The worst blogger in the world...

Once upon a time I was good at blogging semi regularly. These days not so much. Blame it on the crazy schedule as a freelance artist, the changing seasons, the fact that for once I am intact and in great physically functioning state... whatever! 

Today is Luminarium's fifth birthday and I'm so proud of what Merli and I have done in the past few years- artistically, sustainably, there is an every day need  to keep forging ahead with momentum and vigor in this profession, so every now and then I can clear my head of the daily work and realize what we have actually accomplished. Here's to many more multiples of five years!

The biggest news besides Luminarium turning five today is that very soon I'm breaking ground on my Masters of Fine Arts degree (focusing on Interdisciplinary Arts) at Goddard College. I've wanted an MFA for a long time, not so much for status and letters but for the chance to submerse myself back in process and identity and how who I am is reflected in the art I make. It's been so easy to dismiss going back to school for the sake of time, money, schedule, but the low-residency format of this program allows me to maintain my life as a professional artist at home while also allowing myself to get back in the pool of learning. I'm so looking forward to continued learning, self improvement and an additional new community to join. It's easy to forget that everyone always has more to learn and the ability to grow. 

In choreography land there's lots happening: I showed a snippet of brand new rough work at the Luminarium Gala on Sunday (nerve-wracking but ultimately great), but that deserves its own post. 

Below is a mysterious sneak peek at a second new work I'm starting tonight. (Yes, I managed that tiny amount of sewing all by myself - I'm very handy in every other medium, just lousy with thread!)

Write it down, move forward!

Note:  Apparently since my blog template is so old, I can't use a jump break to shorten this novel.  Since it's mostly for my own brain and the sake of recording various life experiences I apologize for the millions of words.

I disappeared from blog-land from most of 2014 as much of the year was fairly traumatic.

Just over one year ago I decided to finally get to the bottom of some excruciating hip pain.  I can deal with a great amount of discomfort and pain as someone in the dance industry, but it had gone too far even for my pain tolerance.  The first ortho doctor I went to was puzzled. Yes, I'd had snapping hip syndrome and osteoarthritis in said hip for years since a college-era injury, no it wasn't the same pain.  Doc #1 was seriously resistant to declare it anything but a strained hip flexor.  Maybe it was because I walked in with my own theories, but he didn't want to do x-rays or other testing and recommended chiropractic and PT (I added in acupuncture, just for the sake of the experiment). All of the above, many more appointments, thousands of dollars and two cortisone shots later, guess what... no improvement!

Around that point in time I started feeling legitimately crazy, and not ridiculous normal creative/ADHD/zany Kim crazy.  Every time I got into my car and turned the volume up on NPR there seemed to be the same feature on chronic pain for this whole entire week in March. How could something unreal make me writhe in pain (yes, turns out that expression's real) on the couch for 20 minutes until a dose of the nearest pain killer kicked in? I vividly remember Russell staring at me in concern as I left him at the cash register, literally crawling out of a Home Depot into our car because I misjudged the window of time I was covered with medicine. It was bad! Too many times I found myself biting my lip and deep breathing through a rehearsal for one of the musicals I was working on because my medicine time-window was up and I felt far too unprofessional to excuse myself from a rehearsal.. this usually ended in holding a straight face until I shut my car door, and crying and yelling until I could get home and medicated.

After some research and with some additional urging from family and a couple close friends I swapped over the Sports Medicine Department at Children's Hospital.  Finally someone prescribed me a better anti-inflammatory painkiller and ordered an MRI!  Doctor #2 was so wonderful and called me at home with the results once he got to examine them.  The initial diagnosis was that I had a pre-fracture in the neck of my femur and had signs of a labral tear. Gross. After running for several months on Boston streets I wasn't surprised.  The initial goal was to clear it up by no activity, rough, but doable.

Five weeks later, no improvement, it was time for a followup MRI - otherwise known as the entire day I spent bouncing about Longwood scared out of my mind!  After getting into scrubs and trying to keep my toes pointed inwards in the MRI tube for far too long, I expected checking out and hitting Starbucks before my followup to discuss results with Doctor #2.  Instead I got a concerned looking technician asking me to wait in the waiting room, not answering any of my questions but taking the initiative to reschedule my followup appointment until later that afternoon.  I was instructed to pick up a mystery phone with no buttons, where Doctor #2 (from his office across the street) told me they had spotted a mysterious lesion hiding on the underside of my femur neck and could I please come back in two hours to be squeezed in for CT scans? Sure... what else was I going to say?

Around that time I was both trying to distract myself by using every single app I ever downloaded on my iPhone, stupid or not, and frantically texting a handful of people to share my internal freak out.  I killed my fully charged phone battery by 1pm, spent far too much money on a charger at CVS, scowled at a burrito, got two iced coffees (only one caffeinated) and awkwardly cried by myself in my car.  The last of that list is atypical for me, but realize by that point I thought I had some crazy bone tumor that was going to just devour my body whole.

Good news, bad news.  Post CT scans I ran across the street to visit Doctor #2 who was running over 2 hours late only to discover that yes, I had a tumor in the neck of my femur, but also it was completely benign.  Meet the osteoid osteoma... a tricky little bastard that lurks in the long bones, vertebrae and jaw bones of teens and young adults with the sole purpose of causing pain.  Boom.  In the late summer I went to Doctor #3 for a consult for surgery to remove it, and a short time after that I showed up at Beth Israel Deaconess, took off all my jewelry, got hooked up with some crazy drugs, hit the anesthesia, and woke up minus my tiny bony tumor friend, after it had been burned out of my femur bone.  I spent two days confined to oxycodone and the couch, where Russell brought me anything I needed, Merli came over with an activity bag full of presents to open on the hour to cure boredom, and Jenn & Christos showed up for some evening entertainment.  I'm hugely spoiled and lucky to have a great group of people in my life! Fast forward two days, and my mom came to take me out for the day.... and I realized while walking about I was both medicine and PAIN FREE! A couple of weeks later my mom and I were walking the entirety of Manhattan.  I will never forget that feeling of freedom.

Through the rest of 2014 Doctor #2 determined I still had the labral tear in my hip cartilage, but with a lot of attention spent on my muscle imbalances and a few appointments with the WIZARD known as Barry Meklir (Muscular Solutions in Coolidge Coorner - just go!), I was able to cancel the serious surgery planned with Doctor #4. Hard work!

I'll cut short the rest of the saga.  It's February 16, I feel GREAT and I never thought I would get here.  I'm working every single day to strengthen, stretch, workout hard and get everything under control after a year or more of inactivity.  It was a scary, sad and sometimes hopeless year (though marked with many great accomplishments and happenings in the world outside the hip), but it's over and I'm in control!

a poem from the bathtub

Weightless nothing,

but structure.
What
infinitely tiny colony built these rigid chambers,

left these crispy solid wisps
that
bob and wave, but don’t.

Exoskeleton of a creature that never existed.

The moment washed away as my soggy leg circles the drain.

Scowling at a misplaced nail file,
as it lazily drifts around the whirlpool; realizing it
is
actually
a small sliver of soap.






 **Disclaimer: I am not a poet, but I like to steep in long baths that morph me (even more so) into an idealist that writes poem-reflections. The self-imposed consequence of the risk I took of dropping my iPhone into the bubble-ridden bath water was that I posted this poem, which might possibly suck upon later examination.  Enjoy?**

8 months later...

I knew I hadn't blogged in forever, but I was hugely surprised to see that it's been nearly 8 months. A great many things have gone down in 8 months, and perhaps I'll gloss upon them to the sake of keeping records, but the sole point of this blog entry is to serve as a gateway blog post. 

Here's to establishing consistency...

Laying on top of my bed frantically scribbling the ideas that are pouring out of my brain, and unsure whether that's due to the cloudy cold dreary weather, or because I've been thinking heavily about the brilliant poet lost today. 

A recommendation

Staying up too late because:

1- BBC's Sherlock is the most genius thing ever 

and

2- The episodes all seem to be 1.5 hrs long (which I appreciate but dont help the case of bed time).

Clean slate excitement

Coming to you live from my brand-newly renovated bedroom (still in process, actually as I need to paint all the doors)!

I'm savoring a tingly moment laying in bed on freshly washed sheets within freshly painted and constructed walls. Space! It's everywhere! 

For anyone stumbling across this post who doesn't regularly indulge my griping on the woes and glory of diy construction, the abstract is three and a half years ago we bought a house under foreclosure in a boston neighborhood that needed a complete overhaul. The most recent project is making a beautiful feel-good bedroom with a usable closet that had a chance of housing my unnecessarily large amount of things to wear. The preexisting bedroom was tiny, perhaps 8'x15', and had a laughably small space to hang clothes (I refuse to call it a closet). Luckily there was a strange L-shaped room next door, and the shared wall wasn't load-bearing.  In January we moved our queen-sized bed into my 10'x12' home office (!! I won't mention what became of my productivity in these last few months), and broke out the sledgehammers and contractor trash bags.

Fast-forward through weekends full of demo and hauling Sheetrock, joint compound and the Sisyphus-reminiscent task of eradicating the constant snowfall of dust from the entire house, and the whole month of February where Russell was away on a business trip and I kept trying to get rid of the dust (nemesis!).  Flash back to me in my clean-sheeted bed facing a brand new direction (bed/chair/desk alignment in any given room is a huge deal to my brain), with super saturated cool-Brown walls and gleaming shiny white trim and reconstructed radiators (I'm a painting boss, no modesty). Awesome new bronze light fixtures hang overhead, but most importantly in my direct line of sight are four doors blocking the way to a spacious new closet! 

This is certainly the best moment of home ownership. Even though it's seriously rough gutting every room in the house, getting to live this feeling upon completion of each room in the house provides complete validation.

Now, how to decorate...

Contently unsettled

It's late, but not as late as it's been on many other late nights.

I'm tired, but too wired to sleep.

After a full day of painting and hip related appointments and moments I declared myself free of both things, flinging myself on the couch to read after rehearsal, and yet now I'm upstairs painting with a sore hip. 

Too much symmetry that's not symmetrical at all.

Something refreshing in dance-film-ville

Here is short film that's been circulating Facebook-land.  Maybe you've seen it already but I wanted to leave it here because I think it's beautiful.  

Often (opinion) dance films are strangely void of, well, dance.  Possibly over half of the dance on camera I seek out seems to be comprised of hand gestures, artistic shots or pedestrian movement, but not a lot of bodies moving in athletic, intricate, choreographed ways.  The other half of the time I find myself watching a dance that has consequently been filmed, as is, for the stage, which doesn't really quality as a dance film.  

The selection below melds beautiful vigorous movement with a solid argument for being a film piece, not live work.  The choreography holds equal weight to the choices made in setting up the shots, the location, the music, the costuming, the editing.  Everything is genuine, intentional, any hand on a body (one's own or the other's) is super deliberate... refreshing.  All of the components are incredibly well balanced and actually deserve to be a semi-narrative film piece that can be categorized as a dance film. 

Valtari- Written & Directed by Christian Larson. Choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Now, is the top removal near the end a bit cliche?  Maybe.  I could very well be sick and tired of people taking off their clothes onstage in dance/theater/perf art, just for the hell of it.  Then again it's kind of nice that the pair of dancers has the naked torso skin-on-skin happening.  Doesn't it feel really lovely to lay your bare back against someone else's?  Yep.  

Also-also, does the warehouse setting remind anyone else of a post-apocalyptic version of the game Portal?

Strikes a chord

Give yourself 19 minutes and check this out. It's nice to have someone speak so accurately and eloquently about something I've been thinking about/worried about/questioning for years, though if you read this blog you probably know me too well to consider me an introvert, in fact, you probably think of me as semi-obnoxious.

The Fox

Ok.  Last Friday I was listening to a weekly music show on NPR, and they unleashed this bad boy.  I thought it was great, until I saw the video, and I fell even more madly in love with these crazy Norwegians that make songs about foxes.  If you're bored at least make it to a chorus...

Tech week anthem, anyone?  How quickly will this become annoying...

(answer: never.)

But what if you're playing video games as an outcome of distraction?

Interesting article on how to rebuild an attention span.  Unfortunately I can't find the time or focus to finish it right now so I'll have to get to it later.  If anyone gets through it and can answer the question in the subject of this blog post let me know.

Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura [sprettsaˈtura] is an Italian word originating from Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".^[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".^[2] Sprezzatura has also been described "as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance".^[3]

The word has entered the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "studied carelessness".^[4]

(definition stolen from Wikipedia after I happened upon this new world!)

Secrets & Motion duet in Plath land... it's complicated.

There is something beautiful about someone that hits the highest of highs and lowest of lows.  Maybe it's awful (first-hand) to swing through life in that manner, but it's also how to experience all that the process of living can offer.  Cue Sylvia Plath.  

I read The Bell Jar in late elementary school (before I quite understood the subject matter, though I made it my goal to explore all the same), and most recently revisited the Unabridged Journals as I tried to make my way through a new duet I'm creating for Secrets & Motion.  The duet transpires between two female dancers/characters with a very complicated relationship.  One has a secret that both know; the piece explores the brain space between the two and the mental decisions on how to reveal the secret, who reveals the secret and why.  After developing the initial concept I looked to Plath as I remembered a seed of authenticity in the following quote:

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.” 

No, this quote doesn't donate subject matter to the duet in its action words, but more in its honest coinciding duality.  It depicts a quick moment of realization as words are tumbling out into a waiting ear, the very human quick change of opinion when it feels like you can't turn back for (self) fear of contradiction.

I began the rehearsal process with improv based on having my female dancers take turns restricting their bodies to face away from the audience.  That became stale in the duration of one rehearsal.  Fortunately (at the same time as I was rereading the Plath Journals) Luminarium was invited to a 'musing' (sort of an open rehearsal) with our dear friends at Monkeyhouse, where I presented the main ideas behind this piece as an experimental movement exercise.  The movers paired up and each duo magically found a different way to express the duet relationship.  Some used parallel movements, some translated their partner through pedestrian gestures, some brought in vocally-made sound and breath, some went in two separate directions!  How wonderful it is to have such resources...  Combine an array of Monkeyhouse/Luminarium explorations in movement with a reread of word-inspiration and I was ready to face rehearsals once more.

I won't keep elaborating on the rehearsal process, since we are only two weeks out from the show (come!) but I will speak on a few deliberate choices I've made.  I've decided not to painstakingly explain the relationship between the dancers.  This means that lots of audience members will approach me after the show eager to share their theories on the two being lovers, enemies, etc etc etc.  It is what it is, but it's also increasingly harder for two females to dance together onstage without a label of any sort!   I've also decided not to overly share the plot with the audience.  Yes, there is a secret that is dangerously on the verge of being shared against ones will, but is it for her own good?  Is the share instead catty and destructive?  To harm or to help?  Either way is it right?  The true embodiment of Facebook's "it's complicated" status (yep, I went there).  Sorry audience members, perhaps there aren't right answers or perhaps you are resolute in your solution to the danced plot... but I promise you'll be ok, even without my clarification.

--

To end, here are some quotes from the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath that are either great reading, or that freak me out as they are intensely similar to my own life and ways of living it...  The similarities will end, however, before my head ends up in an oven.

I promise...

"Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning. ...

I love people.  Everybody.  I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection.  Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.  My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either.  I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.  But I am not omniscent.  I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have.  And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and critiicizing life and take the easy way out.  To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn; this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love. ...

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life.  I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."

Gray area

Day one of a multi-week employment hiatus between summer jobs and fall.  This is both the pro and con of being associated with the field of education/kids.  My biggest problem right now is finding balance.  I haven't had a day off or an actual vacation in.... I don't even know.  When I took a day off during the year it was most likely to do something else for another job!  I'm currently trying to balance being responsible/getting my house in order, four brand new pieces of choreography, producing a festival, trying to take a moment to relax, searching for a new stimulating day job, catching up on work for the multiple orgs I am committed to, and so much more.

This sounds complain-y, but it's not, exactly.  I love most of the things I am currently doing, I just don't exactly love that I have zero free time.  There are a lot of gray areas, since sometimes I consider working on choreography or a new project using free time, buttttt it's also work to an extent.

So.  Before I really start rambling, the goal is to get boring work done, get the exciting work done, and carve out a tiny chunk of time just for me over the next couple of weeks.  Additional sleep would probably be good, but we are heading into 24-Hr ChoreoFest so...

How can anyone not like a sailor musical?

Sheepish.

THIS brilliant video makes me want a goat about a thousand times more than I already wanted one, which is bad since I was already at Veruca Salt levels of want.  While supposedly the animal in the video is a sheep (really?!), nothing gets me like a sassy or semi-violent goat.

PRANCERCISE

This is my favorite video of the moment.  Props to this woman for hitting it hard.

I'm pretty sure this isn't just exercise, it's older people go-to dance repertory for weddings, checking out a concert, maybe the occasional community center mixer...

Here is a decent Prancercise article.

Then again, while I giggle at this poor entrepreneurial woman and her exercise strategy, I did invent 'mouncing time' as a child... like pouncing, just with an M.  Go figure.

What we do to stay fit... sigh.

mollusks for all of us

This is awesome... although I guess they can chew through cement and might carry meningitis, two things that are debatably not awesome.  Not sure why i have such a serious love of mollusks.

poetry schmoetry

I was on a recent kid poem kick for a random reason, and I've been filtering through a lot of Shel Silverstein. Obviously every kid is exposed to his poems through grade school, but I was never really interested in spending a lot of time reading his writings.  Anyways, found the selection below in my word wanderings, and I'm just not sure how I feel about it.  For kids, sure, but it seems overly obvious and 'life-advice-y' in a sense that if anyone questioned it, I don't think the questions could be answered. I don't like wasted words, I often question my choices and I value others' opinions as someone who often questions their choices/decisions.  

Dear Mr. Shel Silverstein,

Speaking from current and historic self-experience, what if your voice is really indecisive?  What if it has good intuition, but is vague beyond that?  I need directions to back up instincts sometimes, where do those come from, careful guesswork?  What if I like running my trickier thoughts by friends and people that every now and then just know better?  What if I am too cautious to follow these inner clues and I miss out?

This is either a waste of time or a needed procrastination device.  You decide.