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Why Creative Collaboration Is Essential (for me, at least)

April 18, 2013 in Art, Dance | 2 comments

As an introvert and an intellectual, I spend a lot of time in my head. I mean, A LOT. My friends gently mock me by calling me a hermit (when they can get a hold of me, that is).

As an artist, I figure that solitude is just part of the package: in order to create, you need to establish your vision by spending time working on projects, ideas, and so on.

However, as a folklorist, I’m keenly aware that artists are always in dialogue with their cultures. The artists we tend to be interested in are tethered to culture even as they innovate within it, whereas in other disciplines, like musicology or art history, you might find a greater emphasis on the lone genius.

So while a lot of the art I make requires me to be alone to refine my technique and assemble ideas into whole pieces and performances, I relish the time I get to spend with other artists. Whether it’s teaching a dance class or attending a jam session, or simply talking about artistic concepts with people who work in different media, I’m glad for every opportunity to compare notes and hang out. This is also a major reason why I do a group improvisational form of dance (American Tribal Style®) in addition to performing as a soloist.

I know that some of this impulse is selfish, since, as noted above, I spend a lot of time working alone. Connecting with other people is sometimes difficult for me. Having art to facilitate the connection makes it easier; it’s less about me talking about my feelings than dancing them, and having someone to dance with and thus share in the conversation.

Part of it, doubtless, also has to do with how American society doesn’t generally value the arts these days. So simply being around other artists is affirming. It reinforces the existence of other people like me, who believe that it’s important to interpret human experience through creative media.

I’m curious about why other people choose to collaborate, too. Feel free to share your perspectives in the comments!

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Form and Intention

February 28, 2013 in Dance, Observations | 1 comment

Photo by Jane Bradley

Performance at Bloomington Belly Dances 2011. Photo by Jane Bradley

On a rare night out, I went to a club with a couple of friends and enjoyed some time on the dance floor as well as off it. The music was largely EDM (electronic dance music, for those not familiar with the folkspeech of its fans) and dubstep, which is both fun and difficult to dance to, because of the interesting way that the rhythm and other sounds interact in the music.

As someone with over 14 years of dance experience, I can navigate a dance floor pretty competently, no matter what the genre of music is. But I got to thinking about how we dance when in uncertain situations, like with unexpected types of music or an unfamiliar environment (maybe when a stage is uneven) or other variables.

To me, it really comes down to form and intention. By “form” I mean posture, technique, and how exactly we choose to structure our movements. At the very least, I endeavor to have excellent posture when I dance, and also when I’m not dancing. I spend a lot of time with my laptop, so I try to make sure I’m not hunching too horribly during those hours. Posture conveys confidence, and good posture is the foundation of a solid dance technique that is both safe for you as a performer and more conducive to creating compelling experiences for the audience.

Since the only style of dance I’m teaching right now is American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, I think about posture a lot in those terms. Having the proper posture is what frees up your spine and hips  to undulate, lift, and drop. It’s really amazing what adjusting your posture can do for your dancing.

So, even when I have no idea what the hell is happening with the music I’m dancing to, I check in with my posture a lot to make sure my chest is lifted, my hips are tucked, and my arms are appropriately angled, strong, and elegant. In theory, good posture is itself a thing of beauty, and a dancer could simply stand in good posture for long moments and still hold the audience’s attention, having in that moment transformed herself into a statue-like thing of beauty.

Intention is the other part of the equation. Intention means moving when you mean to move, and being still when you mean to be still. It means directing your gaze in order to direct your audience’s gaze (it always amazes me how linked the two are!). It means giving each movement your full attention so that no motion is ever wasted or extraneous. It means sometimes being minimalist, and sometimes being a whirlwind of activity…but whatever you are doing, you’re doing it on purpose, with an intensity that comes from being in the moment.

When a dancer manages to incorporate both form and intention into a performance, it can be stunning. If a dance is simple in terms of form, but fully developed in terms of intention, I’m guaranteed to love it. Doing things the other way around is more of a gamble. This is one reason I’ve always felt lukewarm about belly dancers who learn the choreographies of others to perform; I feel like it’s harder to be as fully invested in intentionally dancing when the moves aren’t originally your own, and when you’re having to remember something that came from someone else. But this could also be a symptom of the fact that I really dislike memorizing things. And there are certainly a number of talented, beautiful, compelling dancers who perform the choreographies of others, so I don’t mean to disparage them here. This is more of a “this is what works for me as a dancer” post, and I’d be curious to hear the thoughts of others.

Of course, as a folklore scholar, I’m tempted to add more terms and themes to the discussion. For instance, I frequently tell my folklore students that we can identify a genre by looking at four elements: content, context, form, and function. So in an intellectual sense, I don’t think that form and intention alone are adequate to helping us understand what’s going on in a creative performance. But as a dancer, and as someone wanting to keep it simple for my dance students, I’m going to stick with form and intention for now.

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Giving Up Running

January 10, 2013 in Dance | 1 comment

Most people pledge to start running for New Year’s. I’m going to stop running.

A bit of backstory: I’ve been running for most of the last decade. When I was a kid, I liked soccer but I hated running, because I was obviously one of the slowest runners on the team, and I felt embarrassed about it (and it certainly didn’t help that coaches always singled me out to yell at me during drills). But in college, I discovered the joy of running by myself, for myself, in the Berkeley hills. It was grand.

I know I’m a slow runner, but I don’t care. I’ve finished a marathon and two half-marathons, so I know I have stamina and a ton of discipline. I can go for a run by myself just to enjoy the scenery, or spend some time thinking, or, more likely, enjoy the solitude (though I should note that I’ve enjoyed partner runs too, frequently with other academics). Even hitting the treadmill during a cold winter day can make me happy as long as I have some pumpin’ tunes or the Food Network to accompany me.

But for the last few months, I haven’t been running as much… and I’ve been feeling guilty about it. My partner and I moved to a new apartment while I was simultaneously teaching and applying for academic jobs, and there was a death in the family, and I neared a nervous breakdown for various related reasons, and… yeah, I just couldn’t make much time to run. And I would feel guilty, horrendously guilty, that I let this important part of my life slide.

For 2013, I’ve decided that instead of feeling guilty about not running as much as I want to (since my schedule hasn’t really let up), I’m just not going to run. I am, however, dancing every day. Since I’m trying to build more of a local dance community, I need to be in top condition – or at the very least, have more stamina than my dance students do!

I know it might seem counter-intuitive to give up a thing that I’ve felt guilty for neglecting, but honestly, the added guilt isn’t doing me any good. I already feel guilty for not landing a sweet tenure-track job right out of grad school, despite knowing that the problem is systemic and not with me in particular. And I feel guilty for being so absorbed in my work that I neglect my relationships with those around me. And I feel guilty for not making more of an effort to solely purchase and eat local produce. The more time I spend feeling bad about myself, surprise surprise, the worse I feel about myself.

But feeling bad about not running? That I can control. I’m only planning to give up running for one month, and if I’m absolutely climbing the walls by the end of this month, I’ll find a way to fit it back into my schedule, even if it’s only 2x week. If it’s something that I really feel okay letting go of, then maybe I’ll run a couple miles occasionally on nice days, but otherwise not worry about it.

I think my identity’s malleable enough to deal with this change. I sigh longingly every time I see someone running on the icy streets – but I’m okay with not being outdoors any more than necessary during this cold season. We’ll see how I do when the weather gets warm again. For now, though, I’m kicking ass at dancing, and that’s a good feeling.

Why Religion Should Be More Like Dance

December 15, 2012 in Dance, Ideas | 3 comments

I am not a religious person. This is for many reasons, but one of those reasons is that religion is not more like dance. Allow me to elaborate.

Dance is for everyone, but no one is forced to dance.

Dance can be done alone, with a partner, or in groups. Dance is at once intensely personal and easily social.

Dance is something that makes us grateful for our bodies, but in that moment of disembodied awareness (there is an “I” that is separate from my body but also at home in my body to be grateful for it), it does not alienate us from our bodies. Dance does not make us feel ashamed about our bodies; it makes us live more fully in our bodies, which includes embracing our age, our sexuality, the ways we can and cannot move, and our pasts. Dance does not judge us for what our bodies are or are not.

Dance has the potential to be profoundly spiritual, yet it does not require it. For some people, dance is a form of exercise, and that’s okay. For others, dance is the highest form of art and communion with the divine. That’s okay too. Most of us probably fall somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, which is fine.

Exploring multiple forms of dance has the potential to make you a better dancer, to make you more self-aware. Experimenting with multiple forms of dance puts you in different postures and moves your body in different ways; you learn to experience yourself differently. You learn how people in others cultures learn to hold and move their bodies. Moving like others gives you compassion for them, and appreciation for their lives.

At the same time, not every form of dance is right for everyone. I’ve been belly dancing almost half my life, which makes me pretty good at it. But put me in a ballet class, and I feel like a cow. That doesn’t mean that I loathe ballet, or think its practitioners are terrible people. It just means that I practice it rarely (though perhaps I should practice it more – we can learn a lot from the things we’re bad at and the things we dislike). My belly-dance-honed posture and arm gestures have helped me learn flamenco faster than I might otherwise, while my naturally low center of gravity has aided me in the West African dance classroom. Some dance forms are, for reasons easily understood or not, simply better for certain people than others.

Even hardcore dancers take breaks from dance. Sometimes your body requires it. Sometimes other parts of your life demand it. Stepping back from dance or ceasing to dance doesn’t make you a bad dancer; rather, it means that you’re human, and have healthily recognized that no one practice should dominate your life.

So long as you are dancing, there is no right or wrong way to dance. For people who choose to dance professionally or full-time, there are nuances of the “right” or “wrong” way to do a move that help them refine their practice, but aren’t necessarily relevant for people who dance simply for the joy of it. So long as they’re not harming others through their dance, rules are less important than consistency and engagement.

If you reread my words, replacing “dance” with “religion” (or its appropriate equivalent verb), hopefully you’ll grasp my meaning. If religion were more like dance – more egalitarian, less judgmental – maybe I would consider practicing it. If religion embraced variation and change, rather than demanding adherence to the teachings of a single leader or text, perhaps it wouldn’t alienate as many people who see that we live in a changing and diverse world and thus we need mutable and diverse strategies to cope and adapt.

Dance does not insist that you must worship it and it alone. Dance does not judge you. Dancers do not persecute non-dancers.

Most of the religious people I choose to hang out with? Are dancers (and often scholars and athletes too). I’m not saying every dancer is automatically awesome, but I think dancing can teach us something very valuable about appreciating diversity, because dance is inherently as diverse as humanity – our bodies make it so. When religion catches up in that regard, then I’ll be game to have a serious discussion about its role in my life. Until then, I’ll learn only as much as I need to survive in a world dominated by confusingly contradictory and hostile belief systems.

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Be Constructive Before Destructive

June 11, 2012 in Academia, Dance, Feminism | No comments

I am a teacher, scholar, feminist and performer (among the other identities I shift in and out of). One of the common threads that runs through all these roles is the desire, and even the necessity, to critique and thus transform. But when you’re critiquing someone’s dancing, someone’s writing, or someone’s political stance, how do you go about it positively, in a way that makes people receptive to it (or at least doesn’t turn them off from the very first words you say)?

One dancer I respect told me that she always praises a dance student before going on to offer criticism (as in, “That was a beautiful shimmy! Now make sure you stay in posture and hold your arms at shoulder height”). That helps a student be ready to receive the criticism and take it to heart in the way it was meant: as a tool to aid in growth and progress, rather than as an insult or an attempt to take someone down a notch.

At conferences, if I see a paper I really don’t like because I think the scholar doesn’t know what she’s talking about, I try to open with something nice before I go on to my criticism (for instance, “I thought your connection between X and Y tale types was really clever. However, I think you may be a bit off base in focusing on the origins of motifs that we can’t verify with empirical research…”). Not that it always works; I’ve had people go into rude-defensive mode, but at least I tried.

As a feminist, I’m aware that it can take a lot of positive reinforcement to reach a woman through the layer of negativity that we tend to accrue in our culture. Sometimes it takes a while to get someone to accept a compliment—and I mean truly accept it, not just smile and nod while thinking “But I’m actually still doing the whole move wrong, and I’m fat, and I’m not as young as the other girls in the class.” This is unfortunate, and I’m hoping that creating more safe spaces for women to, for instance, take up belly dancing for the sheer joy of it will help.

I wasn’t always this way; people who have danced with me know that I tend to be extremely critical of myself and of others. But I mean it in the best possible way; I assume that everyone is as ruthlessly disciplined and intent on self-improvement as I am. I’ve since learned that this is not true, and that not everyone wants to hear about every little thing they did wrong in a choreography, or every little thing I think could’ve been better in an essay. I still think that my ability to be incisively critical is one of my strengths, since I have a highly trained eye when it comes to both intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, but I’ve learned to keep a lot of my thoughts to myself unless asked to share. I’ve seen, firsthand, how important it is to boost people up before you tear them down (or act in such a way that they perceive it like that). I’m stubborn so it took a while for me to recognize this, but I’m here now. And I also, along the same lines, try not to say anything unless I have something nice to say, which is hard since I tend to be blunt, but oh well.

So  now, because I truly believe that it’s both important and effective to offer creative, positive, or constructive comments/suggestions before moving into the negative, destructive, or super-critical stuff, I’m figuring out how to implement it in the rest of my life.

For example, as a pro-choice, sex-positive feminist, I am not thrilled with how so many American religious conservatives want to not only outlaw abortion but try to restrict access to birth control and sex education. This, when our country can’t even seem to take care of the children that already exist: malnutrition, poor literacy, and other physical and social health issues plague our young. So… why not address this issue (the constructive part) before trying to take away people’s choices and access (the destructive part)? I mean, why not throw all those resources into trying to help the needy citizens of our country instead of legislating against, shaming, and sometimes even committing acts of violence against the people who provide access to and obtain abortions and birth control?

That is the political feminist portion of this post, and I know that not everyone will agree with me here (for instance, you could argue that saving the life of a fetus is a more constructive act than trying to help an impoverished child, prisoner, or mentally ill person, though I’m not quite sure how that logic prioritizes a not-yet life over an existing life). But what I hope people get out of this post is the will to reexamine your rhetoric, intentions, and actions when you interact with people. Could you go about something more constructively or creatively at first? Could you do something to inspire confidence in someone rather than insecurity?

(fyi, I was tempted to make a bunch of jokes about constructionism vs. deconstructionism for my academic readers, since I’m a huge social constructionist and find deconstruction to be passably interesting, but I’ll spare you!)

It basically comes down to this: do you want to create or inspire, or tear things down? There’s certainly a time for both, as when tearing down harmful institutions such as slavery or fascist governments, or in times of personal metamorphosis, but I think we need to examine our motivations in which types of actions we begin with. Since I’m folklorist, I’ll remind others: you win more flies with honey than vinegar.

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