Monthly Archives: October 2013

unexpected gifts

istanbul-alex-webbAlex Webb

While we were away in Istanbul, the Putney Post arrived in the mail.  Out daughter went to school there, graduating in 2011.  I love reading it, especially love to see what graduates, old and new are doing.  It is always interesting, inspiring and surprising.  One of the class notes (’70) was from photographer Alex Webb.  The title of his latest book, The Suffering of Light, was inspired by this Goethe quotation:  “Colors are the deeds and suffering of light.”

I got pretty curious about his work (including this photograph from the streets of Istanbul), and found an article – 10 Things Alex Webb can teach you a bout street photography.

The ten things are:

  1. layer your photographs
  2. fill the frame
  3. walk . . . a lot
  4. look for the light
  5. realize that 99.9% of street photography is a failure
  6. work on projects
  7. if you are stuck try something new
  8. follow your obsession
  9. capture the emotion of a place
  10. travel

It is worth a visit to this page to see how he explores each.  I found these to be very much the way I proceed with my own choreography, especially numbers 6-10.  What was fresh for me in thinking about dancemaking was the idea of layering and filling.  Layering had to do with depth – foreground, middle ground and distance.  Filling the frame is about taking things out to their edges.  That reminded me of how my Aunt Pearl, when I visited her at the farm in South Dakota, insisted that I  butter toast right out to the edges – it was about tasting things all the way out.  I like thinking about more ways to layer without losing clarity, to fill things to their edges and yet guide the viewer’s attention, about my dance practice as walking, and about how to look for light in a dance.  That has a lot to do with finding the light in myself, and about the heat and light of the obsession that drives the movement.

Looking for the light is what I am doing now, in these late October afternoons, when the light is rich and golden, the angle of the sun amplifying everything, breaking open the heart of what color remains.  Looking for the light is also being available for creative and spiritual downloads from the universe.  Like the Alex Webb piece, like the coat I found wandering in Cambridge that has become a costume, the piece of music I heard playing in a store on Martha’s Vineyard in August that is weaving its way into a dance, like the writings of the brilliant Peter Levine, whose books on trauma have been transformative for us. Opening to the moment, receiving its unexpected gifts.

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authentic movement

c52f92efb563b8d885b6e3610403fc29Georgia O’Keefe

Authentic Movement has been at the root of my movement practice for the past twenty-five years.  It is a  is a meditative, intuitive improvisational movement practice involving a mover and a witness.  With eyes closed, maintaining a focus on bodily sensation and the flow of consciousness, the mover allows herself to be moved by whatever impulse is arising in the body.  I love teaching the work because it offers such a rich and truthful way to connect to inspiration and feeling.

While some practitioners like Mary Starks Whitehouse, who worked with Carl Jung, and Janet Adler are principally interested in the therapeutic dimensions of Authentic Movement, for me it has always been about the expressive possibilities that it unlocks.  As nourishment and ground for any artistic practice from writing to visual arts to performing arts, it has the ability to open doors that would not be apparent when “wide awake.”  Similar to Jung’s “waking dreaming ” practice, Authentic Movement draws us into deeper waters, the hidden caverns of our own creative, bodily and spiritual selves.

Later this fall I will be teaching both in Millerton, NY and New Haven, CT.   I hope you will join me November 16, 1-4:30 pm at the Wellness Center, 65 Main Street in Millerton, NY.

You can sign up here:


This workshop is for anyone who has a desire to move their body freely and who is open to self-reflection and exploration.  No dance training or experience is necessary.  Wear loose comfortable clothing, bring water and a notebook or writing and drawing supplies.  There will be some drawing materials available.

This is from Janet Adler’s film, “Still Looking.”

mistaken identity

This came to mind after reading Pam White’s blog post.  May all beings be free from suffering, may all beings be peaceful.  May all beings be free from mistaken identity.

What is a mistaken identity?  How can we tell?  As an actor and a performer, different identities are my stock in trade.  They become mistaken if I get stuck in them, or start to believe that there are too many points of connection between myself and a character or role.  When we are older, I believe, it is harder to sustain a mistaken identity.  There is too much evidence accumulated, too many instances of un-masking, and it is too much effort to sustain the theater of false personae.

For the young, though, especially those who have had a terrible, traumatic childhood, mistaken identity can be a great La Brea tarpit.  What I am learning, through my research into adoption and trauma, is that children who lose everything when they are very young – before the age of two especially – can re-enact that loss and may chose self-destructive, delusional paths in a confused search for identity. The problem for parents is that those alarming choices can become causes, can take on missionary zeal, can become cemented in rebellion, resistance and fear.

My own youthful mistaken identities nearly killed me.  The problem is that if you don’t unmask, don’t see through the haze of false selves, your bones will be found there in the pits, sunk into the delusional muck. I pray for my beloved child, that this mistaken identity releases her before it is too late.

 

stepping into the void

Georgia O’Keefe

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

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

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

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