I am a dance maker. I was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada (the small blue-collar city across the river from Detroit) raised in a picturesque town on Lake Huron, and educated in Detroit and Ohio. Today, I live and work in Chicago. I tacitly consider myself a “citizen” of the Great Lakes rather than of either of the two bordering nations.
As a child, I found an overwhelming connection between my perceptions of myself –my movement and my creative process – and the activity of the lakes; this sense still persists today at forty.
Observing the daily change in flow, color, texture and wave pattern, I witness a convergence of wild energy, an innate organizing principle informed by gravity, spirals, and the relationship of fluid to earth. The waves repeat their pattern again and again, unified in their directional eagerness toward the shore, without ever repeating the same wave. Lulled into a meditative state, I recognize in the lakes the hypnotic, baffling simultaneity of structured and unstructured, making and unmaking, rolling over each other in rhythmic, absorbing composition. As much as my formal education and professional experience in dance have influenced me, the shoreline and its movement, sounds, repetition, change, and quiet urgency inform my own movement and choreographic impulses to an incredible extent – perhaps most especially in Stamina of Curiosity.
I talk about my work a lot (in classes, post-show discussions and public gatherings) but for the last ten years most of my writing has occurred in a reductive process of translating my work into grant proposals, press releases and program notes. I turn to my journal (where grocery lists and reminders to pay my taxes occupy the same space as choreographic notes) with decreasing diligence.
A few years ago, I began drawing as the primary document of my creative process. Through drawing I am able to witness my impulses without holding myself to the same standards of expertise I do when I dance, where the expectations of training and “professionalism” makes it harder for me to access my beginner’s mind – that state where discovery and wonder hold court over strategy and dogma. I enjoy the opportunity drawing gives me to set aside my ego (or the convoluted lens of dance critique or theory) in favor of moving inner experience onto marks on a page. Though I value exposure, transparency, and vulnerability in my performances, my creative process is becoming increasingly private (mysterious, tender, delicate) as words become less trustworthy advocates for communicating it with the authenticity I love. Drawing, so much more like movement than grant proposal writing, takes me away from the trap of intellectualizing or analyzing each action. Yet, unlike movement, a drawing is captured on the page in the moment it’s being created. Through this practice, now done in community with my ensemble, I reflect on and organize the intrinsic energies and images that inform and prompt the identifiable physical movements that then are organized into phrases. These phrases become the building blocks (the vocabulary) of choreographed work or the evolving language of dances that I spontaneously compose.
Stamina of Curiosity is both choreographed and spontaneously composed, a paradox I hope to chronicle here, among many other things. My process with the ensemble revolves around and returns again and again to our embodied question of how to remain new to the process of moment-by-moment discovery, even when the work’s composition asks for extreme specificity. We are finding, as many have done before us, that the mindful pursuit of specificity spirals into expansiveness and the presence of overwhelming options. Likewise, befriending the apparent chaos of expansiveness leads inevitably to making personal choices that, over time and with attention, become increasingly subtle. I suppose this is what I learned from my early, untrained meditations at the edges of Lake Huron—to observe what is before me and, simultaneously, what is changing, growing, deciding, releasing within me as I observe.
It’s an honor to be participating in Odd and Audacious. Until next time…
Man, was it grand. In that single first bar, I felt like Jamaica was honored better than anyone else ever could honor that country and its rich musical history.
I am really looking forward to the Judy Collins concert. I will never forget the first time I heard her voice. I was a student at Alverno and I walked into the cafeteria for breakfast. The kitchen had the radio on and Judy Collins was singing, “Both Sides Now”. Her voice was so pure, sweet, and calming. I was enchanted with her voice. Since then I’ve been a big fan. I continue to listen to her music and this will be my first concert seeing Judy Collins. So, I’m really excited.