Colleen Leonardi

Spending Time Mending Things at The Seasoned Farmhouse

.

I love where I live for the living. I've been able to craft a very unique life for myself in Columbus, Ohio. My life-long passion for dance and writing continues to find its core here. It's cool. 

About four years ago I decided it was time to return to a third passion of mine - cooking and food. Since that time I've ushered Edible Columbus into being as editor and a main contributor to the magazine. It's been fun. And it's softened me up to the practice of growing your own food and farming. My earthy interests are sated, to be sure, whenever I'm working on an issue. 

It was also at that time that I decided to dive into yoga. I was longing for a spiritual dialogue and a safe, non-judgemental place to be with my body. I found Yoga on High, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and feel like a lucky duck to be teaching there and a part of the community. 

There have been questions the whole way as to what I'm making. A dance? A magazine? A community? An article? A blog post? A yoga class? I've fallen towards and away from the labels these conjure (dancer, choreographer, writer, blogger, teacher, editor, yogi) in search of some identity that might tie me to some community.

Yet the truth of the matter is I'm on my own with this work and creative research. I'm looking at dance as it relates to yoga as it relates to sustainable food and farming as it relates to writing and editing on my own. I've come round the bend of the realization that my community of collaborative dance-makers doesn't live where I do. The people who ignite my imagination and keep my heart happy when choreographing live in other places, for the most part. And while I love food and farming I'm really just a home cook growing basil in her backyard. I don't go hang out on a farm with other farmers pretending to be a farmer. (That would be funny.) Most of the time I'm holed up at my desk writing and researching, a solitary practice I love more often than I abhor. And the word yogi... well, I've never felt it suited me. I do my yoga. That's it. 

So what do I do when my community of dance-makers doesn't live where I do? How do I continue to choreograph? And how do the various materials of my choreographic life choreograph me? 

These are questions I aim to burn through when I present my solo Spending Time Mending Things at The Seasoned Farmhouse on June 1. I presented this solo a year ago in Chicago at Links Hall in "The Wrecking Project." It was there that choreographer Christy Funsch suggested I throw cooking in the mix. So I plan to do just that. Along with dancing there will be the contemplative movement of cooking and the action of writing. All of these textures - recipes, writings and more - will come together in some kind of handmade program meant to act like a little book. 

I've invited people privately as it's a small space and I can't cook for more than 25 people. (If I had the help of someone like my Mom, maybe.) I'm thinking of it like a ritual, a wedding of sorts, designed to marry these worlds of mine and the questions that keep me in these worlds. 

It's an experiment I hope to continue each season in some way. The Seasoned Farmhouse is a beautiful spot and I know from my work with Edible Columbus that there is beautiful, homegrown food to be had here in Ohio. If I can bring these earthy aspects together with my writer's mind, dancer's heart and yoga practice, if I can play in the meditation the joining of these elements will surely offer, then I will have good information for what comes next. 

Because I don't know where this work and creative research is taking me, toward what or whom or when. And that's how I like it. 

.

"This is the great mystery of the soul: Whenever something is being accomplished, it is also in some way being undone." 

~Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul

.

.

Photos by Ryan Bourque

Body to Body | Three

.

.

.

.

.

.

\ And the photography of Colleen Leonard, which I found when I googled myself and left off the "i" in my last name. I'm particularly taken with the "Moving Land" series. Bella, bella. 

On Creative Retreat. On Creative. On.

.

I am going on a creative retreat for the month of March. 

I plan to work on my collaboration with Chet Domitz, my performance for the month of May at The Seasoned Farmhouse, a special issue of Edible Columbus and a special offering of Yoga for the Creative Class. I'm also excited about teaching at the Governor's Institute on the Arts in Vermont again this year. So some of my time this spring will be devoted to preparing to work with all the amazing students and faculty. 

Sometimes you just need a break. The muse is calling. 

See you in a month! 

.

.

"The Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera said he painted because that was what he did. He was like a tree that bears a certain type of fruit; in his case the fruit was painting." ~Susan Gordon Lydon from Knitting Heaven and Earth

"Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts. But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying." ~Robert Rauschenberg in the New York Times as quoted in Knitting Heaven and Earth

Body to Body | Two

.

\ The poem "And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud" by Christian Wiman

/ >>>>>>>Shimmer<<<<<<<<< The concept, feeling, phenomena - everything

\A video of Ann Hamilton's "event of a thread" 

 "Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency; not only in words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body." ~Walt Whitman

“Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history is not everything." ~Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“On average, there are 333 days of sun every year in Los Angeles.”~James Frey, Bright Shiny Morning (p. 389)

"People cut themselves off from their ties to the old life when they come to Los Angeles. They are looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn't do anywhere else."  --Tom Brady, the grandson of slaves, whose 1973 election as Los Angeles's first black mayor resulted in an unprecedented twenty-year tenure and the establishment of the city's Museum of Contemporary Art (p. ix).~from Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene in the 1960s by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

/ The Irish poem "The Woman of Beare" as translated by Stephen Gwynn

\ The Irish poem "The Bog Lands" by William A. Byrne 

The Dance of Dancing

.

"Are you still dancing?" 

I get this question a lot. 

This question baffles me for what it suggests in terms of the myths and assumptions people have around being a dancer. It also saddens me and, quite frankly, bruises me to the bone. 

I am of the mind that you can train to be a dancer and remain a dancer even after you stop dancing. It's the same way I think about being a choreographer. You can be working as an editor (as I do) and still be exercising the lens of choreography through which you see the world. These are innate abilities, I think, and when cultivated and massaged (and sometimes beaten to death) lead people in and out of the profession of dancing for a company, or starting a company of their own and dancing, or just dancing around when they feel the urge. For me, all of this qualifies people as being dancers and yes - dancing. 

When people ask me this question I immediately provide some context. I make my own work, so I dance in my own work. I don't dance for other people. And yes, I'm working on a project now, so - to answer your question- I am dancing. 

But even this leaves me feeling like I have to buttress this term dancer with evidence of dancing, as if somewhere someplace all the real dancers are dancing 24/7 and I just came from there - look, I'll show you the sweat under my arms. 

If I haven't danced in the last 24 hours of being asked that question, am I a dancer? If the person who is asking me the question hasn't seen me or my work for over six months, isn't it curious that they ask me if I'm still dancing?

Because all they knew of me was that I was a dancer and I danced. And they, too, are a dancer and dance. So if I've left the dance with them, wherever that may be, does that mean I've stopped dancing? Certainly with them. But what about other dances with other dancers? 

Was I always dancing in their head whenever they thought of me, a tiny Colleen bobbing around and spinning? And now that they see me in this new context with a different job they wonder, Is she still dancing, because now she does something else? 

(Whew. These questions really have me going...)

Packed into my parsing of this is the assumption, too, that if I do claim the title dancer there must be some place I do it. Usually, that's the second question I get. Oh, so where do you dance? 

In my kitchen. In the park. At a restaurant I visited last week with my husband. At my desk after finishing an article. On the way home from the bank. In Chicago last year at Links Hall. Somewhere in Columbus this year - not sure yet. And so on...

So not only do I find myself having to somehow validate that yes, I have danced recently and so I am a dancer, but I have to prove where I last did it so the person asking can locate in their mind, and perhaps in real life, where I might be found dancing. 

It's as if if I'm not doing it right then and there and that person can't seek me out somewhere to see me dancing, well, then... am I dancing? As if what we dancers do is this ephemeral ritual (and it is, isn't it?) that needs to be justified so people believe it's a real thing real people do. 

Why does this bruise me to the bone so?

When I get asked by colleagues who know my work and my dancing I feel as if they don't really know my work and why I dance. I feel like I've fallen out of favor with the club because I'm not proving myself like everyone else by dancing around all the time.

When I get asked by people who don't know me as well I feel how deep the misunderstanding is in our culture for the practice of not only dancing, but moving and being accepting of the body as an expressive thing meant to shift and share non-verbal ideas on a daily basis, sometimes for performance, but often times not. 

Because really, when I start to think about it, living is dancing to me. And people are dancers. And someone asking me that question is a little dance we engage in for a moment - a moment for which I am always very grateful. 

I will always be a dancer. And so will you, if you want to.

You don't have to be one. (My husband would readily deny he is a dancer, but he is SO MUCH a dancer and inspires me in our living room all the time!)

Be the dancer you want to be. Don't let anyone deny you of the living dance you are.

Living is dancing. I will go to my grave believing that, and dancing! 

(Photo by © Ryan Bourque) 

Body to Body | One

.

One of the creative projects I'm working on this year is a collaboration with art scholar and writer Chet Domitz. I've loosely titled it Body to Body. We've collected some bits of inspiration over these last few cold and snowy weeks. I share them below for continued inspiration. 

.

/ Freedom

\ Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World. – Christopher Columbus, 1493

/ Distance

\ Searching

/ Winter is reality, summer is illusion. –Toivo Pekkanen

\ Happiness

/ Love

"...his cultural and psychic distance, his disconnections from the center of meaning."

"...painting is performance"

"David was, to a large extent, a self-imposed exile, hurt by being excluded, but too proud and resentful to declare his desire to return. Brookner elaborates on the blow to his ego and lack of an artistic community David felt to be truly worthy of him."

"It was the product of the artist reveling in the horizon, when he embraced his marginal status and the freedom the literal distance from the Parisian center afforded. In this manner, there is an “unreality,” a theatrical or performative quality to these works."

"...it demonstrates how one’s marginality may be a source of beauty and resistance." 

"...The sun, a handmaid to the distance, was an accomplice. At the risk of sounding trite: It made people feel good, and does so still today." 

"It is a significant symptom of illness in an economic system that it cannot take advantage of existing productive forces and foster their growth, that it wastes the talents and abilities of the population” (HN, p. 299). So where does the creative energy go? What does one do with the excesses of his or her talents and abilities that are overlooked, disregarded, or denied?" 

"Labor, freed from private property, simultaneously engages all our senses and capacities, in short, all our ‘human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving.’ When labor and production are conceived in this expanded form, crossing all the domains of life, bodies can never be eclipsed and subordinated to any transcendent measure or power (HN, p. 38)." 

from Chet Domitz's essay "Love in the Horizon: the Late Mythological Paintings of Jacques-Louis David" 

\ the withdrawal of reality  =  performance