choreographic confessions

I am emerging

I am mid-career

this is the last dance I will ever make

there are too many people in the room

I can’t do this alone

I need to be alone

I know too much

I don’t know enough

there is no dancing left in me

still

moving I think in a way I can't think any other way

I should do something else

I should be making money

I need to attract people with money to come see my work

there is too much time in this creative process

there is not enough time

there is a dancer in the room whom I will never work with again

do painters dream about shades of pigment?

the dancers

carry fragments of my psyche

I need their opinions

I reject their opinions without explanation

no one in the room understands what the work is about, least of all me, until years later 

that was it

a string of mis-starts and discarded ideas

where it began is irrelevant

beginnings are crucial

the fragment the whole the beautiful etcetera

saturated

desire is embarrassing

(a famous director says)

embarrassment might mean I'm doing something right

it might also mean the work is bad

anything can be made interesting once you deconstruct it

some movements are inherently boring

clichés can be avoided if inserted into the right frame

the joy in flow

the joy in stillness

slow down the dance needs more space

people who come to rehearsal say the work has no logic

yes that

thing needs to be interrupted

and that

other thing needs to last forever

the material has become too fixed too quickly

too shape-based too legible

but that one moment--

it is not legible enough

 

 

 

 

-H.M. May 2017

Photo by Margo Moritz