“You’ve got to give before you get. You cannot expect to receive generous rewards and then decide what to give in return. You must give freely and have faith that the rewards will eventually come.”  Napoleon Hill

I spent the weekend in Boston rehearsing a new dance work with Ingrid Schatz and DeAnna Pellecchia.  Two full days in the studio, diving into movement, trying things out, looking for the light, for heat, for brilliance.  I was reminded of what Alex Webb says about taking photographs:  that you may take hundreds and only one will be wonderful.  I have more patience and faith in that process now than five, ten or twenty years ago.  What has to be there, every time, is willingness and teachability. My own and my collaborators.  If that is missing, then we are caught in the sands of resistance, and I am pretty clear that I do not have the time or energy for that.

Directing and parenting and partnering are interestingly related for me.  In all of them, there is listening, opening, guiding, loving.  With directing and dancemaking, it is loving the process, loving the work and the workers, even when it is awkward and raw, unformed and murky.  I am old enough to have a lot of staying power, and a pretty handy toolkit.  I am also more attentive to the guidance of my heart.  That is really important when starting a new project.  The heart has to be there to keep things pulsing, to support the whole system of the making.  And the heart has to guide toward truth, toward a kind of inevitability in the outcome.  Meaning that when we see the final work, it feels as if nothing else could have happened.

Back to giving.  With directing and parenting and partnering that means that I hold nothing back.  And that reminds me of this from Annie Dillard in The Writing Life:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this:  spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book:  give it, give it all, give it now.  the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.  Something more will arise for later, something better.  These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.”