blog (January, 2007)
sprouts (staring at the sun)
What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward-nothing collapses; And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (14.)
Maybe that's the idea.
I'm part of a performance tonight in tribute to Masumi Hayashi. Our vignette is the last of four about dealing with loss:
Confirmation, the letting go, the moving on.
Confirmation?
I'm sticking in (new(dew)-due-)difficulty with the openness of improv.
In which moment does indirection decide?
In finding freedom's focus, and does it hold tension?
then big and brilliant
I'm battling just to keep up in the ballet class I began last week. Thrown to the wolves is essential for learning, though, and helps teach more than just the skill at hand.
I'm overly self-conscious, and shrink when doing something at which I'm inept. I tighten into a little ball (physically and meta-) and chant disappearance incantations.
Don't want to show it until I've got it...
But teacher wouldn't have it.
Be big, she directed me:
Be big and bad,
then big and better,
then big and brilliant.
Why rehearse shyness while waiting on precision?
It's something I know about and have writ-intended before, but reminders with different twists keep trickling in. Jenita suggests: be generous (the performance isn't for or about you.) Hope@SAFMOD harps on practicing to perform (because you'll perform the way you've practiced.) Paul Buchheit recently wrote: "Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough" (and "Good enough" is the enemy of "At all"!)
You have length in those arms, she said.
Use it.
Make me jealous of it.
Antaeus: Close to Home
I'm performing in one piece of a program this Thursday-Sunday with Antaeus Dance at Cleveland Public Theatre.
I don't tend to play these things up, or talk much about them at all, but I'm privileged to be performing with this group, these friends, and excited about all of the local talent and original work in the show.