Clearing

A few months ago, with the help of a friend, I started clearing clutter out of my apartment. While not seeming connected to either dance or food or visual art, I find that the process has been inextricably linked with all three. And it has kept me extraordinarily busy.

Part of the clearing process has been about synthesizing the many parts of myself that I've lived over the years I've been in my apartment. And letting go of others.

It felt significant though, that a major milestone of an opportunity arose as I began to let go of the weight of some of my artistic history (and significantly, many of the supplies wound up going through a contact to an artists' collective at Rockaway Beach--significant because my art is so influenced by marine and aquatic life.)

I shed bag after bag of things I didn't need, and suddenly had somewhere to wear the new costume I bought on a whim, not having any idea where I would wear it at the moment of purchase. Suddenly, after creating closet space for dance costumes, I was offered the opportunity to dance my first solo full set (which consists of a fast song, a rhumba (slow), a drum solo, and a fast song. I was so honored to be asked. Frankly, in February, when was asked about my ultimate goal as a dancer, I said, I'd like to be on the flyer! And I'd like to dance a full set somewhere. I really didn't expect that goal to be fulfilled before year's end. I guess I have to clear more room for bigger dreams.

Clearing my apartment, my copilot in my decluttering vision suggested that I give up the monolithic wall of books that occupies a lot of space and psychic and visual weight in my apartment. I've been working on that, having donated hundreds of books, and it's hardly a dent. It has been hard in some categories, because books were learning tools, tools in developing a voracious appetite for all things visual and poetic.

But I want room for art, dance, entertainment and most importantly, breathing space in my home. Even breathing space in my ideas, ideas wrought partially from the spaces and density of the world of ideas I've found in those many volumes that I own. I've been scared without the physical density of the books, that I will cease to think think with perspicacity, with breadth, with depth, with feeling. I fear I will cease to be a painter.

But if, as I wrote here, I want to be an open, breathing artist, my home needs to be fluid and open, too.

I am currently back in Virginia. I've been to a beautiful, forested swamp to kayak, the beach for sun and swimming and shell gathering, the pool, made basement studio paintings, read an engaging book, and to a tiny island with a population of 450 people. Unfettered, I don't feel any loss or miss the heaviness of home. I want to bring the experience of this week home, packing it as a souvenir, along with the paintings that I think express this lightness and flow and and memory.

Vacation: All I ever wanted

An Agnes Pelton, Transcedental painter of the 1930s

Since I have only a handful of readers, which is fine with me--I actually enjoy living under a rock-- I feel perfectly safe in expressing semi-publicly that as of this afternoon, my vacation begins. I have a lot to do before I leave--pick up canvases, pack, clean up my apartment, but I am so excited. Tonight I am beginning my week of fun with an outing with friends to Layali Dubai and I can't wait to have mezze and dance the night away with friends. I plan to stay out most of the night and splurge on a cab home from Astoria.

The opulent Layali Dubai!

If I can carry it, I'm thinking of bringing my cane to the beach. Here are my cane and the cane I bought for one of my good friends and a wonderful cane dancer, ViviMar, en route to our dance class this past spring. People always give you a seat on the bus when you travel with a cane; occasionally I accept. One funny story is that I overheard a student saying I was "buggin'--bedazzlin' ma cane," as I carried it onto campus. Despite the questions I may be asked or the strange looks I may receive, the outdoors is a great rehearsal space, even if the small quarters of a New York are more realistic considering our mostly small venues.

Saidi is appropriate for a shore vacation. It is the sound of sun and sand. Below is a cane/ saidi video that I watch a lot. I love Orit's glow and earthy energy.

In Virginia, I always make paintings, too. I am excited about the free schedule I will have next week. And the time with my family. Last year, when I had my paint box out, my niece, then two, kept exclaiming, "I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT, AUNT JEAN!" So perhaps and hopefully, nothing will have changed and I'll have an adoring audience for my painting. That would be sweet and fun, but really I paint to find a connection between human interior worlds and nature. It's not just a response to the beauty the environment offers, which it is, but the space within me that responds to the outer world. I really love the works of Agnes Pelton, and aspire to that kind of clear expression.

This song makes me extra happy and ready to party and swim:

Open

In my first year of graduate school, I spoke a lot about wanting to make "open paintings." I am interested in making paintings that invite the viewer in rather than those that defend their space as separate from the viewer compositionally. I was making work that I felt opened up to the viewer using techniques like radiating points and not "engaging my edges."

I learned about engaging my edges in art school, when my drawing professor kept giving me this compositional note. I was perplexed--I was using the whole page, including the corners. Finally, I asked my painting professor about it. He used a Baroque landscape painting like the one below to illustrate the concept. (This painting a Van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 1655-60). "Do you ever notice how there's a fallen tree in so many landscape paintings?" "Sure." "Well, that's there for compositional reasons--to engage the edge." "And there's a tree branch in the upper corners, and a cloud formation, each of which form a triangle shape that cuts off the edge." In the case of Ruisdael's "Jewish Cemetary," a tombstone and a stream engage the lower left edge.

I was exploring this process of opening paintings in graduate school. It was hard because in the first part of 2007, I was making work that it seemed no one liked, with a few exceptions of people who "got" it or who like unkempt studio production. I dreaded studio critiques because I feared the remarks of my classmates who weren't supportive of my studio practice. I am a sensitive soul who invests a lot of personal care into my work. I was used to more gentle or constructive forums for critique for the most part.

Openness and transparency as aesthetic values are so expressed in Middle Eastern dance. This is a dance about bearing your inner personality, making eye contact with your audience, opening your body, and echoing, radiating moves. I have also come to trust and love each and every dancer in my Thursday night class as a classmate. We watch each other with a critical eye, but with love.

Recently, an audience member who is trained in Middle Eastern dance told me that my chest (my heart) seems very open, but that I need to open all the way down the spine. I think there may be some truth in that statement. I hold onto a lot of defenses--those daily worries from being untenured faculty, past judgments, current people in the dance world who have made it known they do not love me, my inner critique of my own dance, my body. I have some letting go to do to disengage my edges as a dancer. But as surely as it exposes these things to me, this dance teaches the body through pleasure and the sensations to which it attunes me. Through vulnerability comes strength.

A dance friend sent me the link below. It reminds me how safe it is not to care about the "haters" or just "non-fans" that I have.

Like a good meal (above is my eggplant manicotti, a South Beach recipe which I served with sauce), self-regard is a fortifying experience. It is a muscle that my dance flexes just as much as my physical body, probably more. By letting go of boundaries and immersing myself in pleasure, that wonderful manicotti and snap peas, and my dance, I open to all that is possible.

Below is a poem by one of my favorite writers.











Marie Ponsot
[from Springing: New and Selected Poems by Marie Ponsot]


Entranced


1


For openers
any wall has doors in it.


Openers who want
a door (not for air
but for passing through)


open & shut it
forcefully, under
heavy pressure
from the atmosphere
outside.


The ideal opener investigates
those osmotic waterfalls
which infiltrate
doorless walls.


2

To enter the enclosure
of the garden
or the citadel


be door, be son
or daughter


to the dearness
of pleasure.


Exits are disclosure.
Making an exit
can unlock you—
the way entrances do—


to being
outgoing.


In verse & reverse
word and worm
both turn.

A beautiful, open arabesque of a sugar snap stem that was mixed in with my lunch.

Busy

A friend recently posted on a New York Times article on busyness. While I understood it in the context of her own values (as a slow-foodie, crafter and a homesteader), I thought that it touched on major arteries of our society that resonated with me. But I felt that it tapped into the major truths of society, with the wrong spin. The article more or less critiqued the over-scheduled scenario which comprises most peoples' lives, indicating that it was ambition that drove people, and that they were not "smelling the roses" because of this over-scheduled state.

See, I am one of those people who is "busy-busy." I do find myself scheduling in loved ones for next week. And while I do have evening hours at work, it is mostly because of commitments that are what the author of this article would view as optional. But.

My college painting professor said to our class, "Society only creates as many artists as it needs." He talked about how mechanized and detached our society has become, and how it drives people to seek connection in the arts or creative pursuits. He stated, "The health of a society is indirectly proportional to the number of artists it produces, and our society has the greatest number of creatives in history." I believe that this busyness that is becoming "normal" is actually a good sign for consciousness awakening, bad sign for the state of our jobs and society.

People are seeking out creative outlets to strive, yes, for ambition, but not simply to compete, or least in my case, but to find meaning. I am grateful daily for having a career that lets me help people. I am a guide in someone's academic career. But there is a wide area of daily work that I fear does not truly provide value, or "matter," as the author says. Except in art. Except there.

There, a trance turning cape can make a blind child gasp with wonder. I'll never forget my own lesson in the power of painting.

I visited the rooms of Rembrandts in the British Museum while on vacation in London in 2003, excited to see skill, to see the things that underlie ambition: the swashbuckler strokes, the rich glazes, the draftsmanship. I wasn't expecting just the image of a small, thoughtful boy, Rembrandt's son, Titus, to simply communicate with me, to the point that I was fortified and also brought to tears. All I wanted was eye contact with this soul, this soul remembered by painting.

I think that many of us are indeed crushed, and seeking soulful experience that means something. I agree that our society is too ego-driven and ambition-focused. However meaning is something we have to strive harder to create for ourselves amid that crush. That is why that yoga lesson, that cooking class, the knitting circle, that solace of the studio may be the way that we are all, in our own way, "saving the life that is our own" in the words of Alice Walker.

Abundance

Well, it's here, the swelter and accompanying fruits of summer. I was planning to spend yesterday afternoon in relative quiet after a farmer's market visit. But Layla, my teacher, had other plans for me. A casual facebook comment about her visit to a class quickly solidified into a reservation for me for a class with a master teacher, with whom I had not yet studied, Anahid Sofian.

Suddenly, it meant early rising, with no room for a lazy Saturday if I was to get to market and to Anahid's master class. Layla officially kicked me into gear. As my mom said, "There would be no grass growing under either of our feet." And boy, would that be true with the footwork we would do. Aside from workshops, this was my first professional class (although Amar's classes in New York were also advanced, she embraced baby dancers, too). Layla had requested "sixes"--6/8 musical tempo, Moroccan music. One of the songs we danced to, Mach Mach, is featured in this video.

It's really fun to dance to this music because you don't count, you just try to learn to embody the rhythm. And we then did trance turns, where you turn until you shift consciousness. I did touch upon the place Anahid mentioned, going quickly and not caring much about the world around me. It felt wonderful until intense nausea set in. She said it takes practice for your inner ear to learn to adjust. Below is a photo of her company from her website, performing, I believe, a 6/8 number, based on the costuming. She told a beautiful story. She said that when her company performed and did trance turns, the black capes flew and whirred. They performed for children with disabilities at one venue and when the turning began, the children, many of whom were blind or deaf, audibly gasped. They could feel and sense the company's turns.

Little by Little Or, A Renaissance Woman

Studio practice.

When I was in library graduate school, I found myself frequently having separation anxiety from my studio practice of painting. I was at class two nights a week and doing homework the other weeknights while friends painted, went to openings and advanced careers, and otherwise built lives as artists. A friend with whom I worked is also an artist, and she said to me--"Just do it a little every day. Even five minutes and you are still an artist." Somewhere I read a Lee Krasner quote in a interview that she painted every day, "much more than Jackson" and it stuck it my head. My standards about being prolific are very high, so I aspired to do just that.

When I got to graduate school for painting in 2006, I pushed this further. I was in my tiny (first year) closet studio or capacious (second year) studios churning out work at a volume (and I believe, quality) that was unprecedented for me. With a full time job, this was an unsustainable rate. I was hardly home. Sleep? Ha! I was stronger than sleep. At that time, I actually lost a sense of work/life/art balance. The gains were enormous in my ouevre, but I was frazzled and exhausted at core.

There are many myths that say that this spent state is the way to live as an artist, and the only way to be "serious." I have a lot of thoughts on that now. I started dancing as a way to add "fun" to my life, and balance. Although, as I've improved I have become "serious" about dance in addition to painting (obviously?). Recently, a dance friend and I were talking about how we had no idea that this dance wold become such a force in our lives, such an immersive experience. I have been a multi-disciplined artist since childhood--dancing, singing, acting, painting & drawing. I listened then when my college directing professor sternly admonished the class: You have to take yourself very seriously to be a Renaissance artist.

These types of warnings come back as a form of fear: I'm not serious enough. I'm neglecting my studio. I'm not dancing enough. I don't practice my zils enough (well, I don't do that enough.) I need to advance my art career. I need to advance my dance career. I need to be painting now instead of fill-in-the-blank.

My dance teachers tell me about daily classes and nightly performance back in New York's Golden Age of Middle Eastern dance, the '80s and '90s. (For a great description of that, see my mentor, Amar's article). So, the development for dancers in my generation may be a bit slower, because we can't work full-time as emerging artists. Sometimes I despair over this situation and my own limitations: time, money to fully immerse myself in the dance. And my painting.

That's when I have to remember that things don't happen in a sudden rush. Like, one day, I'll be able to do fabulous continuous shimmies like Zenaide. I'll be free and musical with the cane like Amar and create inventive steps. I'll play zils like Layla, (well, hopefully. :)) And my visual art will continue to grow--whether or not I can afford the ratcheting studio rent, because it needs to. (By the way, I would LOVE to perform at my own opening, someday.)

June has been all about dance and academic writing. I was beginning to beat myself up about not being in the studio enough, forgetting the ebb and flow of life that I do not believe makes me less "serious," but more human, more true, and if I may say so, a Renaissance artist. Then yesterday, a cousin (not a blood relative cousin but the excellent friend of the family kind) remarked on my Facebook page: "I haven't looked at your artwork in awhile-it is beautiful, fresh, alluring and positively alive. Bravo. I love it. xoxo" That meant the world to me. Little by little, creations are built. While things are always in flux, art can be stable, keeping me afloat.

Oh, and in one fell swoop I changed my eating plan and major changes have indeed kicked in. Now, I will start Phase 2 this weekend and begin an incremental plan. Chocolate and red wine (in moderation) are allowed. They are in order. I will celebrate.

Portrait of the artist as a young girl.

Play

Me at Layali Dubai, party dancing the night away on my birthday in March 2012

"Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Without play, learning and evolution is impossible. Play is the taproot from which original art springs; it is the raw stuff that the artist channels and organizes with all his learning and technique. Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances." --Stephen Nachmanovitch Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

After a week of mental gymnastics beginning a new academic piece, I spent my weekend recovering and cooking to prepare for my work week. Cooking recharges my mental battery; it is a kind of work, but also a form of play for me. Many visual artists (I am also a painter) love the engagement of cooking--using physical, sensual materials to make a creation. I'm mostly a recipe-follower, so it's a nice respite, a paint-by-numbers when I have so many creative and professional demands.

My first week on the diet has culminated in some of the necessary weight loss, and I feel sparkly-good. I have been eating beautifully and with gusto. On Saturday, I visited my farmers market and made some gorgeous fish (I'm mostly vegetarian but indulge in seafood because it helps a great deal with table fellowship), gazpacho, and grilled zucchini.

This was a beautiful meal, but the structure of the diet is still a major cognitive shift--in thinking about what I eat and making choices. As this goes on, I realize it won't take as much effort because it will flow into habit. But for now, I was really in need of freedom.

Last night, I had the sweetest taste of that. I didn't cheat on my diet, and yes, I do look quite forward to the nightly desserts that this diet recommends (Can I say peanut butter cup??? Mmmm) Still, it wasn't that. It was the dance event at Jebon, where my lovely teacher Layla put on an energetic, skillful, and at times hilarious dance performance. In between the other lovely dancers, the Turkish band plays for open audience dancing.

I'm not too shy about getting up to "party dance." In fact, I'm becoming known as the party starter in terms of warming up the dance floor. I agree with my teacher, Amar, that you learn something each time you perform. However, I also think there's something so great about the casual performance of party dancing. It's freeing; I can experiment. I also practice new steps or technique that I am trying to set in my body (much like I am trying to set my new eating habit.) Yet there is also incredible freedom and flow that I needed in this moment of of restraint and discipline. By "playing" at performing rather than doing it officially, and in costume I am released to explore the music, sometimes socially with others. It's wonderful food for a dancer, and a great feeling to remember when actually doing a performance.

The best and most experienced dancers, like Layla bring a sense of play and fun to their "official" performances, too. Last night Layla gave up half of her drum solo to tutor a young man from the audience in drum solo moves, put her arm around the clarinetist during his solo. If there is anyone who knows how to play and bring fun to a show, it is Layla.

And lastly, even in the midst of the strictest phase of my diet, I got to eat the fun-nest food: a bowl of edamame! With good friends (I'll write more on how dance has brought a whole wonderful group of friends into my life), delightful treats, and the vibrancy of live music, I return to my work week fortified and strong.

(This post from a quiet reference desk.)