the grind begins

Yesterday, was our first day of work at CCP for the WI_FI festival. It was pretty hectic with most of us feeling like fishes thrown out of our comfortable waters. Bringing everything from Green papaya was already seventy five percent of the stress, time and not to mentiion cost. So this is why we have become independent and choose to work in spaces where our efforts are much better utilized. Driving across the city was tiring enough and dealing with the bureaucracy was another exhaustion which i'm glad was a bit lessened with the help of technical/production staff. I wish I had more time to work creatively for Summers begin and end as you wish but as independent artists we always have to deal with the administration aspect of our work. Maybe, we are also actually wary of giving them to someone else afraid that an outside intervention will take away the intimate and independent rationale of our work.

As i did my first run ever in the space, I slowly noticed my body taking on an imposing silhoutte, bordering on insecurity. Funny that even if it was my own work I actually felt this cold detachment from the idea, like I was some other person's medium and "performing" for an auidence. This experience made me aware of the big psychological barrier that the institution imposes on our bodies as "dancers." In that very cold space, I felt the need to justify something. The very thing I hated, maybe that's why I left many years ago and maybe this was why I could never dance as freely and contently in that space as it had a big psychological impact on my body, manifested by tight muscles that go around my neck and those that hug my shoulder blades. I now struggle with this, I dont want to dance with this feeling. If I dance with this feeling then I have lost the contemporary in my work. I became a contemporary dancer because I believe that the body can dance from a non-hierarchical order, from a relaxed and everyday stance. It should be open, breathe with the space, accomodate the gaze in effect subverting it, exposing the mind and the thinking body. I am not a finished form, my body is a work in progress and everyday that it dances, it creates the stage to perform the dance, wherever it is, whereever there is time and space