The Messenger, choreographed and performed by Paula Josa-Jones; Photo: Nick Novick
“You have to make yourself some kind of an antenna for the songs to come to you. So you have to make yourself a kind of a musical yourself. You have to be of music and have music in you – some way for songs to continue to want to live in you or near you. You gotta be real quiet sometimes if you want catch the big ones.”
Tom Waits, July 1992, Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words
I made The Messenger in 1992, the same year as this quote by Tom Waits. What he said there about music then is what I have been saying for as many years about dance. That you have to become dance. You can’t do dance, it has to eat you alive and spit you out speaking in tongues and breathing fire or tender and wet as a newborn lamb.
I am making a new solo called The Traveler (Moth to the flame) to music by Tom Waits. I will perform it at the APAP Booking Dance Festival in New York on January 10. The dance is about a traveler in an unpredictable landscape. It is a dance that is chewing me up. It is so hard, physically and emotionally, that I am often afraid to rehearse it. Waits’s music is like the mule driver and the light in the dark.
A friend of mine said that she was looking for a way to dance (she is 50) that won’t destroy her. I am older than she is but don’t seem to have that kind of restraint. Working on this dance, I enter through a door that looks like it won’t explode and then find myself in a mine field. Sometimes it is the music but mostly it is what comes slithering and snapping out of my body. I don’t want to shut the door.
Building work from and for my own body only is harrowing and exhilarating. For many years, I opened those doors for dancers in my company, and traveled with them wherever things led. Dancing now is different than it was twenty years ago. I have learned how to move in back and forth from what is a sheer, intuitive download to refining form without losing the heat. I have more patience and faith. That only took a lifetime.
Come and see!