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.

Please help me share my work with you.

You can do that by making a donation to my

Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!!

SHARE & EMAIL

My friend Suzanne sent me this video. I found it both disturbing and irresistible.   It immediately set off a storm of video surfing on YouTube for more about Continuum. What I found was exciting.

For no particular reason, I have avoided Continuum Movement for many, many years. The founder of Continuum, Emilie Conrad  calls the movement a connection to our “spiritual bio-world.”  She says that the undulating wave movements that originate in the fluids of our bodies link us to each other and our environment. I think that it is time that I dive into those waters.

In the conversation about the text of the body, this has a place.  I wrote yesterday about Abraham Verghese’s experience of being massaged by a kalari practitioner in Kerala.  The post-massage state-of-body that he described feels like what I see in this video.

My appetite for movement has taken a big leap because I have started to prepare to perform solo for the first time in thirteen years.  I don’t know exactly why it has been so long.  But because it has been so long, I am voracious.  There is a ferocity and a clarity to this new work that I have not felt before.  You can see me next Tuesday evening, 8 pm at Club Helsinki in Hudson, NY.

SHARE & EMAIL

Shot in Fire Island, New York, this film (4min. 23 sec) captures the secrets of eternal youth as Maia Helles, a Russian ballet dancer turns 95 but still remains resolutely independent, healthy and as fit as a forty year old. Made by Julia Warr, artist and film maker met Maia on a plane 4 years ago and became utterly convinced by the benefits of her daily exercise routine, which Maia perfected, together with her Mother, over 60 years ago, long before exercise classes were ever invented. (2011)

Film by Julia Warr
Music by Lola Perrin

juliawarr.com

SHARE & EMAIL

SHARE & EMAIL

The theme of the dance workshop I taught in Boston yesterday was movement and stillness. Asking dancers to be still is somehow counter-intuitive.  After all, we are movers.  And yet I find that a stillness practice – consciously alternating between movement and stillness – brings out the color and texture of the moment.  It takes us deeper into what is unfolding right here, right now. It teaches us to listen and to see the wildness in the small, the quiet, the humble as well as in the dramatic and the riotous.  There is a boldness in stillness, and for the performer, a kind of audacity.  We have to trust that our audience will stay tethered to us in the still and the quiet.  Like a conversation in which the rushing river of ideas quiets to a lake of receptivity and depth.

I love translating my practices as a dancer into a language for the poet, the painter, the parent, the worker.  That is the idea behind my ebook, Breaking into Blossom:  Moving into an Improvisational Life.  It is about finding a deeper, more embodied creative engagement regardless of your work, your passion.  You can order it here.

SHARE & EMAIL

The other side of Cho, Spanish Galgo, and former street dog of Cadiz, Spain.  It takes a lot of restorative yoga to be able to sustain cross-country gallops when you are 17-years old.

Today I am off to Boston to teach my workshop, Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  It is exciting to me to return to Boston to teach.  Many years ago, Pam and I were among the founders of Green Street Studios, which has become a vibrant center for dance and performance in Cambridge.  I developed my chops as a choreographer in Boston, and made many dances with many fine, generous dancers.  Tomorrow’s workshop is at the sister studio, The Dance Complex, another hive of creative energy for movement and dance.  So I am going home.

And not.  I feel a profound difference now which has to do with my long absence from the conventional concert dance scene and from Boston in particular.  I am older, and I have spent the past 13 years in two different kinds of studios.  The one with the wooden floor where I move and stretch like a dancer, and the other – the arena, the field, the paddock, the stall, the saddle, with my partners, the horses.  I feel a little like the wild dog coming home after a big tear across the fields.  But there is a cosiness there too – a desire to settle and nestle into the moment.

SHARE & EMAIL

MOVEMENT FOUNDRY presents

SHARE & EMAIL

 Body dharma is a fierce practice. It is not for the timid or the lazy.

Attending to the body is not just cosmetic ministrations and ablutions.  It is not just practices, classes or disciplines. It is not only poses or techniques.  Because you can do all of that and still have never entered the body.

Movement is the body’s language and voice.  Breath is the body’s anchor.  Heart is the body’s center.  When you invite the body to move – without judgement, without hurry, without direction – you have begun to practice body dharma.

A recipe for entering the body:

Attention:  because the body is precise.

Listening: because the body is subtle.

Kindness:  because the body is tender.

SHARE & EMAIL

A lot of times I will just stand with Nelson and look where he is looking.  I want to know more about his point of view, what is interesting to him, and what he sees.

I never really know.  But that is the point.  We cannot know what another sees or feels unless they tell us directly.  We make assumptions (which are fictions) and then pursue a course of action or inaction based on those assumptions.  More fiction.

When I am with Nelson, I don’t pretend to know what is interesting to him, or how he sees the world.  Sometimes he will be very clear in horse language (movement).  A spook generally means something was scary.  Coming close means that he feels safe or he wants a treat or both.

I like that things with Nelson are very basic.  I spend a great deal of time complicating and elaborating in many other parts of my life.  Being with the horses is a chance to step away from all of that, to get clear, and have a conversation in the language of skin, muscle and bone.  And heart, and heart.

SHARE & EMAIL

SHARE & EMAIL