes an immense amount of dedication.

In my ensembles, we often talk about how we ultimately do what we do as a labor of love. This is definitely true for me. I've never found anything that I love as much as traveling this path of creation, discovery and truth-sharing.

And there is also another huge piece of the puzzle for me. I do what I do--rehearsals, planning, grantwriting, performing, cleaning-up, emotional processing, and all of it--because of friendship. My closest and most consistent friends have for many years been the artists I work with.

For a long time I have judged myself about this, thinking that I'm supposed to have an extensive friend network outside of my work. I'm not quite sure where I developed this idea. I've assumed that a healthy social life can't be based on something like a dance/theater company, especially if I'm the director. The relationships that I have with my company members have so many complex layers to them, that include power dynamics, economics, critical feedback, career issues, business management and more. And then many of my friendships with people who aren't in my work but play a big part in my artistic growth, are complicated by competition, envy, comparison, etc. I figured that because of this, I'm supposed to have friends with whom I do no business at all and have no professional ties to.

But lately I've realized that all relationships, perhaps especially our closest ones, are very complicated and involve all sorts of conflicting desires. Every relationship has a context and things that each person wants from each other. No relationship is clear-cut. My relationships with my company members and collaborating artists give me great joy, growth and sustenance...Exactly what I want out of my friends. Here the Buddhist teachings on friendship are providing me with a potent new perspective.

If one of the most beautiful friendships can be between a spiritual teacher and student, then it seems to me that the same is true of the relationship between director and ensemble member. One of my grad school mentors told me to never direct my friends--to always have casts of performers that maintain a clear separation between social and professional dynamics. This didn't sound so good to me. One of the main reasons I have continued so long in this field is because I can do it with my friends.

Later, one of my meditation teachers told me it would help my practice to meditate regularly with a "sangha" (community of practitioners.) When I told him that I didn't have time to go to a meditation group because of my rehearsal schedule, he suggested that my company is my "sangha" and that I should meditate with them. I've done precisely that for the past 3 years and it has been wonderful--deepening our work together, deepening our intimacy, deepening my practice.

Money is a lightning rod for conflict, and since I want the performers I work with to be paid (and me too of course,) I've assumed that such a situation, infused with financial dynamics, could never produce "pure" friendships. Additionally, my close artist friends (who have their own companies, concerts, rehearsal schedules and such) are always in competition with me at some level for who will get certain grants, presentations, good reviews, popular support--which all is intrinsic to securing money that supports further work. How could I call these people my friends? Aren't we always going to be working with confusing feelings in regards to each other's artistic well-being?

But my closest friendship, the one with my husband and partner, is saturated with financial issues: bills, mortgage payments, house supplies, pet food, groceries--not to mention conflicts about shared time and space. And while it can be difficult to sort through these issues together, I see it is as a necessary part of our continually deepening relationship. Buying a house together--intensifying our financial relationship--has been one of the most relationship-strengthening moves we've made in the past 9 years. Committing to spending our lives together is powerful because of, not in spite of, the complicated financial and logistical issues we'll face.

And over the past 19 years of working together with Kimiko Guthrie, the co-director of Dandelion Dancetheater, we've had to navigate incredibly difficult issues about resources, money, competition and the like. We've found a perspective that works very well for us. We acknowledge that both of us want money for our projects, fair use of the company's name and resources, and fair ways of compensating the amount of work we do for the company. We don't take it personally when one of us wants to figure out a system for dividing something up so that it reflects the particular effort each of us made. We even pay each other sometimes for particular tasks we need help with. None of this seems to taint our friendship at all. Rather, it is enveloped into a friendship that is so large it can contain almost anything, no matter how awkward or strange. We come back again and again to a belief that what's important is that things feel good to both of us, not that we reflect some standard from outside about how a relationship is supposed to be. This can apply to the smallest and largest of trouble spots.

So, I am grateful for the wonderful friendships that I have with the Dandelion Dancetheater company members, with my fellow dance/theater artists, with artists in other fields, and even with presenters and producers. Each one is unique, and each one feeds me in a different, very important way.

I'm not closed off to friendships with people outside of my artistic path at all. I'm just acknowledging and celebrating the fact that most of my friendship life happens within the realm of art-making. I'm challenging my internal judgments about that fact, and inviting these friendships to blossom and thrive.

Yay Friends! Yay Art! Yay Art-Friends!

Success and Failure, Part 2

2010-01-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

(The following is continued from last week's post. The issues at hand are sticky enough to require at least two, if not more, written explorations for me to figure out how to move forward.)

In our reality show pilot (filmed 12/21/09 with Rapt Productions,) we created a situation where one person would win and one person would lose, based on the scores given by a panel of judges. We talked about it a lot as an ensemble beforehand, and all decided to go ahead and experiment with this structure. And while we were ready intellectually, I don't think we were at all prepared emotionally.

Without going into detail about the day, I'll just say that it evoked a lot of emotions and pushed a lot of our buttons at a primal level. As an ensemble, we're still processing the fall-out. The impact that this simple, self-created game structure had on all of us, makes me think that we've touched on some juicy material. I want to explore this more. And I also want to be careful.

We're heading into dangerous territory. While this is for me what "Experimental Performance" should be about, I also realize that I don't have a lot of models for how to protect ourselves from major wounding along the way. This will also have to be part of the experiment. Exploring the nature of winning and losing, for me touches into issues around self-esteem, wanting to be liked, wanting to be successful in the public eye, competition for things like grants and publicity, wanting to be a "great" artist, avoiding people's anger or displeasure and much more. It leads me back to much of my core, early wounding, and calls upon all my spiritual and psychological practices to stay centered in the midst of all that arises.

It reminds me of the irony of someone like me traveling a path of experimental art-making. I want to make work that is provocative, transformational, challenging, thought-provoking, and uncomfortable, because I feel that is where powerful growth can happen in my art. And I want people to like me and not be upset with me. So my art has led me into an arena where I'm going to have to face directly my attachment to approval. Provocative, challenging work is going to make people upset. And with me at the helm, as the director, much of that upset will be directed my way.

This speaks to me of how "the Lord works in mysterious ways." If I can, I often will avoid negative feelings being evoked towards me, by any means necessary. Yet, my love of visceral, truth-telling performance leads me over and over again into exactly that territory I hoped to bypass.

Every major project I direct seems to come up against a major conflict, in which people are quite upset, and usually upset at me. I'm slowly learning to embrace this part of the work. Part of this dynamic is how I think "following our truth" plays out. Truth is often upsetting and confrontational. And part of the dynamic is in line with what Edison said, that it's part of how I figure out all the myriad ways that my art "doesn't work."

And so, I aspire to court mistakes, embrace embarrassment, face anger and disapproval, be willing to lose, and seek to bring forth my humanity, and the humanity of all that I encounter with my work, "warts and all!"

One of the ways I approach challenging issues in my work, is to reflect on aspects of Buddhist teachings that might offer some insight. I am inspired here by the Buddha's teaching on the "Eight Wordly Dharmas." He spoke about eight things we can count on facing in some way in our lives, including: praise and blame, fame and disrepute, gain and loss, pleasure and pain. This teaching reminds me of how much I strive for the "positive" part of each of these pairs, and how much I hope to avoid the "negative" part. But there's another way to look at them.

Seeing all of these states as ultimately positive, changes the rules of the game significantly. It redefines the very nature of the concept of "positive." In this view, "positive" means true. It means the way things are. So praise and blame are both true aspects of any life--sometimes people will like us and what we are doing, sometimes they won't. That's just how it is. And there's beauty in the way this is set up. Praise and blame depend on each other. When we can see them as inseparable, we have the opportunity to view our experiences from a much larger vantage point, beyond duality.

After our first foray into reality show filming, some of the company members expressed discomfort with the notion of a loser. "Could we just have a winner, and no loser?" But I think that takes away the potency of this experiment. Winning and losing are inseparable, like each of the Buddha's Eight Worldly Dharmas. When we can fully embrace both winning and losing as inevitable for each of us, then we transcend their psychological drama, and are returned to a more essential part of our nature.

One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Pema Chodron, reminds us that this particular spiritual path is not one of escaping our foibles and difficulties, but rather one of "rubbing our noses in them." Not as a punishment by any means, but instead as a way to move beyond our fear, grasping and aversion. This is the spirit with which I hope to infuse our investigations into winning and losing, success and failure.

Mantra, one of our ensemble members, likes to remind us of this quote by Samuel Beckett, that I find quite helpful here:

Try again

Fail again

Try again

Fail again

Fail again better

Success and Failure, Part 1

2010-01-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

One of my core struggles in art-making (and really life in general) is how to reconcile a fierce commitment to experimentation with a deep fear of failure. The very nature of experimenting is to court failure. The more "failures" I have, the more I learn, and then the more "successful" the whole process is. It sounds good on paper, but embodying this is a whole different story.

I'm reminds of something I read about Edison and (I think) his invention of the lightbulb. His team had made around 2,000 attempts, and they were discouraged by all the times they had "failed." Edison reframed it by telling them (and I paraphrase here,) "Nonsense! We now know 2,000 ways it doesn't work!"

I aspire to have that perspective on my art (and life.) In the meantime, things like mistakes, failures, losses, embarrassments, and weaknesses are terrifying to me. And yet, they seem to be the only path towards finding my true work, my unique contributions to make.

There's the story about the spiritual seeker who finds the master atop a mountain, deep in mystical absorption:
The seeker asks the master, "How do I attain wisdom?"
The master replies, "Through experience."
"And how do I obtain experience?"
"Through making mistakes."

Recently we shot the pilot episode of a reality show that Dandelion is developing with Austin Forbord and his RAPT Productions. We intend it to be a kind of "Project Runway" of experimental performance. It is a huge experiment, with many complex levels of entry, and many things still to be figured out. I thought it was a very successful day, because we learned about many of the ways it won't work, as well as some of the ways that it might.

And it was also extremely provocative for many of us. We were thrown headfirst up against difficult issues, and forced to face parts of ourselves that most of us would rather avoid. For me, the primary issue that was raised was about the nature of winning and losing. I realize that I have a lot of emotional baggage to sort through around this.

So much of my work is about creating environments of inclusivity, where there is no right or wrong. I seek to revision much of contemporary performance to establish a radical embracing of diversity and humanism onstage, and to glory in the beauty of all human beings' essential oddness, imperfection and undefinable-ness. I want to challenge so much of my own training, and so much of the pressure we all receive to fit in, to try to be different than we are, to seek outside validation. And the more I work towards these visions, the more I'm confronted with my own desire to conform and be told that I'm okay by powerful people--the more I see my intense desire to "win" and my intense fear of "losing."

I'm excited, and a little nervous about facing this part of myself. Like all performance projects that are meaningful to me, I'd like this next one to be a vehicle for letting go of habits that are no longer useful, and to uncover and dismantle some of my own obsession with dualities of winning/losing, right/wrong, good/bad, and success/failure. I'd like to find a playing field for my work that is beneath and beyond these distracting ways of viewing experience. And I look forward to finding ways that wrestling with my own neuroses in this arena, will allow the work to resonate with something common to all of us that are both blessed and cursed with a human mind.

(to be continued...)

A Role Model: Pete Seeger

2009-12-28T13:49:00.000-08:00

I just watched a very inspiring DVD, "The Power of Song," about the life and work of Pete Seeger. He's a very important figure in the folk music revival of the 20th century in the U.S., and a voice that permeated my childhood. It was a treat to revisit his work as an adult.

What I came away with most potently, is a reminder to not get caught up in the money and administrative side of my art-making--to keep coming back to my core love of making performance and sharing it with others.

Of course, in films, we have to remember that we're not seeing every side of a person's life, so I'm sure there were obstacles he faced and continues to face that I'm not aware of. But on the whole, he seems to have committed to his art and activism with a deep sense of joy and truth.

He was willing to pass up commercial, money-making opportunities, that would have made his material life easier. He was willing to stand up for what he believed in, and the truth as he saw it, over and over. And he brings this infectious sense of celebration, even in the face of great difficulty, to everything he does. His voice seems to be a clear, open channel connecting his soul to the world around him. And his art is never about him being any different than he is. His art is inseparable from his "human-ness," and so it asks us to realize ours.

I find this particularly important right now, as so many of us struggling artists and arts organizations are feeling the added effect of our country's economic crisis, on top of our usual struggles to stay afloat financially that just come with the territory. I've found myself, and many of my colleagues, especially obsessed with fundraising, with coming up with new strategies to get donations, with figuring out how we're going to pay for everything we want to do.

And while I believe artists should get paid well for our work, I'm also reminded that the important thing is our work. And yes, we need to take care of our basic material needs in order to have the resources to make art. However, I find that I often get bogged down in a sense of entitlement.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how artists should be supported more in our country, and how hard it is to be an artist, and how I want to pay all our performers much more than the usual amount we pay them (and definitely more than the "nothing" we are able to pay them right now.) And how those artists, and those disciplines "over there" are getting the funding that I want to have. And how it often feels unfair and even insulting. And while some of these are worthwhile causes to put some energy into, they also can take over my psyche and hold me hostage.

I can easily stagnate for hours on end in the muck of "not enoughness." When actually, I have this amazing ensemble that I work with, that is willing to keep going with our intensive creation and performance work, even without pay. I have a partner, and a job, and a family that all are in favor of the creative work that I do, and provide many of the resources that allow it to happen.

And even when I get rejection letter after rejection letter from funders, and things are canceled, and I'm tired, and people can't come to certain rehearsals, etc., I have the opportunity to continue making art.

And while I want to eventually pay myself and the artists I work with at top-of-the-market pay rates, I also have to accept that this might never happen. In a talk that I heard recently by founders of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, we were cautioned that "There's never enough money to fully realize your visions." No matter how much we get, the imagination can always stretch further. And that's a good thing. It puts our creativity into action in a real and practical, rather than "What if" kind of way. Counting on money as a source of security is always unstable.

The important thing for me to come back to, and what I'd rather devote a majority of my head space to, is the art at hand. What am I wrestling with in my own life, and how can I bring that into my art? What are the things that are important to my ensemble members, our collaborators, our audiences? How can we make art that addresses all of this, and also elevates it, so challenges can be seen from a larger, deeper, stranger, more lovely perspective? In the words of one of my ensemble members, Mantra Plonsey, how can I, "Show up and Tell the Truth" every time?

The money, the resources, the praise, the successes, will come and go. These things aren't the core support of what I do. The core is much vaster, more mysterious, and much more powerful. How can I keep myself oriented towards bringing forth truth, in all its wild manifestations? How can I keep coming back to the simple in the midst of such complexity that we find ourselves in? How can I re-focus to just this much, just this next step, just this small, but ever so crucial creative moment?

It's so helpful for me to have role models. To have reminders of what is possible. In Buddhism, the Buddha is often talked about as essentially a role model, a demonstration of what is possible for each of us, rather than some supernatural being. Throughout my journey, role models have been key to my development. Many of them are people I've never met, but rather observed from afar. And some I've been lucky enough to interact with intimately.

Pete Seeger reminds me of integrity, perseverance, joy, simplicity, and inclusion. I thank him for his reminder, and for the loving, yet fierce challenge to bring forth these aspects of myself.

Already Broken

2009-12-22T11:29:00.000-08:00

One of our core ensemble members, who I have collaborated with closely for the past 4 years, has just moved home to Japan. It is a great loss for me, and a great loss for our company. Julie Brown gave so much to our work, in countless ways.

This shift has triggered some reflections on impermanence for me, particularly in relationship to my goal of developing a long-term ensemble. I am very interested in what is possible when a group of artists stays together for many years, project after project. Like any committed relationship, such a collaboration will have tremendous challenges, and hopefully, tremendous rewards. The overlapping Dandelion Dancetheater ensembles I have been developing for the last 5 years inspire me to no end. And I'm thrilled with the intimacy we've established and how that translates into our performance work.

While I know intellectually that all things are impermanent and even long-term ensembles come together and break apart many times, it is still somehow a shock when an ensemble member moves on. I'm sure Julie will continue to be a part of Dandelion projects in various ways, and I've found that sometimes performers get more consistently involved once they have moved away. (We've been working with Jacques Poulin-Denis every year since he moved back to Montreal in 2003.) Yet, I am grieving the loss of her weekly presence, her body and ideas in the studio at rehearsal. I have become attached to her in my work, and am having trouble letting go.

How can we reconcile investing deeply in long-term relationships with collaborators, knowing that they will end, often much sooner than we'd like? How do we commit to going deeply with our ensembles, knowing they will eventually scatter to the wind? How can I create a "safe" container for ongoing, risky, artistic exploration, when it will keep breaking apart?

I'm reminded of what one of my teachers, Stephen Levine said repeatedly about relationships. He would encourage us to dive fully into love, knowing that we'd have our hearts broken over and over. He would remind us that it is a much richer path to feel the joy of coming together completely, which always includes the pain of breaking apart. He would speak of his teacher, Ajaan Chah, and recount the story about Ajaan Chah explaining to a student that he loved the crystal glass on his table--loved to drink from it and admire it. A beloved student had given him the glass. He loved the glass because he knew it was already broken. So when one day he accidentally knocked it over and it crashed into a thousand pieces on the floor, he would not be surprised, and could instead appreciate it in its new 10,000 forms.

Maybe the trick in building a long-term, committed ensemble of artists is knowing that it is already broken. It has already dissolved. And that way, as it shifts each time someone leaves, and someone new comes in, I can fully appreciate it in its new forms.

I aspire to open my heart completely to all my collaborators. And to allow my heart to break each time one of them leaves. It seems when we allow our hearts to break in this work, it allows something vital to continue, from one phase of the work to the next. The cracks in the hearts become a canyon for a river of creativity to flow through. Without the cracks, the river is dammed and the art remains out of reach.

In the Spirit of the Maccabees

2009-12-14T00:25:00.000-08:00

It is the third night of Hanukah (or the fourth, by the time I finish this post,) and I'm taking comfort in the Hanukah story in relation to my art-making.

I see the main points of Hanukah centering around the experience of "miracles." And what I love about the Hanukah miracles, is that they're not other-wordly. They're very down-to-earth. But still miracles. The two primary miracles in the Hanukah story are that the Maccabees, the Jewish under-dogs fighting oppression, were able to win a battle against an army that vastly outnumbered them and had much more powerful weapons--and that when the Jews returned to their destroyed temple, with just enough oil to keep the lights on for one night, that the lights miraculously stayed on for eight nights, giving them enough time to make more lamp oil and rebuild their temple.

We premiered a dance/theater/music piece on the first night of Hanukah this year. "Ring the Bells for Peace" is a holiday show geared towards children, created and performed by the Cal State East Bay University Department of Theatre and Dance. I co-directed the production, choreographed it, wrote half the story and accompanied it with live music onstage. Performers from Dandelion Dancetheater joined the CSUEB students and community members to create and perform it. It was a huge cast of about 30, with some seasoned veteran performers, and some performing for the first time. It was a hotbed of chaos. And it was a miracle that we pulled it off.

This production has been stretching me in many ways. It's my first "childrens' theater" piece, my first piece co-directing with A. Fajilan, my first piece at CSUEB in a number of years without close collaboration with Dandelions Anne-Lise Reusswig and Julie Brown and my first time working with many of the people onstage. A. Fajilan and I had been working separately for the past two months, and really just brought our groups together this past week. While we share a lot of principles and beliefs about inclusive performance, and we both operate well in the midst of chaos, we also discovered many ways that we do things differently--and when we each brought with us a large, unruly company of performers, our differences multiplied.

After our first run-through, four nights before our premiere, I was trying to prepare myself that this might just be an unrealized experiment. While usually the thought of a project I direct not being an artistic success is terrifying to me, somehow I was able to hold this thought with a good deal of acceptance. I wanted to make it work, and saw the potential for great beauty in the piece, but with how much work it would take to bring it all together, I had a lot of doubts. Nonetheless, I pushed on through.

We worked as hard and fast as we could. We pushed the performers in every way we could think of, and we challenged everyone involved to take responsibility for the success of the whole show, not just their own parts. It was exhausting, anxiety-producing and one of the most intense weeks I've had in a long time. I didn't sleep well and had a headache each night. We weren't only putting together a collaborative, interdisciplinary piece of performance, but we were teaching a large percentage of the cast what it means to be in a performance, what behavior brings the whole production down, and what they could do to contribute.

And somehow, when we got to opening night, we had a piece! A complete piece! Yes, there were issues that could be clarified, places to refine and tighten up. But I was not only relieved that we had made it through, but actually quite proud of the result. As a company of performers from many different walks of life, we were able to come together and create many focused and ecstatic moments together, bringing the audiences along with us.

This experience reminded me of the miracle of all performance. It's amazing to me that with the amount of things that could go wrong, somehow the show does go on. And in experiences like this one, the "miracleness" is even more apparent. There's something in the pressure of the opening night deadline that kicks us into gear--brings out great courage, willpower, and beauty. We're forced to work together and to tune into the ways we are connected, in spite of our differences, and to bring those connections forward. The "miracleness" seems directly tied to the fact that we are all bringing as much presence as we can muster, as much attention and intention, to the same objective--creating a successful performance. And while success might be defined differently by the different participants, the process is the same. We all have to show up. We all have to do our best. We all have to engage.

And maybe that's what happened with the Maccabees, and the lamp oil in the temple.

We on the performance path are continually seeking and creating miracles. When I take the time to really look at what we do, it is amazing. There are so many reasons why performances that lift up the human spirit wouldn't happen, even couldn't happen. But we are always somehow able to find the reasons that it does.

Welcome!

2009-12-04T23:55:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Dandelion Dancetheater's first blog!
(For more info about the company, see www.dandeliondancetheater.org)

I will be writing here about experimental performance as spiritual practice, which is one of my favorite topics to investigate and reflect upon. It is a focus that has been at the heart of my work with Dandelion Dancetheater over the past decade. I plan on using this blog as a forum for developing, clarifying and experimenting, with ideas, perspectives and approaches.

To start with, I figure I should at least attempt to define my terms. I am using "experimental performance" to refer to performance involving some combination of movement, sound, theater, image, and/or installation that prioritizes new ways of seeing and understanding. It is performance that is continually questioning itself. It is performance that challenges conformity, tradition, rules, and any kind of "should."

My sense of "spiritual practice" is a little trickier to define. At the most basic level, I see spiritual practice as a vehicle for deepening whatever one's experience of spirituality is. In this sense, spiritual practice is whatever one engages in and calls "spiritual practice."

More specifically, I see spiritual practice as a method or collection of methods used to connect with a larger sense of reality. I see it as an activity that we regularly turn to for aligning with some sense of universal wholeness--whether we call that wholeness by a name like God, Goddess or Buddha-Nature, or whether we identify it as Truth, Peace, Love, Nature, Oneness, Nothingness, etc.

I have had a spiritual practice drawn from Buddhist Meditation techniques for about 20 years. I meditate daily, complemented by an eclectic blend of Tai Chi, Yoga and Chi Gong. I have had an art practice (primarily dance-based) for 25 years. I have trained in folk dance, ballet, modern dance, visual art, choreography, music, interdisciplinary performance, and more. My art and spirituality have at times felt like separate pursuits, but more and more feel integrated. It has been a challenging struggle over many years for me to figure out how to bring together these two major streams of my life's work. I feel great joy when I reflect on how my passion for experimental performance and love of spiritual practice have come together. And I also see how much more there is to learn in this area.

This blog is a way for me to illuminate some of the next steps on my journey. May it be of benefit to you as well.