I had a lovely conversation the other day with my friend Adrianne Ryan, a horsewoman and photographer who lives on Martha’s Vineyard. We were talking about work and she said, “Well, I am blessed to be obsessed.”
Me too. Movement – finding it, growing it, blowing it open, turning it into something ineffable, inevitable and fierce is my obsession (one of them.)
It is work and it isn’t work. The movement claims, re-shapes and hones me. And then I want to share it – speak through it, connect with it.
Last year, during a creative residency, I became obsessed with editing and layering these photographs taken by Pam White (above) that have become a part of The Traveler, one of the dances in the LFRM trilogy. I wanted to evoke something about layering, overlay, what is there and not quite there in all of us.
Yesterday I listened to a wonderful Diane Rehm podcast with Buddhist priest, philosopher and writer Mathieu Ricard. He was talking about his new book Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World.
Listening to him, I realized that my wanting to share and connect with the world through movement is a form of altruism. Maybe earlier in my career it was about something else, something less generous. But now it is about making a connection, about sharing the best of myself and reaching out to the best in you. I felt that so clearly when I watched Kyle Abraham’s solos filmed by Carrie Schneider, that his vulnerability was a deep gift to us. I was/am so deeply moved by that.
As artists, I think we have to aim higher than personal ambition, beyond what we know to reach that skyward, earthly part of ourselves that connects to the skyward, earthly place in each other.
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