Today's truth

Hey -- this is starting to look suspiciously like a BLOG. It's my fourth entry this week!
And this one will be true ramblings. Though it's hard for me to truthfully state that I am not predicating anything before I write it -- because it writes itself in my head long before finger hits the keyboard -- but this is as spontaneous and random as it might get.
And with all that prefacing -- I've forgotten the many things I was going to say!

My most consistent teacher -- in that I really respect his teaching above his work which I have not seen, and I choose to go to his class three-four times a week -- has just recently torn his left meniscus (clue: at the knee). This will heal partially on its own, but will eventually require surgery. He is still so amazingly articulate in his torso, so I continue to learn a lot through his choreography and advice, but the misfortune is the lost image of him dancing himself: long-limbed, long-torsoed, shaggy haired and with a visage that in movement changes as quickly from the comic to an ecstasy of being, of being possessed by and possessing the dance. Quoting Laurel Kean, who also takes this class: "watching him dance just makes you wanna cry."

Laurel tonight before heading off to Basement Banghra with a load of other exuberant Swatties from both Philly and NYC asks me suddenly "what I am doing," by which, she means, am I staying in the country. Why don't we talk through my plans, since it has been brought to my attention that I have more than one reader, and that more than one of these are invested in keeping me here. =)

Right now, I'm finally getting "training," the kind I've wanted since returning from Poland in 2002. I take two to three classes a day (last week clocked ten; this week probably 13), which amounts to 20-25 hours a week of various techniques. 6 hours a week I deal with the laundry of this dance studio, a work/study duty which is enabling me to take all these classes for $4 a pop, which is a terrific deal down from the usual $12.50. Soon though, in July, I will be doing an intensive course at a multimedia performance venue in NYC called The Kitchen, for dual purposes of (a)workshopping some cool, intriguing if not critical themes, expanding my range of technological proficiency and collaborating with a diverse group of emerging artists, (b) praying to God that meeting with Ong Keng Seng every day will open up doors for me to make important art at home. Ong Keng Seng is perhaps the most-internationally renowned director from Singapore, and not without reason -- he does fascinating work. His last piece was a trilogy influenced by Japanese anime and dealing with the war crimes tribunals at The Hague. Can anyone say, "Please: involve me?"

But I told myself I would stay in New York as long as it took to dance on a stage here, and perhaps to get some certification to teach -- art, modern dance, fine, cool, but I want to get more proficient at something more scientific, anatomical, useful for the non-dancer: Pilates, Gyrokinesis, etc. This last aim might take longer than the three months I will have as a tourist from mid-September to mid-December, but we will see. I'm in rehearsals for a fall show now, and am trying to organize making and showing some of my own work in the fall as well. Evidently as a tourist one should not work or study, but no one said anything about "volunteer"! Or "under the table"!

Once home, I'd like to prove my dedication to the motherland enough so that I could in good faith apply for a government grant to go to a contemporary dance school in Brussels, which only accepts new students in two year cycles, so I have to wait for the 2006 intake anyway. If I was still making out OK at this point I'd like to dance for a company in Europe for a bit, delaying my bond just a little, then I'd have to come home, finally ready to maybe really teach and to produce provocative shit. Yes, I think I'd be ready then. O-ma, will you forgive me just a little longer away? Maybe I should ask if I would be able to forgive myself, with the losses either way?

So what happened to non-profit management and international development studies, you ask? Hmm, good question. My heart is in that too ... but not my joy. Note, not "my happiness" ... but my joy. I hold back from saying "passion," because I am told that of this I have ample, if not excessive reserves. Also because the word connotes a recklessness or impulsiveness that I don't want to dominate over the clarity and truth that there is in "joy." But they are related.

I think I should still study for my GREs, and take them in October. Good for five years, cover my bases. Try to once again handle a quadratic equation. Now that I miss studying, I'm not so spiteful of the prospect.

You see, the truth of it is -- or is right now -- is that I only really want to work in the arts, but feel equally a need to impress you and live up to expectation by attaining a professional degree of some sort -- also because yes, I would make more money, have more security, and definitely have more power in the world. I have quite a strong desire for power. Affecting social change is partly an excuse for wielding defensible power. I like, and possibly believe in, the certainty of progress. But it's also said that an Aries is a know-it-all, and will do much in their capacity to prove as such. Match that to a considerable lack of discipline, as well as early above-average attainments of success in my personal history and one sees why I have for these past few years had such difficulty with devoting myself to a "joy" that promises no power of influence, only of self. But let's remember our past musing on "calling" .... Was I called to the arts? Undeniably yes, yes, and yes again ... though I would deny, restrain, avoid, or procrastinate ... or particularly destructively, judge myself negatively for. Issue-mongering, in my case, otherwise known as social activism, was constantly a means through which I was trying to pay the debt of my birth. I wonder, sometimes, non-judgmentally, how different I may have been had I not inherited a Christian legacy. The same could be asked about whether I had been born with skinny genes, or if I had been sooner socially accepted by my peers, which is in some way to ask what I may have been without sources of my fears and neuroses. Are unwelcome traits "weaknesses" if they came from circumstances that were not in your control?