Colleen Leonardi

Divorcing Form from Content

I had a BIG light bulb moment this week. It was my 33 birthday. I’ve been writing a lot this year and dancing and making dances less. This has been a struggle for me. Who am I? What kind of artist am I? Lots of little old dance teacher voices in my head going off saying, ‘You’re not a dancer if you don’t dance! You’re not a choreographer if you don’t choreograph!’

Then this week I listened to a radio program about a writer and her journey into writing full-time. She spoke of how she used to make things and then realized one day that what she was making was actually meant to live in the form of the written word. She realized she could divorce the content from the form in which she was making and simply shift over into the form that was calling her—writing and words.

The content was the same. The form was different.

This resonated with me. On the eve of my birthday with the moon almost full, I realized I have permission to divorce my content from the form of dance and move it into writing. This doesn’t mean I’ll never make dances again. It just means that I’ll be focusing my artistic energies in a different way. And I plan to be open to where that takes me. The form I move into will be my art. Divorcing form from content = my art.

And if it’s not pure enough for some, then so be it. I love choreographing but it’s so much like writing stories to me. And I need to choreograph and move to be free in writing. By divorcing myself from the restrictions of the form of dance {and the voices of the dance teachers in my head} I can embark on a journey where the two are married, where I am much more whole, and where I am defining the form and the home in which it lives.

This means I’m closing down choreoJournal. All new (and old) writings on both dance, writing, yoga and more can be found at: colleenleonardi.com. I hope you’ll join me there.

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Happiness Happens

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I celebrated a birthday this week, so I'm extra happy. But I also finished reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. I saw the book in a store, checked it out of the library and picked it up and put it down in the 'return to the library' basket more than once.

I'm skeptical of projects like this. But something was tempting about the notion of working towards happiness. What was it? Lately, happiness has been happening, and I suppose that's why I was attracted to this book. This week I read through it and flagged pages here and there. It's about a writer working, over the course of a year, to imbue her already-seemingly happy life with the things, people, actions, ideas, etc. that make her happy. And it works for her.

What made me reluctant to drop so fully into Rubin's theory of happiness as a project is that, from the look of the book, it made more of a novelty of happiness than I prefer---that happiness is something to be bought or gained or thought about a lot in the mind rather than fully experienced by the body and the heart. It seemed like a very Western approach towards achieving contentment and fulfillment.

I have to say, though, that after reading it, The Happiness Project presents a way into the body, mind and heart that reminds me a lot of a committed yoga practice. It encourages one to really identify and work towards being more aware of being loving, kind, generous, appreciative, articulate and compassionate. All of these states do inspire more happiness. And a yoga practice encourages an individual to tap into and find these very same states. In my mind, what is key between both yoga and The Happiness Project is that you at least have a practice. That's what I picked up from this book.

I used to think happiness was all around you, waiting to be discovered. If you were lucky, the gold dust of joy would sprinkle itself all over you as you walked through the world. And I stress the word lucky because I thought it was something that happened to you. It took me a long time to realize that happiness is self-generated. Happiness is all around you, but you have to work to see it and, more importantly, feel it every day. We know what it feels like to feel stress every day {unless you're on vacation!}. What does it feel like to feel happiness every day?

For me, yoga, breathing and having a daily creative practice adds to my feeling happy. Some days happiness isn't happening, and that's okay. Because the mere fact that happiness happens means that it is happening to others. That should make you happy but also trust that it will happen to you again soon. You just have to step into the practice of making space for its happening. Happiness is a verb.

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| Think of what makes you happy. Now think of why it makes you happy and what happens when you're happy, how that happiness feels in your body. Make a list of the whys and associated feelings in your body. Commit to closing your eyes and imagining one moment of happiness from the list, each and every day.

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"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure not this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." ~Yeats

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What Happens When You Haven't Made a Dance In a While

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| Your desire to make the dance exceeds the making of the dance.

| 15 minutes of crafting a sequence of movement feels like a long time.

| Food becomes a predominant distraction, like: What will I make for dinner? Where do I want to go for lunch after this?

| You are more sensitive to people walking by the room and seeing you try to make the dance.

| Everything is possible fodder—you become like a sponge soaking up inspiration in the room.

| Moments of Yes occur now and then. These trump the moments of desire. They are raw and quickening, like silver or something, and they carry you forward like a swing.

| Getting attached to that Yes moment, though, can bring you backwards, too, like a swing, to where you started.

| Something feels incomplete.

| You have dreams of other dances you’ve seen and created, all mashed up.

| Sometimes you make other things. You don’t make a dance. And this feels good.

| When people ask, ‘What are you working on now,’ you try confidently to answer fully but know you are lying. You don’t know what you’re working on just yet. You don’t know how the effort to make is working on you. All you know is that it is.

| Stringing the moments of Yes together results in a section, and it starts to feel like a wormhole…that section does.

| You wonder, too, if you are any good at making dances and if it even matters, if anyone even cares.

| The unmade dance haunts you.

| Each day is an opportunity for surprise.

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What Happens When YOU Make A Dance?