Bringing That Part of Me Back Online
This morning I woke up to some nasty comments on my latest dance reel, set to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. Thank God I have a policy of deleting comments that are just outright mean, so you won't be able to see them anymore. But it got me thinking about a few things, and in a strange way I'm even a little thankful to those internet trolls — they pushed me to dive a bit deeper into my own why. Why I create the way I do in general, and in particular when it comes to those dance reels.
What's interesting is that when I allowed myself to express to this song, to feel my rage and dance it, I had trouble editing the footage at first.
I had to let it sit for a while before going back to it. My own inner demons were raising their heads, giving me a clear warning not to share it with the world. Or maybe it wasn't my inner demons at all — maybe it was my inner critic, trying to keep me safe. Fortunately, I've learned to keep those voices in the background of my mind and to keep my focus on what actually interests me: creating from instinct, expressing freely, in this case through movement.
Allowing things to be imperfect, raw, wild.
Especially when it comes to certain performance pieces — mainly dance or movement-based — I'm interested in the emotional charge, in the shapes the body makes, in the abstract story being told. I'm certainly not interested in a meaningless, pretty dance. That doesn't mean I haven't had some fun ones in the series too.
Right now I'm at dance 39, and I'm intending to complete 100 dances within the next three months.
Giving it this kind of focus feels right to me — I like having a project to sink into for a while, a chance to go deeper into this specific branch of my work and explore it with more awareness. I started this series a few years back, feeling the need to bring a certain part of me back online. The part that loves to dance, that loves to express and feel emotions through movement, and that even as a teenager didn't really care what others thought of her once she hit the dance floor.
I feel we all deserve a place where we can be wild, where we let our guards fall and move from something more instinctual, rather than staying caught up in our intellect all day, figuring our lives out.
For me this is personally important, because it shows me there's still life force left, despite the chronic health issues I deal with daily. Very few things make me feel more empowered than this. It's about acknowledging emotional states, playing with them, giving them artistic expression — turning dance into a kind of performance art piece, or whatever you want to call it. The point is, this is as much about emotional expression as it is about blurring the lines between dance, dance-theatre, and performance art. It's about having my own artistic stance, rooted in instinct, improvisation, and imagination.
I'm well aware that some people feel very uncomfortable with parts of my work, especially the physical, intense expressions. I've gotten quite a bit of pushback over the years. It shows clearly how uncomfortable our society still is with anything that isn't pretty, that's unfiltered, untamed. All of this is built on more than 30 years of experience in dance, movement, improvisation, and physical theatre — it's not random, even when it looks unhinged. Maybe the only real difference now is that I'm more able to defend my own work, because I know why I'm creating what I'm creating.