Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Jan4

year of the horse

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1M0B9153bwdgDancer:  Paola Styron with Capprichio ridden by Brandi Rivera in FLIGHT; Photo:  Jeff Anderson

What I love about this photograph is the way that Polly, Capprichio and Brandi are lifting off together, keeping up with each other, syncing up.  I spend a lot of time with horses.  A lot of that time is spent looking for that kind of attunement.  What I find is that what is often missing is the loft and thrust of this picture.  Maybe too much earth and flesh, and not enough air and wing.

My prayer for myself in this year of the horse is that I keep lifting, keep flying, catching the air, winging and hoofing as I move through my days.  I believe that horses love that exuberant dance when we allow them to be fully themselves.  When we are riding, if we want to experience that kind of expressivity, I believe we have to discover it in ourselves first.  What does it mean to be an expressive rider?  Here is the beginning of a list:  breathing, playful, light, smiling, opening, balanced, enthusiastic.

The year of the horse feels like a huge portal, a great opportunity to channel and relish all the gifts of horse magic and love.  Where will you find it?

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Jan1

for the new year

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Picture 3

This is my favorite poem. It is like nothing else. For those of you who have not read it, or those who never tire of reading it, this is my wish for the New Year: to break into blossom every day, to open and then open more – to the moment, to each other, to possibility and delight. Happy New Year!

A Blessing

by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

“A Blessing,” by James Wright, from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. ©Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Dec27

wild woman

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messenger 3

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!

Booking Dance Festival

 

 

 

 

Dec24

all is bright

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The-Last-Christmas-Tree

Although we are snowless here, Mary Oliver’s poem captures for me the heart of stillness, the holy light of this season and this night.  Blessings and love to all.  May you be filled with peace, may you be happy, may you be free.

First Snow ~ Mary Oliver

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles, nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain — not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

~Mary Oliver~
excerpted from American Primitive