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.