Photo:  Connor Gleason

Just finishing a new piece on the dancers at Curry College, called Circo Folle, set to music by Tom Waits.  The students have been great, despite my challenging them to think VERY far outside of the conventional dance box.  Learning something new should always be a little uncomfortable, and they will tell you that they have experienced both discomfort and hopefully a balancing measure of fun.  I have found them bold and inspiring.

My blog has been quiet of late.  There are some reasons for that.  Mostly I have been very deep into a creative process that needs containment.  Musicians call it the woodshed. It is a creative revamping of process, relationship to time, space and self. Finding the footing for that work here at home amidst animals, home, family is very different from the deep diving permitted by the protected, sanctified space of a residency, especially at Bogliasco in Italy.

Nevertheless, the work is growing.  You can read about it here.  I am also dancing into the thorny terrain of funding –  a necessity in the world of the arts.  More about that later.

You can see Circo Folle at Curry College on May 4 & 5 at the Keith Auditorium.  Click here for details.

Koan:  “A paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.”

What I have come to realize from my experiences with Jacob, my godson, is that with a profoundly autistic child, there are no maps.  Jacob is a paradox.  He is my koan – a puzzle to be meditated upon, and one that is teaching me to abandon my dependence upon any system of analysis or interpretation or reason – any efforting or trying to figure things out.

That does not mean that I have given up trying to connect with him.  Just that looking at Jacob through any single lens, or any configuration of systems  -Laban Movement Analysis, Kestenberg movement profiling, Body-Mind Centering, somatic or dance movement therapy does very little to solve the riddle.  They are like maps that I try to lay over an essentially unknowable terrain.

What I have discovered is the beauty of simple witnessing.  Not because Jacob found it delightful or even meaningful in any way, but because the practice of witnessing shifted me out of my problem solving mind into an expansive, soft, presence  – witnessing him and at the same time aware of my own inner witness.  In my heart, I believe that Jacob feels that expansive allowing.  However, even as I say that, I release that belief or hope.  Because I truly do not know what he feels, what he understands, what has meaning for him and what does not.

I do know that my love for him and my joy in simply being with him are constant.  That I know.