space

the other day we took class outside, on the damp grass. my bare feet afraid of sharp things, but happy to get dirty. one of the things we did (and usually do) was to take the material we had been given, and 'serve' it to someone else, to challenge the person and be confronted. (apparently 'serve' is some new 'it' term that means something like pwn, but not quite. apparently nobody really knows what it means, as these things usually go.) at the end of the practice when we were figuring out just what it was we were doing, the girl who was serving/beingservedby me said she felt that i needed the space to move, when i was dancing the material. i thought that was odd, because i don't think of myself as a space-guzzler. but i've started to notice it, the need to move big, and sometimes i feel like i'm flying, a bird set free - ecstatic, certain, but not entirely confident. that's kind of how i feel in general, now. playing in the field full of options, sometimes distracted, often lost and soggy against the ground.

in 'towards mathilde' (which i found largely too esoteric for my tastes, but definitely worth my watching) she commented on the luxury dancers have, to have time to ourselves to warm up. it's so true - i love that we get the self-gratification before we proceed to make, to find the things we want to communicate. in some ways it is self-indulgent, but i guess that's part of the profession. without the focus of warming-up, the preparation for wondrous things to occur, there is nothing. be open to surprise, as notebooks like to say on their covers. it's the luckiest thing, to be able to find yourself every single day. also maybe the hardest.

suddenly there is so much room, just to be. there is nothing happyfluffylalaland about it, nothing little or dinky or quaint. no. it's energising, and hopeful, and so rich! somedays the 'me' disappears, somedays the 'me' is the world, or a mirror, or a large hollow column of light. suddenly i have a kind of drive i never thought i'd have. it comes and it goes, but it's not dormant anymore. not dead as a dormouse. not as a dodo. it's a kind of celebration of human-ness. we can research psychology and sociology and economics and physics and chemistry and all that good stuff as much as we like, but who really has any idea? what did george eliot call it? 'stumbling in the dark'? like moths to a flickering light? and mr p - the more you know the closer you are to the tower of babel. what about progress, which surges and recedes, what about change? and the idea of being self-correcting? that's what this is all about, isn't it, being part of the process. condemnations and put-downs, praise and compromise. also known as giving in. admitting being not quite as superhuman as one would like to be.

comfort zones are nice, but they are also dangerous.

hm, it would be interesting to have an exchange project where collaborative artists work in another country to make stuff about their own country. after all many noted writers write about someplace in another place. distance does lend space for greater clarity. it does give basis for comparison, not good/bad, but different. and how. perhaps travelling teaches more about oneself than about another's context.

when i read about people who've done wonderful things like set up businesses in their own countries that provide decent jobs to their financially-impoverished people it makes me wish i could do that too. concrete, broad-sweep ways to make things happen. tricky, tricky.