Editorial Note: For the past nine years, Stance on Dance has asked a variety of dance artists at different points in their careers what “making it” means to them. Please join us in looking at what “making it” means as a dancer, artist, and human.

For me, the concept of “making it” is elusive and more subjective than objective. When I think of the feeling of “making it,” it is a star-aligning moment, often fleeting and brief, yet it is a glimpse of complete perfection, as much as perfection can exist. The image I have for “made it” (versus “making it”) is water being held in the hand. The water can rest there in appreciation and awe for a moment, but inevitably it will slip through and change form. “Making it” is an infinite and evolving experience and, in my opinion, preferred because it is a living process. The process of “making it” is hard and rewarding, and has given incredible value to my life.

Today, I am proudest of the work I continue to create with Dark Sky Aerial, a project I co-founded with Abby Chan, Elisa Venezia, Joanie Garcia and Isabelle Dove-Robison in 2014, steered in-part today by board president and company member Myra Popejoy. Dark Sky Aerial is an ambulatory and experiential aerial dance company. Work created is site-specific, providing the need for grit and dedication. The practice of using ambulation for the audience itself must require a specific expertise and adaptivity in order to craft an impactful audience experience. As such, there are few companies in the world that combine the diverse modality and performance composition exhibited by Dark Sky Aerial.

Photo by Gean Shanks

In my experience, focusing on “making it” versus having “made it” has allowed me to continue striving and fostering deep friendship in the process (the kind formed by sharing in a profound experience no one else has had). In the process of artistic creation and “making it,” I find I notice more detail and, in turn, become more of an active participant in life. For example and unrelated to dance, if I tried to draw a piece of fabric draped on the back of a chair, I would have to notice the light, the shadow, the color variation, the angle, the general experience of it. Creating artistic work – using the modality of dance – with Dark Sky Aerial is a similar experience. We have to understand and pay attention to the emotional implication of a gesture, a movement, etc. I think the work we put into “making it” can build a deeper understanding of empathy and human connection, because in a sense, the veil is lifted in dance and we have to be tuned in and tethered together, physically and emotionally, to create. We have to be comfortable witnessing struggle and being witnessed struggling. In a sense, we are “making it” as humans, becoming more empathetic and participatory in life using dance as the vehicle.

The innate challenge in “making it” and striving toward a goal has allowed me to develop a positive relationship with struggle. Now, I have a little anchor point in my memory reminding me that yes, I can work through a challenging movement and learn it regardless of the initial failure or the amount of time it might require of me. With Dark Sky Aerial, “making it” has turned a visionary dream into an evolving reality. “Making it” has proven that the experience of “struggle” can be approached with optimism, confidence, and hard work, rather than as an easy excuse to abandon a goal. For me, the lesson has transcended into my general approach to life.

After the last showing of TILT in 2018, produced by Dark Sky Aerial, I felt we made it. I remember standing in a circle on a rooftop, hugging and smiling under the pink and blue-hued stage lighting with creative director Elisa Venezia as well as Abby Chan, Isabelle Dove-Robinson, and Myra Popejoy and feeling a collective: “F*&# YES, we made it!” To produce TILT, we had worked hard to premiere a large-scale, complex production, deepened friendship, strengthened community, and we knew the artistic work we created made an emotional and real impact on the audience.

Photo by Gretchen

“Making it” for me, and for Dark Sky Aerial, is not based on fame. It is based on the ability to continue to create and suspend the audience – and cast/crew – in an emotional and life-changing experience. It is striving to speak to the complexity of the world and the intricacy of the human experience using the language of movement. For Dark Sky Aerial, if the work created an impact, inspired change, or an opportunity for authentic reflection for the viewer, then by our definition the work “made it.”

The COVID-19 pandemic crushed me. I stopped training, and the daily community in my studio vanished as much of the community in the San Francisco Bay Area was forced to exit an expensive city without performance work. Now, a year and half later, here I am “making it” again, returning to the studio to train with the support of my beloved teacher and friend, Liz Gehret (@abagfullofdirtandsilk), and the tight-knit movement community in Flagstaff, Arizona. It is very, very challenging, but the effort is worthwhile, as it has proven to be time and time again.

Despite my personal challenge in the COVID-19 pandemic, Dark Sky Aerial created OMEN, of which I am very proud! OMEN is an original dance film created and performed by Dark Sky Aerial and filmed and produced by Nick Geib of Firewatch Media and Blake McCord, Harlan Taney, and Justin Cliffton of Sandcast Media. The ambitious project was filmed on-location from March 30 to April 1, 2021 in the Grand Canyon. In tandem with the artistic dance film, OMEN, a documentary short, was produced by Nick Geib of Firewatch Media.

Today, I am focusing on “making it” again and taking time to feel the joy in the process. I am trying to reflect more often and soak in the “made it” a little more than I used to… even if my evolving definition of “made it” for the day might be doing one more repetition than I was able to yesterday.

Photo by Isabelle Dove-Robinson

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From 1997 to 2007, Carrie Reynolds trained and competed in the USA Gymnastics Program and went on to expand her performance art through acrobatic gymnastics from 2007 to 2011. Carrie has coached for the Junior Olympic Gymnastics Training Program at Elite Gymnastics in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Discovering aerial dance at the age of 23, Carrie began her training in Northern Arizona at Flagstaff Aerial Arts and Momentum Aerial Arts (@momentumaerialarts) where, in 2014, she co-founded two-time Viola Award-winning aerial theatre company and 501(c)3 nonprofit, Dark Sky Aerial. Specializing in harness dance, aerial fabric, and aerial rope, Carrie has performed in airplane hangars, historic hotels, on the exterior walls of industrial buildings, in traditional performance spaces, and suspended from construction cranes. Throughout her time as an aerial dancer, Carrie has completed approximately 11 months of residency at the New England Center for Circus Arts and a three-month artist residency program at Central del Circ in Barcelona, Spain, as well as trained extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her most notable performances include original work for Google, Athleta, The De Young Museum, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Burning Man, Dance Mission Theatre, and the work she is proudest of – created by Dark Sky Aerial: OPIA ‘16, TILT ‘17, TILT ‘18, and OMEN ‘21. Follow Carrie and Dark Sky Aerial at www.darkskyaerial.com or @darksky_aerial.

The post The Infinite Art of “Making It” appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Editorial Note: For the past nine years, Stance on Dance has asked a variety of dance artists at different points in their careers what “making it” means to them. Please join us in looking at what “making it” means as a dancer, artist, and human.

During the early years of my career, I was experimenting and gathering experiences that began to shape my path. I was often inspired by my mentors and even occasionally dabbled in the vulnerable process of creating work and sharing it: What if people hate it? I experimented with different approaches to teaching: Were my students getting better?

When I was younger, I had a narrow concept of how I measured my success. If an audience loved a piece I created, then the piece was successful. If my students mastered the steps, the class was successful.

I turned 40 this year. Over the past five years, I’ve noticed shifts in my experience of my career. I am not so haunted by the self-doubt that used to paralyze me. I am finally at a place where I can accept who I am most of the time. I can embrace what I have to share as an artist and a teacher.

I measure success differently now. And the measurements change every day. I ask questions like: Did my piece share what was true in that moment? Did the audience show up and witness that? Did the creation of this piece provide opportunities for other artists? Was this piece accessible? Did creating this work support my community?

In my teaching, I ask myself: Did I isolate anyone? Did I make sure to connect with each person? Did I honor what was true for each student on that day? Did I make efforts to invite and include those who are often underserved? Did I accept whatever each student contributed to the class? Do I accept myself despite my mistakes?

I have developed a growth mindset that has enabled me to take more risks. I nudge myself to take chances more often. Even if I flop, I learn from the errors and make different choices next time. There is freedom in that. I am willing to take a critical eye to my own teaching and my own work and be honest about how I could improve. This commitment has given me the freedom to try new things more often.

If my measurement of success is based on things I can’t control, I am setting myself up for frequent failure. I can’t control how an audience responds to a performance, nor would I want to. I can’t control my students, nor should I try to.

It has been a gift to release myself from the pressure of meeting a standard of success that was never the right path for me. An expansion has come from redefining my relationship with creating and teaching. My work serves a different purpose now.

I make art because life my life is short. I witness what is true for my students in each moment. I try to create a container of acceptance in my classes. I try to bring dance opportunities to those who have less access. I continuously evaluate what I could have done better, and then I grow. If I am growing, I am succeeding.

Photo by Bela Knox

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Michaela Knox is the founding artistic director of Spark Dance Program and a master teacher of the Danceability Method. She is also the artistic director of YES Dance Theatre Ensemble. Michaela lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and three children. 

The post “If I Am Growing, I Am Succeeding” appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Editorial Note: For the past nine years, Stance on Dance has asked a variety of dance artists at different points in their careers what “making it” means to them. Please join us in looking at what “making it” means as a dancer, artist, and human.

When I began my dance career, I had this belief that if I worked hard enough, I could join any dance company, train in any dance school, and make it just like any nondisabled artist. I wasn’t prepared for the journey, for the realization of how deeply ableist the dance world is. My perception of making it in the dance world has been predominately associated with surviving, especially as a Mexican American disabled woman. I’ve survived in terms of making it through systemic racism and ableism in academia, making it through auditions, making it through an audition-based dance program at my past university, and now navigating the dance world to find opportunities to expand my career as a disabled artist.

Photo by Paula Kiley, Image Description: A dance action shot of Vanessa captured in a sunlit dance studio. She is swaying away from her purple walker and her bent arms are above her waist. She is looking at the high arm. She is wearing tulle dress where the top portion is a long sleeve blue velvet material and the bottom is a beige tulle skirt. Her leg braces are visible.

I realized that no matter how prepared I was, how much preplanning choreographic work, how much I trained my disabled body in dance technique, I would still be seen as not enough. Not enough to be in choreographic works, in a BFA program, or to gain access to opportunities to show my choreographic works. This all stems from the lack of understanding of disability art and our disability community. Society has shaped disability throughout history through an inspirational-porn lens and as a community to be pitied on. This perverse idea holds disabled artists back from being able to make it in the dance world/industry.

While there will be folxs reading this and thinking that dance is supposed to be a highly competitive field, the rate of rejections for us disabled artists, particularly in spaces that are predominately for nondisabled artists, is high. Nondisabled folxs who expect disabled artists to only seek out spaces that are only created for disabled artists is ableist. That belief system continues to uphold segregation and ableism in the dance world and doesn’t hold these spaces accountable to be equitable and accessible for the disability community. Not only that, but the disabled spaces that do exist are often limited and don’t have the capacity to support all disabled artists out there. Disabled artists should have unlimited options to craft their dance career, to get grants, to showcase their artistic work, to be accepted in any dance training facility, to choose any dance company to audition for and be in, and so much more.

Upon experiencing all of this in real time, I had to shift my focus to literally making it through these experiences and changing these systems, while at the same time focusing on my own artistic goals. It should never be expected from a marginalized person and/or community to change these kinds of oppressive systems. I chose to dive into this activism work because I knew if I left these spaces, it would be the same experience for the next disabled artist trying to focus on their goals. I initiated outstanding changes at my university through the guidance of disability justice along with the fantastic student organization CSULB Affinity AIDE (Advocates for Inclusion and Dancer Equity) where I was the Disabled Student Affairs Chair.

Within all the important and essential activism work I have done and will continue to do, I have managed to find joy in the small moments and achievements. It has been hard at times because rejection hurts. It hurts realizing that my disabled body could potentially be used against me as an excuse not to be granted opportunities in nondisabled spaces. This has taken me to dark places mentally. But being able to reshape what it means to make it has allowed me to find innovation and creativity in my work. And I have to thank my disabled body and my disabled experiences because it has equipped me to be innovative and a problem solver.

Whenever I finish dance classes, finish performances, experience great rehearsals with other dancers, finish my choreographic work, figure out new ways to do a pirouette, or have brilliant ideas, I celebrate those moments. That’s when I know I have made it. I choose to live in the present when my anxiety isn’t poking at me, which is why those small moments make it all worth it.

When I successfully transferred to California State University Long Beach, I remember feeling excited but also terrified that this opportunity was going to be taken away from me. I remember that feeling and I carry that with me whenever I find myself confronting ableism, when I notice I am the only visibly disabled person in the audition room or dance class, and/or any space that wasn’t built for disabled artists. When that happens, I think “I am here as a radical act and my fears will no longer be fears for future generations; I vow to dance my heart out because I am honoring myself, my ancestors, and future generations.”

I envision a future where disabled dancers are hired in all the dance companies that exist, where disabled choreographers are hired at various dance companies, where disabled dancers get dance training in any school they desire. I envision equity where disabled people are not forgotten. Until then, I celebrate the moments that will get us there.

Still photo taken from Vanessa’s dance film “Nycto-Eterntity,” Image Description: Vanessa diagonally reaches up towards a archway full of leaves. Behind her is a large window with the sun casting a yellow glow. As she is reaching she is holding on to her walker that is adorned with starlights. She is wearing a blue long sleeve tutu dress.

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Vanessa Hernández Cruz (she, her, hers) is an emerging Chicana disabled dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, artist, poet, and activist. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She received her Associates Degree in Dance from Santa Monica College and recently graduated from California State University Long Beach with her Bachelor of Arts in Dance Science. Her dance films Static Void Distortion and Nycto-Eternity were selected to be screened for the Some Dance Screen Fest happening in October 2021. Her latest dance film DNA: Disability Not Ability was selected for Opulent Mobility’s 2021 Exhibition that will be screened in October 2021. DNA was also selected by IKOUII and was exhibited in June through August 2021 for their virtual art show Without Labels and won the Honorable Mention award. In 2020, her dance film Nycto-Eternity won The Dance Cinema Award from Frostbite International Film Festival and was recently screened for The Midnight Film Festival in New York. In 2018, Vanessa won first place in the Global Citizenship Research Symposium: Dance & Disability in Santa Monica College for her dance film Grey City. Vanessa’s choreographic work has received the award for Cultural Diplomacy for Innovation in Choreography from Ballet Beyond Borders in 2019. Her lifetime aspirations are to continue to perform, choreograph, create, and to continue to pave an easier path for future disabled artists through her activism.

To learn more about Vanessa’s work, visit www.galaxiesdance.info or connect with her on Instagram @GalaxiesDance. You can additionally support her work on Venmo or PayPal.

The post My Ancestor’s Wildest Dream appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Editorial Note: For the past nine years, Stance on Dance has asked a variety of dance artists at different points in their careers what “making it” means to them. Please join us in looking at what “making it” means as a dancer, artist, and human.

Has your idea of “making it” changed over time?

As a teenager, I was training in the hip-hop commercial dance arena until my world was blown open by dance as research/a global lens through my studies at Wesleyan University and work with professor, choreographer, and scholar Pedro Alejandro. As I grew into a professional dancer in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California, in addition to being onstage, I cultivated and embraced my identity behind the scenes as arts administrator, event coordinator and producer, stage manager, dance company manager, rehearsal director, house manager, box office manager, studio rental coordinator, marketing, fundraising, and grant writing consultant. My relationship to “making it” changed when I co-founded GROUND SERIES dance & social justice collective with fellow Wesleyan alum, dancer, choreographer, and scholar Sarah Ashkin in Oakland, CA. Stewarding programs, performances, educational events, and site-specific works with Sarah broadened my horizons. With our independent curation and care, I felt welcomed and encouraged to imbue radical hospitality in the experiences and experiments. GROUND SERIES uses performance to practice place-based justice by cultivating accountability to land, body, and history. Postmodern dance, scholarship, and social practice yield our funny, relentless works that honor discomfort and failure. I deeply resonate with these values:

Dancemaking is a way for complex learning to be embodied and shared.

Every body has wisdom that can be transmitted and through movement.

Dancemaking cultivates awareness and agency in everyone who participates: performers, audiences, partners, and passersby.

In this way, performance can undo and remake the world for the better.

We are celebrating 10 years in 2022. I’m so grateful to this radiant web of artists, partners, and community members throughout the US.

The power of a place impacts how I perceive and relate to “making it.” After moving from the dance hub of the Bay Area to New Mexico and Arizona, I discovered alternative ways of living and making art outside of a major city. During this time, I developed practices of spirituality and meditation, which I continue today. In my subsequent move to the Greater Palm Springs region of California, I rooted into a full time arts administrative career serving two arts nonprofits (see my reflection A Flourishing Resilient Community as part of Stance on Dance’s series Where Dance Is). In the Coachella Valley, I also helped grow a few creative cores. I became a founding member of the intersectional feminist creative collective Wyld Womxn, the dance collective Desert Movement Arts, and Peer Practice in the Desert, a once-a-month free movement class at a rotating location exploring a theme, a site, and an improvisational movement score. Shaping these platforms and flexible centers of expression taught me about authentic leadership and adaptation.

In December 2019, I moved to Los Angeles, where my orientation to “making it” has been about integration and expansion. My administrative work is in service of a humanitarian virtual reality nonprofit which digitally archives cultural heritage in 3D around the globe. Diving into sciences and technologies has opened my sensitivity to these innovations. The sprawling city grants me access to a broad variety of professional dancers, dance teachers, choreographers, students, international artists, technologists, studios, theaters, beaches, fashion, comedy, and the Hollywood industry. Weaving the commercial, stage, community-centered, and site-specific feels buoyantly home.

Have the events of this past year affected your sense of “making it”?

In adapting to this past year’s urgent call to exercise safety amidst the public health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic and reimagine safety during a global crisis to defend Black lives, reckon with systemic racism, and inequity, I return again and again to the body, dance, creativity, grassroots organizing, and cross-sector collaborations.

My activism grew out of participation in Sarah Ashkin and Kai Hazelwood’s Practice Progress embodied anti-racism workshops, advocacy campaigns by Justice LA, co-presenting ‘Using Arts and Culture to Create Healthy Open Spaces During Recovery’ with Miguel Vazquez, AICP, a Healthy Communities Planner in Riverside County, volunteering as a Joy to the Polls volunteer with Election Defenders, and organizing with pro-democracy initiative Hold the Line. This interdisciplinary work affirms my love and advocacy for choreography as community organizing and planning.

Through the summer of 2020, I worked with artists from GROUND SERIES to present a COVID-19 compliant site-specific production Stages of Tectonic Blackness in New Mexico, which was also streamed live on Instagram and edited into a video piece. This work tarries with the paralleled processes of dehumanization and extraction, emergence and rebellion, as sustained by Black bodies and rock bodies. It has been part of visual art exhibitions, new international research, and is in the works for touring in 2022.

This past year pushed me to increase my artistic toolkit and versatility. Zoom-based singing lessons with Micaela Tobin and artist coaching from Julie Potter awakened skills and unlocked perspectives. I learned about dance filmmaking with the LA Women Choreographers Winter 2021 Brockus Project SHIFT/west artist residency, and classes with Kelly Hargraves of Dance Camera West. I co-directed, choreographed, and performed in a short dance film STALK, which premiered June 2021 as part of the residency.

I’ve listened and learned from so many inspiring voices through podcasts, books, social media streams, online classes, virtual events, and conferences. Accessibility and mutual aid are paramount.

Lastly, I have been deepening my spiritual and meditation rituals, caring for houseplants, appreciating nature, and developing home-based and neighborhood sites for fitness. These practices ground me and nourish my whole health as a human being.

Dance is ancient.

I feel I made it when I…

Took four Monsters of Hip-Hop dance classes back-to-back and didn’t quit.

Enrolled in Impulstanz dance classes in Vienna, with justification of my professional dance experience.

Participated in artist residencies for dance.

Engaged with contact improvisation and hip-hop dance communities around the world.

Attended APAP conference in New York City and networked with brilliant artists of multiple generations, as well as solidified a new gig updating a dance website.

Interned at Contact Quarterly – recalling the spark of the late Nancy Stark Smith…she executed a spontaneous handstand hop on the side of her desk one day, her zest pinging the space with fresh views, clarity, and fun.

Wrote and edited dance articles for Hot Stepz Magazine in Boston to amplify artist stories and support the mother-daughter team behind the magazine.

Worked at ODC Theater in San Francisco with Christy Bolingbroke, who taught me about curation, production, communication, and genuine enthusiasm. She builds bridges so artfully. Her guest appearance on the Work Doesn’t Suck podcast gave me a distinctive dose of practical hope and resolve in the pandemic to consider particular cracks in the field around cashflow and contracts, and highlighted new opportunities such as increased capacity with virtual dance classes.

Wrote meaningful interview and research articles about dance for inDance by Dancers’ Group in San Francisco.

Produced full-length dance theater show Rocked by Women for Sarah Bush Dance Project at Dance Brigade’s Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco. Sarah Bush and her colleagues helped me mature into dance company management skill building, while upholding and centering feminist values.

Wrote successful grants for SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts in San Francisco, where I was able to build capacity in this line of work with Joe Landini’s trust and healthy sense of humor.

Performed Isadora Duncan Dance in Tokyo with Mary Sano after training with her for many moons in her San Francisco studio.

Developed, workshopped, researched, co-produced, performed, and sold out the opening night of task by GROUND SERIES – a breakthrough in leveling up my artistry.

Instinctively knew how to offer an embodied grounding practice prior to an artist talk experience that I conceived of, organized, facilitated, and moderated at a community theater space.

Received an artist residency at Buckwheat in Morongo Valley, CA, and welcomed in GROUND SERIES artists and local artists.

Commissioned an original sound score from composer and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Lewis for my dance film STALK.

Received the opportunity to choreograph and perform a new site-specific piece Rewilding with musician Emer Kinsella for Heidi Duckler Dance’s Ebb & Flow: Chinatown Festival at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

I feel I am “making it” when I…

Utilize knowledge of anatomy, somatics, and bodywork to support and investigate discovery, pain relief, pleasure, healing, wisdom.

Connect dance to and across multiple disciplines, sectors, spaces, generations, contexts.

Acknowledge and strengthen my commitment to dance – dedication in practice, production, audience participation, scholarship, literature, advocacy.

To conclude, I offer a poem inspired by this prompt:

“Making It” (2021)

Making dance divine

Making dance heal

Making dance accessible

Making dance feel

Making dance real

Making dance grow

Making dance wield

Power for all to know

Making dance transform

Making dance taste

Making dance sacred

Making dance come face to face

Intersecting politics, places, and ideals—

making it travel in life and death wheels.

We are always making

and being made.

Dance is life, life is dance.

This path is never strayed.

Rush Varela photography courtesy of Heidi Duckler Dance – Brittany’s ‘Rewilding’ at Ebb & Flow: Chinatown Festival.

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Brittany Delany (she/her) was born in Boston, MA and is based in Los Angeles, CA. As she grew up playing sports and learning dance moves from Janet Jackson music videos, she found dance homes in several communities including hip-hop, jazz, contact improvisation, modern, and postmodern dance. She loves to research, teach, and perform around the world. Hip-hop aesthetics such as the break, satire, remix, cypher, one-upmanship, and innovation are key values in her choreography and movement. She has studied east coast and west coast styles and learned from some of the pioneers at hip-hop events around the world. Postmodern sensibilities of abstract composition and ‘everyday’ movement also underscore her approach and design. She has performed with dance companies and a constellation of artists and choreographers at CounterPulse, Highways Performance Space, Joshua Tree National Park, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Temescal Arts Center, among other stages and sites. She is founding co-director of GROUND SERIES dance & social justice collective. She holds a BA in Dance from Wesleyan University. With over a decade of experience working as a dancer, choreographer, event producer, and writer, Brittany values the power of imagination and teamwork. Connect with her at brittanydelany.weebly.com.

The post Always Making and Being Made appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Editorial Note: For the past nine years, Stance on Dance has asked a variety of dance artists at different points in their careers what “making it” means to them. Please join us in looking at what “making it” means as a dancer, artist, and human.

When I was finding my way, as we do when we are young, I don’t remember holding a concept of what it meant to make it. I didn’t look into my future. In my grade school years, I attended the Alvin Ailey Dance School when it was still in a tenement building on the Eastside of Manhattan near the Tramway. I loved to dance and perform Shakespeare at that time but never thought of what I would do when I grew up. I left Ailey when I was accepted into the Performing Arts High School and changed my major to theater. My mother, however, was clear about not wanting to see me play a slave on TV like Cicely Tyson. And, Diana Ross was beautiful, could sing, and that was why she was in the movies. So I best think of something to fall back on instead of an acting career.

At one point, I referred to myself as being on the bottom of the totem pole because I was Black, a woman, and an artist. I didn’t know what making it would look like for me. I didn’t even know I was a working-class actor until I was in my 40s and a student getting my BFA in Theater. One of my instructors, Mr. Jon Jory, formerly of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, gave a lecture on what it meant to be a working-class actor. I sat there and realized he was talking about me.

I had spent my whole life doing gigs of all kinds: Broadway show tours, a stand-in on movie sets, roles in devised, contemporary, and Shakespearean plays, a museum puppeteer. I just kept performing, teaching theater-related arts, and learning all things theater. However, I did know that all that I did had to relate to who I was as a performer.

Then, I landed a super gig and became a fulltime performer on salary with a per diem. This looked like making it. But while in recovery from tour burnout I asked myself, how was that for you? And what are you going to do now? Do I burn out some more to get the next big gig? Or do I find a way to create some sustainability by creating my brand. Invest in me so that I don’t have to fit into someone else’s vision to be successful.

This way of thinking was the beginning of my making it mindset. In addition to learning from others while working to create their vision, I also have to create my own. The fallback, as my mother would call it, would be working outside of my creative visions. To manifest my ideas as projects that sustain me not only financially but, above all, creatively. This is what the making it mindset has come to mean to me; a self-sustaining creative livelihood that affords me the way to continue to share visions.

Photo by Ahjo K. Sipowicz; This is an unfiltered image taken from Danielle’s performance in an empty storefront window called “Passing: Alchemical Moments of Body Space & Time.” The image is of her as two separate personas.

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Danielle Reddick landed in New Mexico after touring as a cast member of the International Broadway tour of STOMP. Before STOMP, she worked as an actor, solo performer, puppeteer, and percussionist. Danielle received her BFA in Theater at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. During her time in Santa Fe, Danielle became a certified fitness instructor, clinical hypnotherapist, and trained in the Feldenkrais Method and the Nia Technique. After 10 years as a group fitness instructor, Danielle has developed a way of individualizing somatic training for actors that she calls SoHyp (pronounced so-hip). Danielle has been a professional actor on stage and screen and is a member of SAG/AFTRA. She is a long-standing company member of Theater Grottesco, and co-owner of RedQuyn Zoom Productions: creating original work and performance salons called The RedQuyn Experience. Find her social media on Linktree at linktr.ee/Dani_SoHyp.

The post The Making It Mindset appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Editorial Note: For the past nine years, Stance on Dance has asked a variety of dance artists at different points in their careers what “making it” means to them. Please join us in looking at what “making it” means as a dancer, artist, and human.

What does being a dancer/ “making it” as a dancer mean? It keeps meaning different things as I get older. Here’s my journey of continuing to find new answers to that question. 

Age 3-8: Being a dancer seemed like being the ballerina in my music box; some other rarefied realm of glory and nothing but dance, tucked outside the mayhem of regular life. My memories are a whirlwind of ballet, the smell of old buildings with dusty floors, the Lycra, lace, changing rooms, pianos tinkling, and trying very hard to be good, to be better, to master the art. I thought being a dancer was a fairytale dream. 

Age 8-10: The royal academy of dance training of my formative years started to feel stifling, and my eye was drawn to the painted sets and wild costumes of the drama classes. I quit dance and dove headlong into acting, inhaling the funny language of Shakespearian scripts, magical characters, and the sacred black box theater where stories of all sorts came alive. I thought being a dancer was a prison of strict rules.

Age 11: Seeing the development of physical prowess in my former dancer friends led me into a flood of regret when I realized I had three years of training to catch up on. The desire to become physically masterful as a dancer consumed me. I dove into dance at my new middle school and worked so hard it became all I thought about. I thought being a dancer was being good at steps.

Age 12-16: My whole focus revolved about dance. I slipped into the school theater every lunch break to just submerge in the scent of that dusty sacred space and do my homework from the seats in the theater, looking out at the stage with wonder and thrill. I worked so hard that I was soon the youngest kid dancing with the highest level of the program, but it wasn’t enough; I knew I was still behind. I thought being a dancer was the coolest thing in the world.

Age 17: I quit the dance program at my school and enrolled in the local arts academy whose classes were more challenging and technical. I flailed but worked my butt off to catch up. I auditioned for a prestigious summer intensive and somehow got in though I was technically weak. I struggled throughout that program but was obsessed with the challenge. I thought being a dancer was incredibly hard and tantalizingly far out of reach.

Age 18: I went off to college on the east coast and was unprepared for living that far from my island home. I dove into the college dance program as my solace. The familiar rigor of the ballet barre and the hours of hard rehearsals got me through that semester until I dropped out at winter break in a mental tailspin. Being a dancer was the only place I felt comfortable. 

Age 19: I began a humbling period living back at home as a college drop-out after being an overachieving top student my whole life. It was an identity crisis. I dove back into dance at my local academy, and it gave me joy and community while I sorted out how to get myself back into college. Being a dancer was my family. 

Age 19-21: I enrolled in a new college on the west coast. I didn’t know what to study; I just didn’t want to waste this chance. I started an Art BA, meanwhile taking as many dance classes as I could and being cast in many concert pieces. As I dragged myself back to my dormitory every night in my sweaty leotard and plopped down to do homework, my roommate suggested that I seemed overjoyed spending so much time dancing, and that I could major in what I loved. The next morning, I stamped the forms to add a Dance Major. The choreography classes obsessed me. By junior year I was a studio rat, hanging around in the dance building every vacant period to dream up choreographic ideas to create on my fellow dancer friends. By senior year my passion was creating choreographic works, guiding dancers through processes, and inventing moving pictures for the stage. I thought being a dancer was the deepest way for me to express ideas and connect with and empower others.

Age 22-24: I was accepted on a full ride to a graduate program to get an MFA in Dance. Those two years were a whirlwind of finding my voice and empowering fellow dancers through the choreographic processes and pieces I created. I was collaborating not only with super talented dancers but also set designers, lighting designers, and composers to create the worlds of the works I imagined. It was insanely all-consuming and it was heaven. I thought my purpose in life was to empower other dancers through growth-provoking choreographic experiences and to move audiences with the realness of what was happening on stage. 

Age 24-26: I moved to a big city and was creating choreography with friends in their living rooms and through residencies at an underground theater. I was struggling to earn money, to pay rent, and to gather dancers together in the sprawling world of the city. I was finding myself unable to create choreographic work I truly believed in while having such a hard time just getting by. After an amazing choreographic residency that culminated in performing my work at a beautiful big-name theater, I made the painful decision to quit choreographing. I turned all my focus to growing my art career and surviving financially. I was losing sight of how to develop rich choreographic ideas with meaning to dancers and audiences as I struggled with the reality of being an adult. Dance felt like the furthest thing from practical.

Age 26-30: I worked like a maniac on my freelance art career and took up running, not dancing at all. I trained for years and then ran a marathon as my physical challenge. I developed a painting career and supplemented that income with work as a prop stylist, art teacher, and childcare professional. Being a dancer or a choreographer was a distant dream.

Age 30-31: I moved home to Maui. A few months later I saw a dance concert and I almost jumped out of my seat with the desire to dance. I took one class with the company and it was all still in me; the coordination, the groove, the joy, the feeling of being in love with the experience of my physical form in space and time. I was rusty, but it was all there. I felt healed by the very first class. I remembered that dancing is part of who I am and it is beyond all logic or explanation. 

Age 31-33: I trained fanatically to get back in dance shape, taking weekly ballet and modern classes for the first time in nearly 10 years. The sweat and the challenge made me feel madly alive in ways I had forgotten. I discovered my strength, remembered what it is to be in love with life through dancing, made an entirely new community of friends, and found my beauty. I inhabited my body with more supreme peace than I ever had. I began to teach classes and choreograph bits of work, inhabiting these roles with new purpose and clarity. Soon I was cast in a concert and performing a solo, feeling utter comfort in front of so many witnesses. By February 2020 I was performing in front of a crowd of nearly 3,800 people, and the grounding and freedom I felt in the middle of that sea of chaos was unbelievable. I found myself again by dancing. 

Pandemic March 2020-present: As COVID hit, I promptly quit dancing to pour myself into keeping my family’s business alive. On top of all that, I threw all my focus into growing my art career. I launched my own original textile business in May 2021, designing my paintings into fabric and selling yardage to clients all over the world who are transforming my paintings into wearable art. I am promoting my fabric with photos and videos of myself wearing it, and often I am dancing. My dancing body has become a vessel for sharing my new art with the world. I feel more integrated than ever.

I know now that I have always been connected to dance, though it continues to take new shapes all the time. It is always there, and it always will be. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

~~

Julia Allisson Cost was born, raised, and currently resides in upcountry Maui, Hawai’i. She comes from a family of many artists. She is a painter, textile designer, sewist, and dancer. See her work at juliacost.com.

The post Iterations of Being a Dancer appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY ZAHNA SIMON

When I was growing up, I wanted to be recognized for who I am, but I thought I had to live up to society’s expectations and ideals of “making it” as a “normal” person. I am not a normal person. I grew up oral, mainstreamed alone, and I was the only Deaf person around my hearing family, teachers and peers. I loved being involved in many activities even though I didn’t understand everything. I just minded my own business and accepted what it was. I often felt excluded from activities; when I asked questions, it was often responded with, “Never mind,” “I’ll tell you later,” or “It’s not important” – a typical Deaf experience for those in hearing atmospheres.

One time after school, I accompanied my friend to her ballet class. As I watched her class, I became attracted to the visual movement because there was not a lot of talking, especially less in comparison to any academic classes where I missed most of the information. While watching the class, I felt I could learn at the same time as everyone else instead of always being one step behind or left behind. As a Deaf woman/girl, society paints its own picture of what someone like me should be and act like. It felt oppressive when I really wanted them to accept me for who I am. Dance became my outlet to release the oppression and feel free to express who I am. When I performed onstage, people viewed me as a dancer, not as a person who is different. At that point in my life, that should have been enough to feel like I “made it.” Dancing saved my life and gave me the beautiful gift of expression and a place of belonging when I felt alone and isolated.

As I entered college, I thought that to be successful I needed to either join a ballet company, be a backup dancer for famous singers on TV/tour, and/or join a contemporary company like Alvin Ailey Dance Company or LINES (which I really did want to do). As I progressed through college, it became apparent that some people did not know how to interact with me as a Deaf person even though I went out of my way to make things as easy as possible for them. I was the only Deaf dancer I knew. I was content with it, even though it felt isolating, lonely and like others couldn’t connect with me because they didn’t understand my experiences. This was especially true for how I connect with music and rhythms, how I always adapt to the “hearing” way of dance and music. I spoke with my best friend in college, exhausted from having to always educate others around me, and told her, “I figured out my purpose in life; it’s to educate and change the world.”

After auditioning a few times and not being accepted in a dance group while everyone around me was telling me I should have gotten in, I scheduled a meeting with my professor, who was a highly prestigious legend in the dance world, to ask what I needed to improve on. My professor then started to say, “Well you do really well even though I know you have a hearing problem…” and then proceeded to say some other things but I didn’t catch any constructive feedback, or something specific I needed to work on, which led me to believe that I wasn’t accepted because they didn’t want to work with a Deaf person or, in their view, “a hearing problem.” I became bitter.

After I graduated, I decided not to pursue a professional dance career and instead focused on my career as a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry in San Diego. I did end up joining a few dance companies as my heart couldn’t stay away from dance, but that was scheduled around my full-time job. I loved my job, I loved my life, I was grateful for what I had, but I felt something was missing. I still had a dream to perform while traveling the world and dancing in a company with other Deaf dancers like me, both of which seemed impossible because I was the only Deaf dancer I knew at that time. I saw other dancer friends on Facebook who were dancing in professional companies and traveling the world, and I felt like I wanted to dance and do more with my life. But I was comfortable where I was, and I really did love my job as a chemist.

Then seven years ago, I had a health scare where I needed surgery to remove pre-cancerous cells. I woke up and realized I only have one life. I have the power to change it, to do things and be places that make me happy. I did exactly that. I quit my job as a chemist and decided to pursue my dance career full time. My first dance class after surgery was Antione Hunter’s class. It felt healing to meet and take a class from a Deaf dance teacher. To know there are others out there who have lived my experiences made me feel less alone. He invited me to perform in the second year of the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival. This was right when I moved back to San Francisco from San Diego. Through my involvement, I was inspired by meeting other Deaf dancers and Deaf artists with similar passions as mine. Often it feels like the arts world and the Deaf community are separate. In this festival, I felt my two worlds coming together and it felt like home. I knew from that moment that I wanted to invest my energy to be more involved and support this festival so that other Deaf dancers and artists have a place to call home where they have family. They are my family. Now I am a professional dancer, the assistant director of Urban Jazz Dance Company and the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival, and the office manager for a professional fiduciary office in San Francisco.

Every day, I’m grateful for my journey to happiness, passion, compassion and the power of the arts. Every day, I am grateful that I stepped outside my comfort zone to change my life for the better. Pre-COVID, I was traveling all over the world performing with Urban Jazz Dance Company, a mixed company with Deaf and hearing dancers. I ended up achieving exactly what I dreamed. In the process, we touch every place we go, educating and advocating for access for Deaf children and communities, teaching that differences are beautiful, and inspiring young Deaf children that they can achieve anything they put their minds to.

In the end, “making it” is doing what I love, following my passions, and not listening to society’s standards. There’s room for everyone; we can always make our own paths, never settle, and actively be happy. Live life to the fullest, as each of us only has one life.

Photo by RJ Muna

~~

A San Francisco native and Deaf from birth, Zahna Simon is honored Changemaker of 2018 at San Francisco Live Oak School, where she is an alumnus. She is a professional dancer, chemist, avid health nutritionist, researcher, Deaf advocate and Deaf interpreter. She is a former student at San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA), where she trained with Elvia Marta in modern, jazz, African, ballet, hip hop and choreography, as well as participating in Alonzo King’s LINES pre-professional summer programs. Upon graduating from SOTA in 2003, Zahna attended UCI, double majoring in Chemistry and Dance. At UCI, she trained and performed various dance styles, working with fellow peers, graduate students and distinguished faculty such as Lisa Naugle, David Allan and Donald McKayle. She has worked as a former chemist by day at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and dancer by night at various dance companies in San Diego, including being featured in KPBS TV and radio special “Deaf Dancer Performs in Trolley Dances.” Zahna relocated back to the Bay Area and worked her way diligently and passionately up to being the assistant director for Urban Jazz Dance Company and the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival under Antoine Hunter, founder and director. She is also a full-time office manager at a professional fiduciary office. She has been featured in Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher Magazine and Ikouii Creative’s book “Inside Their Studio.” She has performed with Kim Epifano, San Francisco Trolley Dances, Alameda Island City Waterways, and Man Dance Company in the Bay Area.  

To learn more about Urban Jazz Dance Company and the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival, visit www.realurbanjazzdance.com.

The post My Two Worlds Coming Together appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY DONNE “the Wychdokta” LEWIS

I was struck by sickness in early April. In July of 2020, as I write this, I am still in recovery from what was most likely COVID-19, though I have no proof. Due to a failure of the ER, I was not actually tested until long after I ceased to have a fever. This illness tries to steal my breath and, in fact, I am still suffering from asthma-like symptoms, something I never previously experienced. However, I am also one month into a virtual teacher training course for Pilates, which I expected to complete a year ago, in person. At that point on my time continuum, I had just completed a four-month self-directed artist residency in Belize, Central America from December 2018 through March of 2019, just after completing a month-long artist residency in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my home from the summer of 2006 to the fall of 2018.

While conducting sand dance development nearly eight hours a day/seven days a week in Belize, I envisioned staging a fully developed sand dance piece in a theater with a large audience. Likely nothing will ever compare to this time in my life, where daily trips to the farmer’s market and dancing in an open-air theater space were the staples of my agenda, to be interrupted only for coffee breaks or french fries from the downstairs food truck. Occasionally, the bats and mosquitoes attempted to evict me from this wondrous space at dusk. Most often, I won this battle, though the mosquitoes routinely left me wounded.

Opening for a new music festival, and producing a full concert for an art gallery show within the first six months of arriving in Washington DC, was supposed to be just the beginning of my journey to execute “Operation Dance Professional.” The tip of the iceberg, where I debuted my newfound melding of Reiki healing with sand dance as a movement meditation. That was before the concerts I’d planned, the benefits for which I’d volunteered, and a scheduled hospital artist residency, were all cancelled courtesy of COVID-19.

In 2020, “making it” as a dancer means something completely different to me than it did in the fall of 2018. In 2020, “making it” as a dancer means something completely different to every dance artist, worldwide, thanks to the coronavirus. Personally, I am more appreciative of the part-time office job that is keeping me fed and providing health insurance, and maybe even the Airbnb gig that paid for part of my rent in the pre-COVID days. My previously very narrow vision of stage and fame/acclaim has expanded to development, service to self and community, and gratitude for the opportunity to still be on the planet practicing my art.

Photo by Artis Moon Amarche

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Donne “the Wychdokta” Lewis is a Washington DC-based movement artist, and has been a dancer and musician for the past 20 years. She has spent the past five years developing the art of sand dance. She defines her version of this dance form as barefoot dancing on sand. Also a Reiki healing practitioner, Donne is on a journey to create a moving meditation, utilizing elements of dance, Pilates and other movement techniques to help guide herself and others through the inner landscape of the mind to improved mental and physical health.

Follow Donne at Instagram.com/wychdokta.

The post Still on the Planet Practicing My Art appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY LAUREN TIETZ

I arrive to this essay with a longing for ceremony

I arrive with the longing for dancing together, for the field of aliveness that is conjured when we gather to co-create with the language of the body

I arrive with my impossible longings to experience a society before gender apartheid, pre-racial apartheid, pre-patriarchy, pre-colonization – to touch balanced power and relative justice – just once, before pre-collective trauma

I arrive with my white skin color and privilege

I arrive with my female body

I arrive with my Jewish roots, my refugee great-grandparents 

I arrive with my love of jazz, postmodernism, Zen, orange poppies, desert datura blooms in the night  

I arrive with all my seeming contrasts

I arrive with gratitude for all my teachers

I arrive with my longing for agency without aggression, for leadership without arrogance, for collaboration without losing myself

I find myself in mid-life, looking back at the serpentine pathways I’ve followed that have often led me to earlier sources of inquiry, pleasure and healing. At each new return, there is the sense of coming home to fundamental questions of what is alive for me now: What moves me, what needs my curiosity and care?

Is it wholeness we seek when we are on the road to “making it?” To know the whole, to sense integration, we must become intimate with the fractures, the discarded years, the exiled parts, the wounded ones. Have I arrived when I feel wholeness, or have I arrived when I can recognize the fractures and offer them respite, invite them home, scoop them up with kindness? Have I made it when I practice true kindness, knowing the future will hold amnesia, trusting I will, most likely, remember and forget kindness, again and again? Is this amnesia the path? Is the path of practice itself necessarily a form of “making it?” I know I will lose the path periodically, perhaps unpredictably. Like now. In this pandemic, I am turning toward isolation, learning how to reach again in new ways, looking for new methods, re-remembering kindness and patience with myself, with my partner, with my family, with my art practices, with society, learning how to grieve, to listen, to remember to touch and to be touched, again.

In orienting to wholeness, how can we deepen our capacity for intimacy with perceived separateness? How can we build bridges between fractured elements – within the self, between self and the natural world (to which we belong), between self and other (to which we depend)? The space of dance, mitigated through the senses, through touch, sound, light, image and proprioception, affords a different relationship to reciprocity, to interrelatedness. It’s true in craniosacral therapy as well, where temporary moments of expansiveness or wholeness feel like a sort of healthy merging between self and world. It’s as if skin dissolves, and identity shifts from I-ness and they-ness to a shared field of We, and it can feel quite mythical, magical even. I don’t tend to be cavalier in naming those states. They are so precious. They are not mental constructs; they are direct experiences, felt through the body. They are not permanent. Yet, somehow, they remain in some way underneath everything else, regardless of what storms are brewing, what sands are shifting. I believe we need much more of this kind of magic in contemporary life. Maybe this is the space of ceremony, that we touch in healing and creative spaces. Perhaps without these pleasurable states of presence, sustainability feels almost impossible, and thus, the intergenerational traumas of war, racial apartheid, gender apartheid, etc. can seem endless? Without the nourishment of states of presence, of care, I don’t know how we can change from the inside. I don’t know how we “make it” as an individual or society.

So as dancers, perhaps we have a different view into the felt sense of becoming, of state shifts, of tracking internal landscapes, emerging from the body in relationship to the world around us. Rather than having “made it” to the top of the mountain (and at whose expense?), maybe we are practicing responsiveness, adaptability, awakening, and pause.

How can we ever sense the making without the non-making? In a society obsessed with productivity and progress, there seems so little space to tend to the other essential spaces – to slow down, pause, metabolize, transition – to a pivot, a redirection, a recalibration, a reversal even? Do we throw away winter, do we discard it, render it useless? “Making It.” Interesting that the phrase is so rooted in the material realm, to produce something, to make a tangible, identifiable, recognizable, categorizable thing. That which can be known. And what of the mystery? For something awake, alive and potent to emerge, it must have space. With space we can have perspective, and with perspective, we can reflect, and with reflection, insight is possible.

How do we nurture these spaces of integrated intelligence, these states of readiness, somatic embodied presence? How do we soften and allow the other places of tangents and discord, failed experiments, confusion or emptiness, and existential crisis to exist as well? This is what I am after at this stage. How do we include processes of dismantling, dissolving, getting lost, disorientation, emptiness, sickness and death? Where do they live inside us? In a culture that is so terrified of the awkward, the messy, emotional honesty, sickness and ultimately death, how can we honestly measure success? In measuring success, do we reject mistake-making, the illogical space of dreams, the unproductivity of night, the dormancy of winter, the deep restorative non-productivity of a siesta? Could cultivating that which supports honest practice be the goal, to “make it” so to speak?

There is an incredible relationship within dance to that which is fleeting and ephemeral. Naturally held within our practices, we find spaces for curiosity to lead to new directions, new relationships, small deaths and births. There is a sense of building more comfort with potential discomfort and with the unknown. There’s mystery at the heart of improvisational techniques. In a society that has lost the art of rituals for grieving (grief’s capacity to stretch its many arms in so many directions – sorrow, rage, collapse, longing, wailing, grasping, surrendering, davening), it is no small thing to practice a dance technique that requires some relationship to death and faith at its heart! As dancers, we birth this thing that is dissolving as quickly as it is being seen and taken in. Do dancers then have more intimacy with impermanence? Much like other cultures have known that to embrace death in some way is to embrace life, to know grief is an expression of deep love, a love of life. Mourning loss is a necessity if we want to be in the process of balancing, not balanced, not pre-defined, but allowed to exist in a state of becoming. Is this the practice of artistic sustainability?

This capacity to hold difference and continuums feels like a rarity these days in the white, male, hetero, Christian dominant culture of the West. How can we learn to embrace diversity within ourselves and within our own psyche when what has been modeled can be so toxic, when so many aspects of the dominant culture are built on fear and hatred toward difference, avoidance of interdisciplinarity, segregation, and competition? When hatred is taught to be directed inward in so many different insidious ways – judging good and bad through skin color, culture, body type, sexual orientation, ability, beauty and so on – how do we survive or succeed even, with such messages and experiences internalized? This brings us to emancipation, decolonization, the healing that we are each being asked to engage with personally and as a society right now.

What strikes me in thinking about this landscape of sensing and feeling through the agency of the body is the idea of a sister practice of emotional intelligence, the capacity to sense, discern and feel emotions with wisdom, grace and empowerment. Our capacity to cultivate inner emotional intelligence is essential in this path of intrapersonal decolonization. We know the ways in which society attacks, from a very young age (for boys the theory is that by age five many emotions are shut down), the very nature of our physiology, to have, feel and express emotions. Some of the cues are subtle and some are quite extreme. In a way, I’ve come to see one root of Western societal oppression that seems to be shared by many of us across the lines of gender, sexual orientation and race is oppression of emotions in early development. Self-hatred, shame, confusion and disempowerment are just some of the by-products of the suppression of learned healthy emotional expression. This societal preference for hiding feelings, for using numbness to suppress feelings, to shame and label emotions as bad, only results ultimately in more pain, intergenerational trauma, isolation and confusion. This form of emotional oppression coexists with gender apartheid, sexual violence, institutional racism, police brutality, poverty, homophobia, etc.

We must engage with the intrapersonal work of decolonizing. To turn towards the wounds and tend to them requires love and a kind of healing that is supported by the intimacy with ourselves that we develop with emotional intelligence. The additional oppressions, the traumas of social injustice that certain groups of people struggle with and survive each day, only adds to the challenge of healing, surviving and thriving. But without this deeply personal process of learning to sense and feel from within, to locate ourselves amidst the insanity, it is quite hard to transform the toxicity.

We must become more intimate with our emotions if we are to “make it” as a species. We must notice whom and what we banish. We must learn to whisper to the grief, the rage, the joy, the tender voices. Because this inner emotional landscape is an essential biology that is here to stay as we navigate pandemics and collaborations, communication patterns and our own relationship to self, inner and outer critics and allies alike. There is much to learn about our habits, about what trauma needs to heal, about our early patterning, our deeper longings for life, for future, for one another. “Making it,” beyond the superficial sense, must necessarily include a process of emancipation and maturation. Empathy and compassion, gateways to kindness and peace, depend on this.

Yet how can we work sustainably and envision a new way or a new society if we don’t have the time and space to both heal and to dream? The fact that this healing or dreaming space requires real privilege (economic, educational, time, space, etc.) is indicative of the problem at the very heart of our most unjust, most unequal economic system.

Dreaming is not productive in an economy such as ours. It is considered a waste of time, an indulgence, a non-linear approach that is inefficient. Yet to dream is perhaps both to touch a space of understanding of things as they are, on their own terms, and to enter the realm of the imagination that knows no limits. We need this as artists. And our society needs artists. Perhaps more now than ever! We need to see through the lens of sensing, feeling and imagining rather than the lens of progress, productivity and competition.

We value these spaces to dream and to vision much like we do winter’s apparent emptiness, like a relic, no longer relevant, forgetting the germination below. Or like the ancient process of navigating the seas by the stars alone, not efficient. In the dream space, I sometimes feel I have been welcomed into an old growth forest, and what we most need is held there, waiting for us, if only we could make the time, pause in our speaking to listen more to our own hearts that come alive in such quiet.

We find ourselves in this space of redirection, during COVID, amidst the protests, and our collapsing democracy with our own fragility near, as humans and artists. We are in relationship to our survival and our livelihoods, in relationship to the environments that have sustained us, and that is now in profound tumult, and to one another, rediscovering our interconnectedness in strange new ways, a concept our ancestors held in reverence, a practice some of us are only beginning to remember. How will we heal? How will we molt? How will we awaken? Is this the deathbed awakening, filled with grace, forgiveness and awe? Or perhaps, it’s a molting into a new phase of maturity, a new coordinate on this map to “making it,” wherever that might lead.

~~

Lauren Tietz is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, filmmaker, performer, choreographer, somatic movement teacher and craniosacral therapist. Her performative and cinematic collaborations with other artists have spanned mediums, styles and geographies from Austin, Texas, to New Mexico forests, to caves in Turkey, and to the Rio Grande along the Texas/Mexico border. Lauren completed her MFA at Transart Institute in 2011 and since then has directed and produced multiple experimental films where the body and its movements are the central protagonists. Her films have screened at festivals and galleries in NYC, Berlin, Austin and Cuba. Along with her private practice in craniosacral therapy she also teaches movement/dance classes and workshops in person and online. 

Follow her at laurentietz.com and earthskybodyworks.net.

The post “Making It” Beyond the Superficial appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY MADELYN BIVEN

It was my final semester in the Ailey/Fordham BFA program when a ballet teacher at the end of class one day asked what my plans were upon graduation. When I said I didn’t know (no dance jobs were lined up, no contract was signed), she looked at me for a moment and seemed puzzled. Then with fondness she said, “There is somewhere out there for you.”

I was struck in a funny way.  My future dance career felt certain yet ambiguous. I believed her.

There are many social moments we have as dancers—someone gives us a pretty compliment, the audience is in awe, a mother (not your own) cries from watching your performance—that attribute to our public identity. For me, pursuing the identity of being this kind of dancer made me feel utterly lost and left behind. I dipped into freelance work when I lived in the Bay Area and signed contracts for project-based work. But it was never my job to be in the studio all day all year long. The motivation to achieve this goal kept me training, but I always felt I was never in class enough. I felt I needed to be on stage more. I was insatiable. I began to think this is what it meant to be an artist; to be forever insatiable. A beautiful starve. A complex algorithm of desire I cannot decode about my very own self. A mystery breathing endlessly.

During my time pursuing a dance career in the continental US, the identity of the place I was born, Hawai’i, sat in the deepest folds of my heart. I was always homesick. I lived with a divide inside myself. I felt as though I was two halves that didn’t touch. Two full moons in one sky. I was lusciously seeking western forms of dance in my body, contemporary styles based off ballet and the anarchy of ballet, but I knew of no dance companies in Hawai’i. Hula seemed too low impact and simple bodied for my fire. I wanted to be a beast. I wanted high legs and silky floor work. I wanted to eat the space alive. And I didn’t want to give up ballet. But my physical body felt best at home on the islands. The humidity soothes my skin and opens my joints. The sea water puts waves and shapes into my hair. I feel as though my internal organs relax when I am at home and my nervous system detoxes from city noise. If I were to listen to my body, it would say, “Be in Hawai’i.”

Living and working on the continent, I longed for Hawaiian earth, but when I visited Hawai’i, I felt anxious like I was slacking off as a dancer. I was never whole.

Photo courtesy Contact Hawai’i

I decided to leave the Bay Area and return to O’ahu six years ago. But I didn’t stay. I have also lived in Los Angeles, Charlotte and Boston these six years. I was chasing love. I was running away from and toward it at the same time. There are not specific landmarks I recall which rerouted my path as a dancer, but I know that in moving to new places without an immediate connection to a dance community, I had to keep my dance alive on my own. The last thing I could do is not be a dancer, and not because it was my outward identity, but because it was how I made sense of the contradictions in this world.

Now in 2020 (and in my 30s), I feel no need to escape my body from the anxiety that I am not doing enough. Upon returning to Hawai’i, I have been invited to perform in both small and large-scale art shows, gallery spaces, and improvisational happenings. Most of my performance practice is currently improv-based, which is never something I sought out in pre-professional training. I am usually asked to “do whatever you want” when it comes to sharing solo dance work in a collaborative space. People who want to work with me as a dancer trust me as an artist. And I finally trust myself.

The division I felt inside for years has become a deep crevasse and now possibilities coexist rather than separate me. I think artists live constantly between dualities; thus, art makes its way to us through the cracks of our world. It is the nurture of nature which grows an artist, not an everlasting starvation. The notion of “making it” kind of floats away from me. I cannot grasp it. I would say I have made it out of something in my mind and into something else. And if I find myself to be idealess at times, I listen to that, as ideas also need the space to rest and breathe.

Photo courtesy Contact Hawai’i

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Madelyn Biven performs, teaches, and researches movement-based work. Upon moving home to Hawai’i in 2017, she has been a dancer in the Honolulu Biennial, O’ahu Fringe (as a guest with electroViolet), Peiling Kao Dances Home Season, Maui Dance Festival, and Contact Hawai’i, an annual exhibition exploring the notion of foreign contact as it relates to the Hawaiian Islands. Madelyn developed and performed work for Hawai’i-based collectives Paradise Cove and Aupuni Space. She currently teaches ballet in Kailua on the island of O’ahu.

The post Trusting the Dance, Navigating the Divide appeared first on Stance on Dance.