“[T]he understanding of technique…is the door to choice.”
– Mary Oliver
“Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.”
– Flaubert
“[T]echnical knowledge and diligent work…are less interesting perhaps, but altogether essential, for such things support the ineffable and moving light of the poem: they are the bedrock of the river.”
– Mary Oliver
I’m taking the “Warriors” dance intensive with Kimberly Miguel Mullen this weekend. Lessons from this evening:
Make sure your tailbone is beneath you. If not, you’ll get ahead of yourself.
The torso leads from the heart in Afro-Cuban dance, the feet follow (flat and in plie).
When the tempo increases, the movements get smaller. Don’t try to do as much as you do when you’re slow, you’ll lose energy and fall behind. Don’t try to do something too big.
Break the movement into the constituent parts and focus on them, then align them with the beat (always). The details and power will flow when the foundation is solid.
Prepare mentally and physically when in your lines. Be ready and move right into it.
Laser focus.
Move intelligently, with precision. Manage your energy wisely.
Be in it but not of it. Have a perspective outside yourself to see how you are inhabiting and expressing the movement so you can be true to its essence and make corrections.
Spatial awareness: know where other people are and your own needs for space.
The drums, the beat, and the ocean’s waves never stop for you even when you’re tired.
Dance heals.
It takes work, practice, muscle memory, repetition like any athlete drills the knowledge into their cells.
Study with teachers who have learned at the feet of the great dancers. Devote yourself to learning the ways that work, immerse in tradition. Commit to humble service, continuous growth, willingness to fail and receive feedback and continue, over and over, as long as it takes, to develop mastery through whatever blood/sweat/tears the sacrifice demands for the reward of craft. In this way, one moment at a time, one may become someone who can carry the lineage and medicine forward, and contribute something of value to the rest of humanity.
“This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of… man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!”
The shade tree 