Creative Juices

Readjusting to home and working on my own thing; readjusting to being a teacher and a dancer.

Not sleeping well, though I'm not sure why. Being back with John usually relaxes me, but I think I have so many things on my mind right now - so many things coming up in the near future that require my exacting attention. If I accomplish everything on my list through the holidays, I'll be directing two shows (both written, or at least adapted, by me), choreographing a short dance film, and teaching three workshops. . . Life gets very full very fast.

I started teaching at the La Jolla Playhouse two days ago. I love high school theater students. They are so eager and passionate and just stuck enough that I get to experience both their breakdowns and euphoria as I push them to become unglued. I always start my classes off simple, solely concentrating on the idea of Shape: the range of movement and space used to create the shape, the volume within the shape, the level on which the shape sits, and the negative space that's been carved around the shape. We make phrases of movement going from shape to shape to shape; we make shape sculptures, and then, slowly, they begin creating full bodied pieces.

It's a harder concept than it would seem, simply because we aren't used to thinking so much in the abstract, but I was wholly impressed with this group. Usually, I give ou a series of words to get creative juices flowing as they create their human sculptures, and half of them come back with extremely pedestrian, upper-body-only shapes that completely imitate the word in its most literal sense. This group, which gives me great hope, came back with these incredible full-body shapes which only hinted at the literal sense of the word, and more often evoked a mood more than a pedestrian scenario. I was smiling and am thrilled to see how advanced I can get with these phrases they are constructing.

I'm also choreographing for Celebrate Dance right now. I actually want to use CD as a place to get some of my ideas out before I have a concert in the winter, though I'm not sure I can swing the winter concert. I'm trying; I just need to find a place to have it. I worked for an hour and a half with my two dancers yesterday and was so scared that I would walk in the door and have no idea what I wanted. Somehow, just by being in the room with these two beautiful movers, the opposite happened; I knew exactly what I wanted and could point out to them when things were not the way I saw them in my head, and could give them suggestions on how to express various bits of the peice. We didn't get very far, but we have two and a half hours on Saturday and I think we'll start moving faster as they become used to each other and I become capable of walking in the door already confident.

Isn't that really what its all about most of the time? Starting off confident allows you to try things you would have easily poo-pooed in any other state.