Crow: pitching my dance

I'm pacing up and down the balcony practising what I am going to say for the interview tomorrow. I have ten minutes, so I have to get everything down into sound bytes. In Chinese.

I have been very very lucky in the past week.
I bumped into Melinda Lee on Skype, and began articulating my dance to her. It was good to talk with someone from a dance background, who has to do very similar things. (She has to pitch her dances too). We spent about 3 hours chatting, at the end of which I realise how important it is that I give the panel a sense of what the dance looks like, and how I intend to achieve this.

I bumped into Ray yesterday. As a film director, he has to pitch ideas too… and I really got the sense of the importance of knowing the material and being able to articulate one's ideas really clearly.

And so today I am pacing up and down the balcony trying to figure out how to say what I want to say in the most succinct way possible.

I'm feeling good. Terrified, but good. Good in the sense that I understand what it is about now, and the ball is in my court.
I'm terrified because there is, as always, the possibility of failure. But now the ball is in my hands and all I can do is pitch it as swift and accurate as I can.
10 minutes.

My dad teaches me a trick. Prepare the material, and take the questions in a way that bring you back into what you want to say. Yeah.

________________

Four years later: A different kind of courage

In writing the process a dance proposal for based on Ted Hughes' Crow, I came across the footage of the dance solo I made four years ago, Aftermath (with Cocoa). I think the main thing that struck me is how determined I was, and how taut the piece is.

Oddly enough, this piece is perhaps thematically more similar to Crow than any of my recent duets; in the sense that it is about an individual in confrontation with the randomness of the world. Aftermath was choreographed a year after a car crash I was in, and is about the process of coming to terms with the death and the sensation of a world flipping over in multiple senses. Even today I am sensitive to how high the center of gravity of a car, especially on highways.

Although Crow is a piece about courage, I think that I am in a slightly different place now in movement and in life than where I was 4 years ago. Aftermath was choreographed during and right after my time in Poland, and the vocabulary reflects not only the forcefulness of the Luminski technique, but also my determination to get it under my belt. Having only picked up dance from college, I was way out of my depth with the technicality of Jacek's work. At the same time I loved the movement and the teacher very much, so I was gritty determined to master it. The most embarrassing thing for me was to go across the floor (contemporary dance classes often end with sequences where the dancers travel across the floor. Due to space limitations, we travel in small groups in front of everyone), because often I didn't even have the whole sequence… and here I was asked to go across the floor in front of everyone else. However, based on the philosophy that the only way I was going to learn was to try, I swallowed my pride and blundered across. That quality of grit is therefore very present in my movement.

Later experiments with butoh and meditation, as well as life in general, taught me grit in a different form. If Aftermath is about courage in movement, there is also courage that comes from the capacity to be still and patient.

Crow is an odd choice to make right now, because I do not feel very much Crow right now. In fact, my tai chi practice is taking me in what may seem the opposite direction to what Crow is about. Crow is about will power and the explosion of sunlight, while what I am exploring in tai chi is the softness and receptivity. I think I was much closer to Crow a few years ago working in an office cubicle, when my creativity was exploding from the frustration of the 9-5 office job. Nowadays I have a nice balance in the freelance work I do, and am generally doing what I really enjoy doing, teaching and performing. So there is no need for the type of rebellion exemplified by Crow.

At the same time, I think there is a playfulness that arises from the right distance with ones source material. Because I am not very Crow at this point in my life, it is easier for me to explore Crow playfully. And just like the Yin-Yang in tai chi, it is precisely the fact that tai chi is taking me down a different path that will add another dimension to the dance. Just like we drop down in preparation for a leap, I believe the softness and compassion in tai chi will bring out something different, more playful, than pure heroism in Crow. Aftermath is wonderful in its relentlessness, but it is fun too, to be able to be playful.

> A video of this 7 minute dance solo to Bach's cello suite #2 will soon be posted on the BurntMango website

Getting the Contact culture moving...

One thought that keeps humming in my head (not necessarily related to the choral dance piece in December) is about the development of Contact improv in HK. Basically I went to a body-voice workshop a couple of weeks ago and heard a lot of interest in Contact; but the thing is in HK there is not really enough leadership or expertise to really keep it humming. There's a group that meets twice every month (which I went to on Sunday), but the group is really inexperienced and the form cannot grow just by jams at their level.

So I think one of the things I am interested in doing is to devote some time get Contact moving in HK; we basically need a critical mass of people with enough expertise and interest to keep it going; which means that I will have to get enough expertise to teach it and train this group.

Part of this journey will be to find a improv movement form that makes sense for HK; through the movement awareness classes I teach / jams I have been to here I suspect that there is a great potential for HK to develop its own contact vocabulary/flavour; one that comes from tai chi's "pushing hands"... (it is a sort of combat-testing form)...

This may mean going to the States (good excuse to visit my friends on the West coast) and getting back in touch with a community of good Contact dancers; take some intensives and then figure out a way to teach Contact... I know how to play/jam but I need to figure out how to teach it. The last time I took a Contact class was, um, way back in Swarthmore with Leah Stein

Something also culturally specific here is the hesitancy the average person has in physical contact. We're not a very touchy culture, particularly towards the opposite sex. Most of our dance forms are visual more than kinaesthetic (think fan dance, ribbon dance, etc). Put in another way, this hesitancy can be articulated as a sacredness of touch- that the moment of first touch is much more significant. So I would like to explore a form that respects the importance of contact... and at the same time is able to access the universal exhilaration of falling and tumbling in movement.


> regular jams in HK are organised by Kongtact Square

New piece? Falling Apples/Eden

"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts,

there can be no more hurt, only more love."

Something new in the works: HK Dance Alliance is calling for submissions from Emerging Choreographers, and I have decided to submit a proposal. It is quite exciting to be thinking about a dance again, and I have found that the intention to do so is attracting a lot of energy.

Falling Apple/Eden will a piece for 5 or 7 dancers. It is a piece about innocence: the freshness of a new-born in joyful discovery of the world; and the sudden freshness of the world in the wake of a tragedy.

The starting point for this piece comes from the walk-with-apple-on-head exercise that I often use in my movement awareness classes; and will also be an opportunity for me to revisit the space of the tragic chorus.

"Grasping the Sparrow's Tail" (攬雀尾) DVD

Victor has been teaching a tai chi series 攬雀尾 ("Grasping the Sparrow's Tail") at Club O, and we have been filming a DVD on it. So I have spent the past two days editing; it is a very tranquil experience to watch so much footage of tai chi.

Despite the use of three cameras there has been an extraordinary amount of unusable footage.. mostly due to our (my) inexperience. But there are enough shots, thank goodness... enough what I call "charismatic shots" for us to hang the rest of the footage on. Part of the challenge of this project lies in the fact that this dvd is aimed so that people can follow the movement; and so basically you have to have at least one full body shot, done in one take for each set of movements (there is the left side, the right side and the complete works). You can't just "cut away" from it. Finding the right location has also been a challenge - first there was the weather, and then the perfect natural backdrop has also been elusive. For some reason in the country park there is always an inconvenientsign or bicycle rack in the way... especially if you want the spread of 3 cameras.

Talking the Walk / feeling unpeeled

Last night I gave a talk about my Compostela walk.

It was a funny process for me, to dig up my writings and photos and try to connect to them again. It is such a different world from here…

I was also supposed to do the talk in January, but it got rescheduled, and then I specifically meant to talk about pain, because I had pulled a muscle in my arm; I wanted to talk about pain and negotiating with the body.

So last night was interesting – it was interesting, as in – I didn't try to entertain the audience.

In fact, it was after a 'hands-on-healing' session, and I was feeling a bit drained after that. In the past couple of weeks, I have reached a stage where I can feel people's auras. Nothing special – just that the chi under my hands float my hands up; the way I suppose hovercrafts function. I don't think I know yet how to disconnect properly though.

Anyway, so I was tired, and so I was feeling a bit introverted. So I didn't project my energy out in the way I usually might. Oddly enough I think I allowed myself to be vulnerable in a way I don't in front of an audience.

I don't know how much the audience got from the talk; because my talk circled, the way conversations do. It was not constructed in the way one might do for a presentation; with "this is my point" and "here is what happens next". So I broke most of the rules I ask of my students when I teach essay writing. Perhaps too, I could have taken more from the audience-

Anyway.

I talked a lot; a tangle of different threads in my life: being rejected from Lecoq; sitting meditation. I don't know how relevant people found this stuff; I think the people who have had meditation experience knew what I was talking about and were with me.

We then did a Feldenkrais exercise on foot exploration, and then slow walking; where I evoked something like Thich Nhat Hanh's "Touching the Earth" exercise – walk an expression of your blood ancestors, walk as an expression of your teachers; walk as an expression of the earth… my grandfather, oddly enough, came up a couple of time in my talk; about his death the summer before I went walking; and the idea of walking for our ancestors.

I think people enjoyed that part: the walking in the room was very concentrated.
I sang 'Climb Every Mountain' for them; sang imperfectly- but I gave it what I had.

I felt quite fragile afterwards. Instead of going to my grandmother's (where I camp out when I am in town) I went all the way home. I have not been home enough this week, and being home nourishes me. Besides, travelling helped me shake some things off.