More than fifty seniors were at the center that Thursday morning, ready to see what shoelaces had to do with hopes and fears. We began the workshop as we always do, collecting the participants’ hopes and fears.  A warm- up followed, tailored to seniors moving and stretching from their chairs, as well as Shoelace Project movement repertory and finally and most importantly, the creation of a gesture dance of hopes and fears. 

If you’d like to see  the seniors in action, click here:

http://vimeo.com/28510060

It was pretty great to hear some of their most pressing hopes – most notably, that their checks would arrive the following week.  As soon as someone shouted that out, the room burst into spontaneous applause.  And that, of course, became the last gesture in the phrase. Because clapping is movement, and the seniors did it with gusto.

I know many artists who have greatly enjoyed working with seniors.  I know I do, for a lot of reasons.  One of the most important is this: it is confirmation of something I believe with all my heart:  we are all movers, and we are all movers all our lives.  I have heard people say they can’t dance so many times.  And it is clear that there is a divide between professional dancers/performers and otherwise.  But there is no monopoly on movement, and level of training does not necessarily a dancer make. 

The seniors that day were dancing and expressing: beyond offering their hopes and fears, they joined in the chair-based exercises, and they participated in the gesture phrase, raising their arms, miming drowning (including the all important verbal accompaniment: glub, glub, glub), clasping their hands by their hearts, and of course, clapping their appreciation and desire for timely checks.

I am often struck by how naturally kids will start moving, doing what we generally would call dance.  Impulsively. Intuitively.  Joyfully.   Maybe that continues, maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe there are dance classes, or family gatherings with a dance floor, school dances, clubs, a million moments over a lifetime when movement emerges. 

Movement is always happening to us, through us, in us, from our cells on up.  May we always be able to move with as much vigor and joy as I observed in those women and men in their 70s, 80s and 90s at the Prospect Hill Senior Services Center.

One of the things that comes up quickly is how to learn – how do you even remember a series of movements, let alone execute them?

I don’t even remember how I learned to learn dance, initially.  My first dance class was when I was 5.  My first performance was called “feeding the ducks.”  In my life, I have almost always been learning some kind of movement.  It is its own skill.

I do know what it is like to be a beginner though, as I am a beginner at oh so many things.  Recently,  I joined a chorus and reconnected with the great humility of learning a new skill as an adult.  Looking around, it seemed pretty clear that everyone else knew exactly what to do, how to find the notes, how to, well, sing.   I think it is not so different as coming into a dance class for the first time: How do you get your body to do something it has never done before?  How do you ignore the voice saying that you don’t look like somebosy (everybody?) else. And how DO you remember all these steps ?  

It is one thing to say, and dance teachers often do, that you don’t learn to play a Beethoven symphony on the piano in the first few lessons.  But piano lessons are often alone. Dance classes are frequently in a group (though private lessons are also a possibility).  But for many people, dancing, and learning to dance a particular style or technique is a social activity.  We learn by doing and we learn by watching – there is a huge value in watching someone else move and copying those movements.  There is a wonderful joy in being in a room full of people dancing.  And there are those humbling stumbling moments as the brain learns a new skill – the discovery of how one learns the best: by watching others move, by feeling the movement, by hearing the music, by listening to what the teacher says, by repeating the movements over and over again, all the above. 

Come take a dance class and see how you learn, and more than that, how much fun it is to dance. 

We are beginning to generate a movement vocabulary.   Surprising possibilities are coming up – off balance, jarring to offset the seeming stability of the verbal phrase, expansive, viscous.  Showing up, being present, can be dynamic, not just meditative. 

And then there is text.  In the writing about “here I am,” in the developing dialogue, it is becoming clear that there are many ways to express these three short words – serenely, contemplatively, assertively, pensively, invitingly, dramatically.  What does it mean to announce your presence?  Who is the speaker? Who is the audience? 

As part of my research, I have been looking at biblical texts, where the phrase is often the response to a divine calling:  Abraham answers "Here I am/Hineni" several times, first when he is being asked to sacrifice his son and then when he is instructed to stay his hand to avert the sacrifice.   Moses says it when he hears the voice of the divine speaking from the burning bush.  And he is asked to remove his sandals to, in recognition of that holy space.  The “where” matters, when one says “here I am.”

Three short words – such an economy of language and syllables- manage to convey something vital about time, space and the protagonist. 

This is rich material for a dance theater piece.  We look forward to sharing the process with you here and in open rehearsals in the time to come.

i am pretty sure there is a scientific principle on this. . .something like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, about knowing with certainty the position and momentum of an electron (the more I read up on this and write it, the less sure I am that it is an apt analogy). Because time matters in bursts (those "everything changes in an instant") and it matters, well, over time.

This year, the Shoelace Project took on a life of its own. What a gift, to keep working on one piece, one that by its participatory nature is different in every setting based on the audience -- beyond the aliveness of performance, there is a uniqueness dictated by viewers. And then the opportunity to keep sharing it -- to be able to perform it enough times that by the most recent showing, we had the time in a rehearsal to fix a foot position, say, or add an extra swing before the lift in which Desira is carried off by Louie -- that moment stands out for the shared excitement and joy of realizing the piece more fully in a really specific instance.

moments that matter, hugely --  change is a process, not an event. both things about time are true, somehow. this interest in moments is pretty strong for me, for a bunch of reasons. one is that I am starting a new piece in addition to continuing with the Shoelace Project. I have been told by a creator and performer for whom i have great regard that once one has a sense of a piece, it is time to start another. That is part of the creative deal -- the need to keep creating, to keep challenging oneself, to avoid complacency. And so I am starting a new piece, and it seems to relate to time (again, with time. In 2002, it was infinite time, with "Tipping the Hourglass." Now it seems to be about present moment:) There is a hebrew phrase, "Hineni," which translates to "Here I am." That phrase says A LOT. right here, right now. Moving into 2011, I'll be diving in, moment by moment. 

happy holidays!