Thursday, May 17, 2007

Evolution

As a species, we are at a critical point in our evolution. We are facing a juggernaut of obstacles that may prevent us from continuing our growth process. Pollution and violence among other problems are threatening to stop us in our tracks. Pollution is represented in this piece with cigarette smoking and violence as a cowboy. Inspired by the classic chart of man’s evolution from monkey to man through different stages, I place current man in the center of the stage. If we can get past our polluting and violent ways, man may continue to evolve into a species of enlightened beings.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Hallelujah

Chakra Solo

Chakras are energy centers in that align with the spine. If you know about chakras, it might be fun to look for the gestures that go with of the seven centers in the dance video I've posted below. For each chakra, I've created a movement gesture and in this dance, I combine the gestures in an improvisational way.

The root chakra reaches toward the earth. The sacral chakra is the creativity/sexual chakra and is located at the sacrum. The solar plexus chakra is the door to our individuality. The heart chakra is where we hold love. The throat chakra is connected with our verbal communication, while the third eye chakra is our connection to intuition. The crown chakra located at the top of the head reaches skyward.

In between the gestures, I spin like a whirling dervish. The dervishes spin in order to align their chakras and I use it here as a way transitioning from one chakra to another. By creating and performing this dance I like to think I am giving my chakras a healthy workout.

Hope you enjoy it!


Thursday, February 08, 2007

Red Light Rooster!


Red Light Rooster! is my interactive family fun show. This show was inspired by a problematic gig I did a few years back. I was hired to perform at a family fun night and was given the library to do my show. Problem was, there was a carpet in the library and I couldn’t do the performance that I normally would do. So I decided on the spot that I would do some creative movement exercises with the kids. I didn’t expect the adults to get up and dance as well, but when they did, I saw immediately that there was magic in the room.

Kids are most fully themselves when they are blissfully engaged in the business of having a good time. As our minds are beginning to develop, the first real experiences we have of fun as kids is physical. Running, jumping, balancing, kids are feeling their fun in their bodies.

Adults are also most fully themselves at play, but because the demands on our lives as adults, playtime gets put on the back burner behind making money and meeting responsibilities. When adults do engage in fun, it most often doesn’t look like the same fun they had when they were kids.

Kids know that one day they will become adults as well and they are learning what being an adult means from watching their parents. For children to witness adults having fun in the same ways that children understand fun is powerful. Not adult fun, but physical romping around fun that kids understand and feel. This was the magic I experienced at that problematic performance. I was watching kids watching adults having fun that they could feel.

By observing adults having fun, kids can know that happens throughout our lives. As they get older, their ideas of fun may change, but at least, they can look forward to growing up because they will know that there is definitely something fun about it.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Love, Love, Love

Expressing love is the highest form of human communication.

As we spiritually evolve, we begin to examine our words and actions for the amount of love they contain. We grow in our ability to hold and express love. Gaining awareness of what we are expressing makes us conscious of how much love we are offering to the world. Once aware, we can begin to make choices about the things we say and do.

The more evolved we become the less there is to say. Imagine removing all non-loving thoughts from your communication. Imagine removing all expressions of judgment, fear, regret and annoyance from your verbal repertoire.



By stopping unloving thoughts from escaping our lips, we discover an entirely different self. One that has freed itself of negative expression. One that has taken a huge leap toward a higher more loving, more joyful sound. It would be like dropping your anchor and experiencing your balloon rise through the clouds.

It can take a lifetime, perhaps many lifetimes to perfect this step, but before we can stop our minds from producing negativity, we must first stop our mouths from expressing it.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Building Community with Art


Each spring and fall for the past five years, I have been a teaching artist with a program called Building Community Through the Arts. My job is to help create a feeling of community among high school students in the Bangor, Maine area. Since the shootings at Columbine High School, BCTA was created to enhance the social environment in our states’ schools. The idea is that by ushering high school students through a creative process in the area of performing arts, they invest in one another as people. To whatever degree I am successful at bringing these strangers closer to one another is beyond my control. What I can do is to help these students create and perform art. It’s a powerful relationship between art and society that I am here to engage. And by the time we are finished, a community will be created from the stuff of imaginations.

On the first day of these residencies, I like to perform for my students. I might dance an excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird or tap out Bubba, the Tap Dancer, a thinly disguised autobiography. As a teacher, I need to give them a reason to do this scary thing I’m asking of them. As an artist, I demonstrate skills but more importantly, by performing I open myself to them. This is a smaller version of what they will be doing themselves. By performing, the energy in the room rises and I’ve found that this is the best space in which to begin. My art work combines dance and storytelling. This is not a common combination of talents but a pretty good match for the creative abilities of high school students. They can all talk and move around.

We begin by pushing the desks to the sides and stand in a circle. We say our names. We look at each other out of the corner of our eyes. Even though we are strangers, I know from experience that that will change very soon. I open my bag of creative tricks and immediately, we are laughing. We run and trade places. We pass imaginary balls and heft invisible suitcases. We mix ourselves up in a scramble and freeze when iceberg is shouted. We balance with one leg in the air; with our arms around each others shoulders. We touch. We fit ourselves together like puzzle pieces. We turn each other into showers and lamps and bananas. We float across the room holding each others gaze. With broken legs, we run from dinosaurs and chase the moon.

Essentially, we play and we remember how good it feels to play, but these are young adults. With so much change happening physically and emotionally, their defenses are strong, especially to the kind of openness I‘m suggesting. Resistance is completely understandable if not entirely expected. It‘s not a surprise. Enthusiasm is unfashionable among teenagers, and as we work on creating, my major battle is not with the creative stuff but with the toxic fear that is released before creativity can happen.

Often, these are English classes I’ve invaded. One assignment I might give is to pick a favorite part from the books they’ve been reading or a line of poetry that appeals to them. Whether it’s Boo Radley or Robert Frost, these positive responses to their reading holds the key information for this project succeed. For whatever speaks to us in art, tells us a little bit about ourselves. By creating art from these fragments of these students, a very personal expression is formed. They create gestures from the text and teach them to each other. The movement and the words may stay attached or music may be added to bring in a new dimension. As our time together draws to a close, we spread their creations out like jewels on black velvet. After examining each one, we string them together like Christmas lights. On the last day that we meet together as a class, the performance piece is rehearsed again and again until the bell breaks us apart.

At the same time that my groups are turning and twisting, there are other teaching artists like myself working their own brands of magic in other high schools nearby: actors, playwrights, mask artists and physical comedians. On the conference day, we all meet in a church in downtown Bangor; artists, teachers and two hundred high school students. Every fifteen minutes over the course of that day, dancers make their debuts and original plays are premiered. Art reigns supreme.

To create is to open oneself. It is to dare and to choose. When we create we are saying I thought of this or this touches me. In performance, this part of oneself is offered as a gift to whoever is there to receive it. When that part is received by an audience, it becomes part of them as well. When two hundred high school students give each other little pieces of themselves, the barriers that divide them come crashing down.

At the end of these conference days, when all the dancing is done but before the buses have taken them away, I see these students shine. For me, these are moments when the world seems to transform just for an instant. Time stops and the atmosphere rings with a high frequency. As I make my way among them, their enthusiasm fills me. They look years younger than they did just a few weeks ago. Or is that just because they’re smiling? A few of the boys who were the hardest to convince say thanks and goodbye. Every pair of eyes I meet is like an open door to the beautiful part inside each of us; no longer hidden but visible for all to see.

Then the buses are moving and they are gone. And the fullness I feel is a complete saturated happiness. By creating art, we arrived together in a single moment of union, communion, community, perhaps heaven. That reward is not just for these students, but for all of us to feel good about. And we did this by creating art.

Follow Your Bliss

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

Joseph Campbell



I found my bliss early in life in the back of my sister’s tap dance class. Reaching back into the body of my six year old self, it was a small effort to stand up and move forward onto the dance floor with my sister and the other girls but I remember it felt so big to me at the time, like discovering a secret treasure. I knew then that I had discovered something about myself. There was a clear, magical feeling within me that said yes, this is the right thing to do.

As a kid, you simply do the things you like to do. No real mystery to it. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that it’s ok for girls to dance and less ok for boys, but by the time I came to that understanding, it was too late. I had already been dancing for years and I loved to do it. When I put the feeling of dancing next to the thought of it not being ok, the feeling was much more real and that’s what I followed.



I loved to dance so much that I danced all over the place…in the driveway and the old folks home. I would drive my mother to distraction by dancing in the kitchen while she was trying to get dinner for eight on the table. It was a beautifully simple and unselfconscious time. I didn’t think about what I was doing because I was too busy enjoying myself.

As I got older, things changed. When the neighborhood boys turned out to see me perform at the school pumpkin sale one fall, I started getting bullied around the neighborhood and at school. I thought I would be the “star” of the neighborhood, but that was not the case. When I entered middle school, I had to quit dancing for awhile and withdrew to my room. By that time, dancing had became a big part of who I was. Life didn’t seem right when I wasn’t dancing. Sometimes, not following your bliss is as important as following your bliss. When you’re off track, you know it and when you come back into alignment with your bliss, you are rewarded with the relief of finding your way again.



In Bubba, the tap dancing rhythms are the indicator whether Bubba is on track or not. At the darkest part of the story, the steady rhythm is broken as Bubba quits dancing and leaves his path. The piece sags and the space becomes heavy with the absence of lighthearted tapping.

To follow your bliss, you have to know what your bliss is. Not everyone in every life finds their bliss. Sometimes life lessons are more general and we struggle with trials that seem less inspired. If you know what you love to do, you are very fortunate indeed. Many (or can I say most) people don’t have a specific passion in their lives and struggle to know which way to go in life. Whether its rock climbing or origami, when you find something that you enjoy doing so much that time stands still, that is your direction. You might have to try out a bunch of different activities before you land on fertile ground.

Although there were hard times, my life as a dancer has been a joyful, easy to follow adventure. By following my intuitive knowledge as a child, I trusted that each turn in the road would be shown to me by the same inner feelings. This turned out to be true and by listening to my intuition, I have been perfectly guided throughout my life. I am thankful for the gift of a life rich with friendships, culture, and not to mention many wonderful adventures.



Bubba, the Tap Dancer is an homage to my six year old self; that boy who found the path and the insight to follow an intangible feeling of personal truth. In the end, Bubba is redeemed by his journey and is welcomed home with honor. Although no one has come to shake my hand in congratulations for a life well lived, I know that by “following what was in my heart” my life has been lived in the way it was meant to be lived and I believe that has to be the greater honor.

If you would like to watch more Bubba, click here or here.