By Native American tradition, I am in the ‘Mother’ phase of my life. And yet, I am not a literal mother of human children at this time. However, I am certainly am called to give birth to ‘Project Babies’ all the time and this is one of the ways that I am fulfilling this mothering nature that I do so strongly resonate with right now.
The collaboration that I did with Phase 2 Dance Ensemble is the most recent performance project that I have given birth to and it was quite the journey for me personally. I really am looking, all the time, for healing/growth/expansion opportunities and I find them everywhere in life. This project was no different.
I had just seen Amy Steinberg in concert at Center for Spiritual Living, Dallas. I shot video of the concert and was editing her footage just prior to working on this. At the same time, I had started doing booking for Robin Hackett. So, I was listening to nothing but these two and inspired like crazy while I was listening. It just made sense to marry the two and make a baby! : ) So, Kim Jackson of Phase 2 and I agreed that I would be setting the piece on their company. I would also join the company to dance in some group sections. SUPER FUN!
My idea was to use the 45 min time slot that we had a the City Arts Festival to present an improvisational dance structure, around 35 min in length, using their music. After much more listening to Robin Hackett and Amy Steinberg, I found a string of 8 songs that best fit a story that I could connect with personally. Made sense to me! : ) So, I went ahead and started developing the improvisational structures for each section. My idea also included some sort of narration in between songs to tie things together, but I wasn’t clear about that yet. I just knew it would all work itself out.
This ‘knowing that it would work out’ process went on for a frighteningly long time. I was going back and forth and back and forth about using all sorts of combinations of myself, friend Anne and Kim as the narration and nothing felt quite right….I couldn’t make the story work. So, I went round and round. As I went around again, I noticed a thought had come up again and it continued to come up again and again. The thought was that I ‘shouldn’t dance at all and I should be the only narrator’. I had the thought very early on, but stuffed it quickly because I had a lot of resistance to ‘not dancing’. So, I quickly discounted the intuition and moved on to looking for the RIGHT answer. : )
Five days before the performance I went to bed asking ‘What’s Up? Am I suppose to dance or narrate or what???’ The next day I fell on the stairs and injured my tailbone and it became clear within the coming hours that I would not be dancing in four days. I wasn’t even really sad. I just got it finally. And had to laugh. : )
So, what my intuition free flowed forth once I allowed myself to just narrate was that I should just simply be real!!! That I should tell the story of my own experiences that inspired me to string these songs together, sort of like snapshots from my life. I decided to call it ‘Pictures of My Evolving Love’ and I took snapshots from my perspective on the stage. I was as excited as anybody to see how this improvisational dance would unfold within the boundaries I’d set! Super exciting fun!
Here is a look at the second section of the piece in a video. The photos at the beginning at some of the shots I took from the stage. : ) MUSIC: ‘ Hitchhiker’ by Robin Hackett.
My Point: You don’t have to fall on your a$$ to ‘get real’! You could just listen the first 10 tens your intuition nudges you!!! : ) I swear to you that the day I injured my tailbone, I open my Florence Scovell-Shinn book to page 187 of her complete writings to find this quote:::: ‘ Misfortune is the result of our failure to stick to the things that Spirit has revealed through intuition. ~~Florence Scovell-Shinn
