Eat, Pray, Love

I love the book, I love Elizabeth Gilbert. I believe that she gave an account of her year traveling and spun it toward grace and revelation within her own aesthetic values the way that all of us who make things do.
But that movie is complete shit balls.

New Feet

I had a body work session with Chiara this morning. I cried, I talked about what I was feeling, I imaged, I mobilized energy blockages, and then I got to have new feet all day. I took my new feet on the first walking meditation of my life. I blissed out on my new feet. I ENJOYED standing. I walked slowly, slowly, slowly around Capitol Hill. I let my feet spread out on the ground for the first time in my memory. Descending the stairs was a full five minute adventure. The front of my ankles let go. It was incredible.  My face had more color in the mirror and my eyes were brighter. I was shiny and new and I walked around thinking, "I think I just love everybody."
Then I got stalked by a scary man in Trader Joe's who was clearly magnetized by my shiny newness.  He followed me around the store and then got in line behind me at the checkout, standing right up on me. I mouthed to the checker that he was following me and she stalled him while I made my get away.
I ducked into Madison Market and called my mom while I calmed down. I tried to hold onto my new feet but it was hard to talk, worry, and feel the energy flow down and out of my feet. Plus, I remembered Chiara telling me to practice just letting everything go.
I got my feet back some on my slow walk home. I thought, "Wow, the Universe sends tests right away." Then I saw a tiny long haired dog going poop on the sidewalk. It had a little poop dangling from it's fur and I thought, "Oh good, the Universe sends jokes too."
Got the feet back at home with the shoes off. Lost them again at Victrola doing homework. Back really strongly in the bath. Currently, replaying the Trader Joe's stalker to Adam over dinner has spun my mind off into the Vritti's and they feel the most gone yet. I'm trying to just let it be, and to be gentle with the experience of anxiety high up in my chest after experiences of calmness, soothing, and grounding. I know that is just how it goes at first with anxiety.

I proposed to Chiara, but she already has a boyfriend.

Next Dance Cinema

Whoops! I forgot to tell you that a dance film by Randi Courtmanch, which I danced in, was screened at the Northwest Film Forum as part of Velocity's Next Fest series. I had to miss it because I've been taking so much time off of work for yoga training weekends that mama is broke.
If you had to miss it like I did... here it is!

traces from Randi Courtmanch on Vimeo.

Also me!

Also me!

Also me

Old Shit

I have so much bullshit surrounding my body.

I haven't been a good blogger because I've been deep in Yoga Teacher Training for the last month and even deeper in excruciating knee pain. I have got so much bullshit surrounding my body.  I left the first weekend of teacher training giddy. I felt that I had found a body-based community that celebrated all bodies, stretchy or stiff. I felt that my work in yoga was around unlearning the body hatred I learned in dance as well as decriminalizing my spoon-shaped feet, boulder filled hip flexors, and forward curving shoulders. There has been a month between that weekend and this weekend, which is the second intensive training pod, and in that time my knee injury has switched faces (literally there is a new pathology) and doubt has swum so entirely inside of me. I am in constant pain and the list of poses I cannot put my body in has more than doubled. This weekend is so much harder for me in so many ways. I feel I'm the worst yogi in the room. I feel that this pain and this overuse injury (what use?!, I'm barely moving it) are my fault. I feel that I'm supposed to know how to fix my knees myself. I feel that if I had better facility in my body I wouldn't be in this pain. I feel that my teachers don't think I'm physically good enough to be a yoga teacher.  This is some Old Shit.
Though I have never had an injury that is this mother fucking painful before the feeling that my body is an obstacle is nowhere near new. Here is the Truth (with a capital T) - I can dance like a mother fucker. I get the magic. I can communicate through the perceptual vehicle of dance. I'm a good mother fucking dancer. But I have always been a shitty technician. Put me on a stage and I'm in my element one-hundred-percentipede. Put me in the studio and I'm a laundry list of inadequacies: no core support, bound up little feet, hyper-extension (which I worked for, by the way, because everyone else had it), very tight and bound up hips... blah blah blah. Who's fucking joke is this that I should have this shitty body and only want to move it? I know that I would take the magic over the facility any day of the week. I know that there are cattle call auditions bursting with killer technicians who don't have that magic authorship of the body that makes dance artists captivating. But God dammit, can't I just have a little of that? If not that can't I at least be pain free? Please, God?
I left training today and got right into Adam's car and sobbed. Sobbed and sobbed. Sobbed for the physical pain, the mental pain, and for the fear and confusion of it all. Is this pain yoga centered, or would it have still shown up if I hadn't started practicing and kept dance as my body intention? Is it just a joke to think that I could even teach, let alone get good at yoga? Isn't that not very yogic of yoga?
I am so full of doubt and I miss my friend Paris. The yoga sutras tell me that doubt is an obstacle. They offer that meditation on someone who has transcended what I have not can be beneficial. If I can't have faith in myself, can I have faith in someone else, with myself (and even further - someone else who is also me)? I know my mind is so tricky. I can watch it spin off into the vrittis. I know that no matter which thought starts the train it will inevitably end up in self doubt. There is no thought that I can't view through my own fear that I am not worthy of it.... So it's me and Ghandi on the couch tonight. I've got ice on both knees, a pillow under my bruised tailbone, tears on my face, and ghandi on my computer screen. Soon it will be me, and Ghandi, and whiskey - because Ghandi can do whatever he wants.

In honor of old shit and to remind myself that I have always embraced the grit, blurred edges, and non-polished aspects of being human because I know that we need them in order to bond with each other, I offer two things. First some words from Lenard Cohen that my Teacher Beth Award read in class at the exact moment I could most receive them and second, an old DIY film I made at my mom's house in california with her point and shoot digital camera.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen

Unpopular Opinion

I don't love Cristian Rizzo's work. I know it's sacrilege in this town where everyone is falling all over themselves in praise of him.  Adam and I went to see his piece b.c, janvier 1545, fontainebleau.  at On The Boards this last weekend. The work was a solo for dancer Julie Guibert though it was simultaneously a duet for Guibert and Rizzo. This is the second time I've had the opportunity to witness Rizzo's staged work and the two experiences feel so similar. He creates the most meticulous and striking visuals on the stage. Both times the set has been multi-layered, shifted during the performance and provided a changing landscape. Both times I have really loved looking at the set on the stage.  What I long for in Rizzo's work, I think, is for the performers to change along with the props. I long for a surprise.
In last weekends work the curtain opens on a Guibert laying on a table with her back to us. The floor is covered in candles. Rizzo is a cross between a modern day skateboarder, an aristocrat, and a bunny rabbit. He watches her then he s-l-o-w-l-y picks up two candles and places them on the table. Right away I know what we're in for here. She will repeat a phrase and perform variations on it and he will watch her and collect the candles. But dammit there are so many candles.  I'm agitated in my seat. I don't want to sit here and watch the candle collecting. This is potentially a great place to put me in. This agitated state can be a great place to speak to me. Make me think its one thing and the BAM show me it isn't. Agitate me for long enough that the most minute satisfaction will feel colossal and then here I am in the experience of being moved by something that would normally not even register on my radar. But no, he picks up all the candles as she repeats the phrase and its variations.
Julie Guibert has an incredible facility.  Her performance is full of astounding and elegant feats of strength. Watching this understated Olympian-ness was refreshing. I kept recalling a performance at last years NorthWest New Works festival where a company made a work based around really brazen feats of strength and how I kept wanting them to be more impossible. If the message is "look at how incredibly impressive this is" I wanted it to be fucking impossible to understand. But Guibert, who broadcast no ego that night, left me awestruck. This is the nature of my thoughts as I watch her move. I'm thinking things like "that is so much harder than it looks" and "now this phrase is in this facing". With the exception of two birdlike arm flaps by Rizzo, which engaged me most of anything in the evening, I relate to the movement in an almost scholastic capacity.
I wanted more from the night which went like this: A woman lies on a table and begins to move while things around her exit. The candles leave. The props leave. The hanging sculptures leave. The man pulling the strings leaves. The curtain closes and when it opens again she is alone in the pure white room, finally. She is looking at us, finally. And I think, aw - now the piece can begin! But it's over and the crowd is going fucking ape shit. He comes out and bows and is just adorable without his bunny mask on.
I leave as unsatisfied as I left his work the last time. Yet I know I will see him again if I get the opportunity. I think this is why - though I don't leave steeped in that Spoken To Through Art feeling, I do know with complete certainty that what I have witnessed is crafted, made with meticulous intention and thought, and most importantly it is sincere.  It is made sincerely and it is offered sincerely and that is always a gift. A rare gift and an inspiring one.

Your Welcome

More dance talk coming tomorrow.

Just make something happen.

I went to see the last installment Here/Now http://www.herenowonline.blogspot.com/ which is a totally cool movement/music/improvisation/performance experiment where a musician and a dancer are randomly paired to improvise an on-the-spot performance.
What I saw there solidified something for me - Just make something happen.
Anything. Just make anything happen. I really do mean THING here, anyTHING. The pieces which were successful for me that evening were the ones in which a series of events were easy to identify... even shitty events. Now she has her hands in her pockets...  Now is the part where her foot is stuck to the lid of the vase which is in the middle of the floor...  Now she and the musician are kicking the lid back and forth to each other... etc.  Even the most inane details are so interesting when they hint at a story. Dance works (that night or out in the wide world of set choreography) that are stocked full of endless abstracted dance movement just don't keep in the room with them.  I space out. I feel the weight of everything about dance that irks me. I start to dance in my head. I'm not there. But even the lamest action which marks an impending change keeps me engaged.  I'm in my seat like And then what?... And then what?.... And then what?
Let's get a few things straight here:
I don't mean story in a literal way. I don't even like story in a literal way. I am the one who will not get the story if one is presented, wont read the program notes before seeing the show, and don't want to read any reviews of anything ever. If you try to tell me a literal story with your show chances are that I won't get very much out of your show. That is just who I am and what I look for in art. 
I mean Story as a series of episodes or actions. I mean A Series Of Episodes Or Actions as ways that the audience gets to witness the changing focus, intent, emotional space, or vibration of the performer(s). I have an idea that this witnessing can distract us from our own guardedness and our own expectations about art and being moved so that a real interaction with the art can take place. If your a smart maker, you'll use the momentum of story to engage and entertain while sneaking in the temporal information, to you know, make the art. 
But that's just my opinion.

Also, many of the musicians, with a few really wonderful exceptions, didn't seem to  know how to improvise with their dancer.  Some stashed themselves in a corner and didn't even check out what the dancer was doing. One ran around the stage with signs. The signs had sounds written on them that the audience was to make. It was a super clever idea that I think could have been successful with a softer execution, but that night it was only successful at avoiding an improvised duet entirely.

There were some big generalizations in the night for me:
1- dancers want to touch the musicians
2- musicians don't want to touch the dancers
3- it can be difficult to have faith in something long enough to develop it
4- just make something happen

Go to Here/Now! It's a totally cool experience. I give everyone mad props for taking the risk and seeing what comes out of them on the spot and with a stranger (and potentially out of their element)! I'd love to be a part of it. I found it to be a great tool for my choreographic brain to root out what I am drawn to on stage. Just go.

Damn, Tony Robbins!

Via my mom...
A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken a new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided. ~Tony Robbins

More about that later...

Anniversary Gift

Speaking of Adam Kozie, who is my boyfriend...
He isn't moved by dance. Those are his own words.
What is it about dance that befuddles people? Is there another art form that gets this kind of black listing? Are there people out there who don't like music, or movies, or photographs? Miguel Gutierrez talks about a Perceptual Intelligence. He asserts that we can train our audience to have a perceptual intelligence in part by assuming that they already have one. By not dumbing down the work so that everyone feels that they "get it" we can create an opportunity for people to actually engage with the work and to cultivate a new sensibility. At least that is what I took him to mean. After spending some time around him I feel quite certain that he would let me know in a heartbeat if, in fact, that was not what he meant.  I think another hefty factor is that a lot of folks only get exposed to shitty fucking dance.
For the most part I feel fine about the smaller artistic community around dance. I like that it is a special club and that we dancers and dance lovers generally relate to the world in similar ways. But Adam Kozie is my long time boyfriend and his not being moved by dance puts a bee in my fucking bonnet. This dance making thing is an essential part of my genetic make up. I am who I am because and in spite of it. It is the reason I'm on the planet and I now know first hand how devastating it is to remove it from me.  How can my love not be moved by the thing I love, and in fact, am? Is there any planet on which this is acceptable? As you can see I've got a lot of questions.
A couple years ago on our first anniversary, I made Adam an anniversary dance called Big Year. I had two goals: to make a dance with an old shitty point and shoot digital camera and to move him, you know, with dance. Our first anniversary was this cruddy time in our relationship. It had a real Are we gonna do this, or not? kind of feeling and I felt it really strongly while making the dance. I cried over and over again while editing. I had hoped that the directness of it would help the "moved" bit along. This is just from me to you.
I don't think that I was successful in moving Adam, but I am curious about what came out of it. I did things I might not let myself do for public consumption and I like that. Most profoundly it is a marker in time for me. Yes, that is just the way it was. Phew, it is not that way anymore.



Adam is also an incredible drummer (INCREDIBLE), who you can check out here with a project called X-Ray Press http://www.xraypress.net/, though I think you'll dig 'em a whole lot more if you go here http://www.myspace.com/xraypress and play the song Chord & Mumble.

Ps-
Adam did really enjoy Diana Szeinblum's Alaska (which is fucking incredible) and had more to say about it on our way out of the theater than I did. And I love to talk shop more than anything!
You can pay On The Boards five bucks and stream it here http://www.ontheboards.tv/alaska BUT I tried it and had to wait for it to load every minute or so even after trying it on windows which Adam says is better with those things. Fair Warning.

Hooray!

No meniscal tear for me! Just an over use injury!
Physical Therapy! I love Physical Therapy! Apparently I don't know how to use my very strong rotators and that causes my knees to track poorly. At Cornish I "learned" that my bony structure was such that my knees would just track poorly...
What The Fuck, Peeps?
I was like: Wait a minute, are you telling me that I can learn not to do this anymore?
and he was like: of course!?
phew.

Today's sermon comes from Adam Kozie, who is not only a super fox, but one of the coolest human beings that I have ever known. It's an idea I've been obsessed with for many, many years now:

amen.

Cake - a first draft of a first section

Dear Knees,

Hey sugar pops, I love you. Come on into the body. I can't wait for you to get here. Come on Left Knee I've got a space all ready for you. It's going to be great. We're going to dance again. We are going to dance on stages and the lights are just going to drip over us. We are going to make big works about even bigger ideas. We're going to jump and fall and belly flop. That dance engine that is made up of all those bodies pushing against the pattern of time and space, entrance and exit, deeply articulated and making a weather system of wind in the room - we're going to be a part of that. Come on in. 
We're going to teach too. We get to learn all about the Yogis. We get the immense luxury of saturated study. We get to go: Body Mind Desire Intent! Body Mind Desire Intent! So come on into the body. We get to teach other knees. We get to encourage other knees into their bodies. We get to be a part of everyone's homecoming. I can't wait for you to arrive. Hey - Neck and Jaw, you guys come too!
We don't need to be afraid of greatness. We don't need to be afraid of being awful. We don't need to be afraid that we don't believe in ourselves. We don't need to be afraid that we are arrogant. We don't need to be afraid of being seen. We don't need to be afraid of being overlooked. We don't need to be afraid of our uniqueness. We don't need to be afraid of our cliches. We don't need to be afraid of our needs. We don't need to be afraid of what we disregard. We don't need to be afraid of our mistakes. We don't need to be afraid of the fruits of our labor. We don't need to be afraid of the results of our work. We don't need to be afraid of shifting our weight. We don't need to be afraid of bending. We don't need to be afraid of leaning forward. We don't need to be afraid of stepping forward. We don't need to be afraid of moving forward. We don't need to be afraid of being forward. We don't need to be afraid.

I love you guys,
Lasara

Calling Out

You guys,

I went to the doctor on Tuesday about some increasing pain in my left knee. It's really preliminary, but it looks like I may have a meniscal tear. Which is knee surgery. Which is a straight leg for months. Which is a lot of rehab. The next step is to head to a Sports Med and see what they say, then to have an MRI. I'm a server with no health insurance and I'm really freaked out. Don't even know how to make these next steps happen.
I'm also all set to begin a Yoga Teacher Training in October, start work on a show with Paris Hurley, and make something of my own - and Mother Fucker I want it.

So I'm calling out to you. Give me all the mojo, healing tinctures, positive thoughts, prayers to God, laying on of hands, and whatever else you've got. I really need it.

love-Lasara

Dance Film!

Randi Courtmanch is a dancer. Randi makes dance films, real ones with real cameras that she actually knows how to use. I'm so jealous. 
A few months ago I danced in a room with Randi Courtmanch and a few video cameras while she followed me around offering suggestions of things to consider while dancing and situations to imagine. This is the second time I've done one of her films and I always really enjoy it.

I just saw this film for the first time and I think it's so great! She had shared it with a film class and received some negative feedback and I'm giving a fat WHATEVER! to that. (I could go on a serious rant about where feedback comes from here) My first thought is that maybe it lives more in the realm of Dance than of Film which I think is great. Isn't that what we're trying to fucking do here?


lasara from Randi Courtmanch on Vimeo.

I was pretty tubby for awhile there

No joke. I had graduated from Cornish and was living in this teensy weensy studio apartment with my cat Frank. I was nursing a broken heart the best way I knew how, with marijuana and cake. I mean whole cakes. And you know what? They were fucking good.  So that helped plump me up a little. It's really interesting for me to think about now because my whole Cornish life had been spent in total assurance that I was the fattest thing anyone had ever seen.  I lived in terror of Ballet Class for about one thousand reasons including the tights. It was my working truth that not only did I know how freakishly obese I was, but you did too and you were just too polite to say anything about it.
Lets give you an idea of what were talking about here. This is me just after graduating from Cornish in a creative residency at Centrum with LeGendre Performance Group:

What a fatty, right? I would do pretty much anything for that stomach now. See those big lesbianic shorts? Subterfuge.

So the weed and the cake chubbed me up a bit. I was real insecure about it. I started dancing in a company called Launch Dance Theater (led by the little spark plug Ricki Mason whom you can spy on over here http://www.rickimason.com/). I would say things to her like, I'm the biggest one in the company, ricki, I can't wear this hot pink micro mini. Launch ended at the exact same time that a persistent anxiety was throbbing against the walls of my tiny studio apartment. All that lonesome stoned binging and no more dance projects and some seriously shitty dating experiences and a really scary allergic reaction just did me in.  I had myself a full on nervous breakdown which I'd like to just gloss over here and get back to talking about fatness. After a whole lot of needless time spent in full on mental breakdown, I was prescribed Celexa.

Celexa is a drug that makes you fat, lazy, and have muscle ticks. It also makes you feel like fucking shit whilst floating your anxiety away from you on a heavenly cloud. It did me really well and I wanted off of it as soon as humanly possible. I'm so glad it exists and I hope I never have to be on it ever again. 

Ricki Mason and I had always flirted with the idea of forming some kind of duet company and we tried to in this time. I was so desperate to be a dancer again. But I just didn't have it in me yet. There was no store of energy inside of me that could haul my body around. I needed everything I had to heal myself up.  In retrospect it was too ambitious too soon.
Anyway, a dancer not dancing is about the worst thing I can think of. Worse, it was me.  I got fatter and felt so deflated alone in my apartment with the cat, the cake, and the celexa. I started to do what I could to feel like I still was a maker of dance. For me that was setting up digital cameras on timers and dancing for them.
The first one is called The Bathroom.
Here are some shots of it:

I'm so proud of this girl when I look back on these. I was so afraid and these innocent photos were the boldest move I was capable of. I've lost some weight now though I'm nowhere near as slight as I once was. I've got to be honest with you, I want to rock the shit out of this body. I was tiny and ripped for years and I didn't even know it. I'm no longer interested in hating my body, or hiding it. I want to move it with everything I've got for as long as I've got it. Because who is writing the fucking story here? I've got a left knee that screams at me all day long, Achilles that do not ever reach the ground in down dog, hips that don't open up. legs that won't ever get anywhere near my head and I intend to fucking rock them.

I've got a blog too, dammit.

Soon I'll fill it with thoughts, wishes, rants,  up on my soap boxing and some art too.

In the mean time, check this little experiment with composer/violinist Paris Hurley (drop dead gorgeous and completely admirable mega talent plus honest-to-God human being). The bones of the experiment go like this: Talk. Give each other assignments.  Do our assignments. Show our assignments. Collide our assignments.


Paris Project 1 from Lasara Jarvis on Vimeo.