kickstarter

told me to make it exquisite.
shorter
brighter
more concise
more clear
direct

to get the money, you need to have a great pitch. A clean, concise, clear, perfect, wonderful, timely, effective, powerful, sexy, short, attractive, direct video that makes the people want to give you money.

when i hear these things it is similar to when someone is speaking in a another language...

kinda like this:

transparency
people's goddamn obsessive thinking and analyzing and opinion creating
ugh
shut up i want to say to them
shut up a thousand times
because it is bullshit what you are saying to me
to my ears
to my heart
and i would like to go and live in the forest, where it is the birds that chatter in my ears
and the sun that blast upon my face


because, you see, you all cannot stop. the incessant chatter
the endless analyzing and explaining.

it was why i have longed my whole life to be a nun. to hold that black and white starchy guard close over my ears and down to my ankles. That shut you up. To shut everyone up.

I would like to give away the bed and the desk and the bike. I would offer you the clothes in my closet
and i would go away
where the chatter is less
where the endless striving ceases
and it is the birds that chatter in my ears
and the sun that blasts upon my face.


The river will take me away. Will take away it all
because we/you have figured it out, haven't you? you have the endless answers.
you have done the analyzing, the obsessive hours of thinking.
and i cannot see.
because it hurts you see.
it all hurts, this endless stuff we engage in. you succeeded, did you? you figured out the perfect song, and you made a better functioning mop, and you can now offer gardening to everyone, and everything has improved.

Ode to my First

the first piece I ever choreographed was about intimacy between two people. it was based on Felini's movie, "La Strada". That was in 2008 (only 4 years ago!). It was a duet with myself and Jessica Pusateri at UCSD in Studio 3 of the Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Center. It's funny to see what followed in my life during these last 4 years, regarding intimacy. If I was to re-approach the topic of intimacy, it would look quite different.  Anyway, happy to be wiser, calmer.

Here's an Ode to my past sweet self:

My next work is a solo. "Defining excellence"

Make the Work

if I were to go to any of the people that love me who also understand art making and dancing and I were to ask them for some piece of advice, some small bit of crucial wisdom they would all say what *Kristine Eudey said to me at 4:50am this morning. They would say, "make the work." It is a sentence that brings tears to my eyes. Because I have everything I need to make work. everything.


So I read this email she sent me at 4:50am. I read in my bed only 1 hour later and I laid there and felt that paralyzing abyss that I sometimes feel in the morning. The abyss that brings forth the tip of the fear of the world and of life and of the mysteriousness. That deep respect for the proximity of death and for the life that was given without explanation to us. And we hold that life everyday and sometimes we seek answers and explanations, but without fail, the humility of mystery stays with us and so we are humble and beautiful and we must practice acceptance. To be human is to accept the awareness of life without the understanding. So, sometimes, in the morning, when I wake up, I see that and then I turn my attention to... well, normally, to coffee. I get up and I make it like a religion, like an elixir that will help me be and do.


I am aware that most of my writings and work are kind of sad and kind of deep-set in the dark spaces of life. But by no means am I a sad dark person. In fact, it is my own light hand-in-hand with my awareness of our cultural obsession with pretty light things and makes me want to make art about the integrated realness of things. That dark and light are one in the same, both worthy of respect and both here with us and in us. 


*Kristine Eudey (one of the most fascinating photographers based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an artistic colleague I respect and trust deeply) and I were discussing making work and the vastness of what one can do with a day, etc, etc. this morning and there in the sky outside my window, a rainbow extended itself up and over the air beneath it, and a big fluffy orange kitty cat crawled through a hole in the fence, prowling through the wet grass of my backyard, with intention for mischief and discovery.