CSU Fresno Day 3

What a great group of dancers... committed, enthusiastic and courageous! And tireless!

In six hours we put together 8 minutes of dance and have only the ending to finish. We've discussed details of make-up, hair, lighting and costumes and the dancers will meet with me today to create their costumes before rehearsal.

What I have loved most about this project is that the students have faced each challenge I set for them with the utmost grace, even under these intense challenges. The risks I refer to are not just the physical athleticism and partnering, but the most difficult -the emotional risk. I am asking 12 undergraduate students to dive into the material from which horror films are made, and to access their life experience to make it real.

One might wonder, "Why would anyone do this?", "Isn't dance suppose to be pretty?".
Actually, it has taken me a while to understand my internal motivation... while I love to move and so became a dancer, I lived a very difficult childhood and had no resources with which to cope. Painting and art provided some manner of expression but not until I found dance did I find a voice that could express what I felt The depth of the emotions were too deep to be expressed literally, and dance provided a resource to express these things without naming them, analysing them or defining them. And then, when I began showing my dances to the public the most amazing thing happened. People I didn't know began writing me, so many I can't remember them all, and telling me of their experience. The most dramatic were those who told me they were suicidal until they saw my dance, which made them feel understood and less alone and more able to cope. There were those who were overwhelmed to know the were not alone in the shadow of grief, or the belief their late loved one was still with them. And those who said that they didn't think anything so beautiful as the dance could come of such a terrible experience. And the perpetrators of child abuse at a conference who cried when the watched "Sarah's Doll House", a dance that without blame or judgement portrays the Twilight-Zone-like experiences of the abused child.

Cultural Awareness
These experiences, and having lived through isolation, I have a keen desire to provide a vehicle to help people feel understood. To put our real humanness on the stage -no fairytale. Having toured to other countries, and particularly Belarus where we were sponsored by the Embassy as Cultural Ambassadors representing the USA, I have become acutely aware that our American sensibilities of social acceptance are vastly different from other countries. Somehow I had never realized that other cultures don;t place the same value on being happy that we do. My artistic mission has been to shed light on the darkness because I understood that disconnecting from those darker emotions causes a myriad of interpersonal and social problems. And not having the darker emotions understood isolates the sufferer and intensifies the darkness. When a loved one dies, for example, people say "It'll be OK" and they give a socially acceptable amount of time (about a month) to grieve but then it is suppose to go away so that you can live the American value of happily-ever-after. But when the grief/depression/anger -whatever the darker emotion is- doesn't go away, our culture provides few ways to deal with it.

Authenticity & Significance
Through dance, I have found a way to help people feel understood. Without being literal, he dances I create often dive into forbidden topics and issues (death, grief, hauntings, mental illness, suicide, child abuse, war, sleep disorders...). Through Expressive Movement Processing, presenting the dancers with the opportunity to bring subconscious material to the dance, each dance takes on the personality and characteristics of those who perform it. Even the same dance will never be performed the same way by different performers. Through the decision making process EMP brings to the dancers as they learn the dance, each dancer brings their life experience into the dance. And the process allows dancers to stretch their performance comfort zone so that they can perform intense emotions (whether funny, sad, crazy or whatever) in an authentic manner. And that's what the whole process is about: authenticity. Otherwise, the dance will not resonate with the soul of the viewer and will not achieve what I consider the highest tenets of the art of dance... significance.

And significance is what I can see happening in this dance. Taking on the topic of nightmares and bringing awareness to aspects of sleep/sleep deprivation, night terrors and through the kinetic reaction of the viewer, changing the inability to ever really share the depth of experience of a nightmare: sharing the unsharable.