For the month of April I have decided to unpack Just Before {an old project of mine} in order to move forward with making new work. Do you have any of those? Old dances or projects that you closed the door on but they never closed the door on you?
Just Before was unlike any other project I’ve created. For the month of April I plan to explain and explore why. I’ll share my process, notes from my journal at that time, and notes and drawings from the artists I was working with–Yari Alcaraz, Keren Ganin-Pinto, Jaclyn Thompson and Yen-Fang Yu, with Levi Gonzalez as our mentor. It was a part of my residency as an Outer/Space Artist with DTW in the spring of 2009.
The two main questions we hung in the air were:
| What is a limit?
| How does one find a right way to live?
Just Before was mysterious. Two days after the final showing in June I ended up in the ER with a ruptured ovarian cyst. While not a broken limb, it was an injury all the same. It’s taken me two years to recover and, now, be able to write about it publicly. My dancing is different because of it. The way I make dances is different. Just as dancers talk about injury as informing the way they move, the incident and the sequence of events that led up to the instance has changed me forever.
I hope you find something, too, for yourself and your process as I embark on this excavation adventure. As Nikki McClure instructs in Remember {a seasonal journal} for spring:
Dig. The soil is deep.
.
.
A scan of a copy of a photo for which I have no source. If someone does, please send it to me, and sincere apologies to the photographer.
