Nachmo, Day 20 - Process Shift (The Tech I'm Using)

I've been slowly changing how I write choreography throughout the month.

 

Since 2012, I've written all my dances out on lined looseleaf first, then either transcribed them into Benesh Movement Notation (ballet/jazz) or typed them into Pages (tap dances).

This month though, I started using my Rocketbook erasable notebook. Since it's set up to scan the pages directly to my email, that way I could continue writing by hand like normal, and then immediately have no-effort digitization AND email backup in one fell swoop. And it does work well. But the Rocketbook has limited pages and I was choreographing faster than I was uploading/backing up.

 

I sort of accidentally fell into this habit of jotting down choreography notes in the Notion app on my phone whenever I didn't have the Rocketbook on me. Then I'd continue working on the notes in Notion on my laptop, with the iTunes/'Music' miniplayer in the corner.

Two days ago, I discovered that if you hover the cursor over the miniplayer and scroll, you can scrub through the song without having to click back and forth between Notion and iTunes.

That absolutely changed the game.

Now I can keep the cursor in one place (hovering over the scrub bar) and replay 8 counts to my heart's content, while simultaneously typing notes without the extra hassle (yes, I know exactly how 'first world problems' this sounds) of clicking back and forth between the two (and forgetting which one was selected before starting to type). This means I'm losing my train of thought WAY less, and the fact that I'm doing a show on my lived experience with memory loss should tell you how frustratingly easy it is to lose my train of thought... and how difficult it is to find my train of thought again once I've lost it.

This tiny change has launched me into creative hyperspeed. I'd already half-taught my devices not to autocorrect my tap dance shorthand so I'm not facing that friction much. I'm also not sweating the specific counts as much as usual (mostly for the sake of doing a lot of output during Nachmo proper), replacing specific subdivisions with timestamps because those are MUCH easier to find when you're dealing with jazz music. I just don't have the brain space or energy to try to find the 1 and hold a very fleeting idea in my head long enough to figure out which sixteenth count I'm starting the step on while following the saxophone melody. I'm NaNoWriMo-ing this thing. Get it in writing and figure out the pacing later. I've always let the music's own dynamics and rhythms inspire me, so I'm hoping with the help of the timestamps I'll be able to hear what I was thinking later.

As far as stats, so far today I've done almost three minutes' worth of choreography. I've just finished the song I was on, and that officially brings me to the 30-minute mark of the show -- or, my goal for Nachmo 2025. Obviously, we're going to keep going and see how far we get. Maybe choreographing the entire 54-minute show in a month isn't entirely out of reach after all. I hadn't planned to speedrun creation and production the way I did with Sottovoce, and I think it might be harder to do such a thing this time. The things that made Sottovoce so unconventional for me were the things that made it forgiving... I was suffering with memory loss even then, but the lack of set music meant I could hide the blank spots in editing a little bit (that's why the editing in Sottovoce is so janky. Almost every single cut in that film is covering a 2-3 minute mental blank). Here, I am working with set music, and while that may make it easier to memorise, that will mean I actually have to know the choreography, at tempo... all 54 minutes of it.

I do notice that letting my work breathe/not choreographing at the absolute cutting edge of my ability (as of 2019) means I cover more musical ground a lot faster, and hopefully it'll be easier for my broken brain to actually learn it. I'm only hoping it's not too boring for the audience.

(silence)

As I mentioned in my previous post, lately I've been into smooth jazz. As in, instrumental music.

Up till this summer, I strongly disliked instrumental music. Where was the story? Where were the opinions? Where were the thoughts and the observations? One of the reasons I love Daniel Amos/Terry Scott Taylor SO much is because every lyric is a gemstone reflecting back at you a universe of observations, feelings, and experiences. I have always related to the written word, and that extended to the type of music I listened to.

But lately, good lyrics are losing their pull. I've been listening to a lot of synth/vapour/climate/retro-wave, and I've found myself actively skipping the songs with lyrics (I keep telling myself it's because I don't like the singers' voices, but I'm not sure I believe that). At the same time, my own love for and ability to communicate in the written word seems to be going downhill.

I think it started after I was banned from posting on Facebook by my in-laws (thus effectively murdering me in front of my primary audience), but that was in 2021 and the loss of the written word really only accelerated in the past year or so. Words suddenly don't mean anything to me anymore. Is it because I've believed and then been hurt by the words of one too many people? Is this part of my memory loss? Is this a normal part of aging? (Am I old enough to be 'aging?') Is this simple lack of energy from having every scrap of my soul siphoned out of me day in and day out at the fast food job as things happened too quickly to think... and my ability to think atrophied as a result?

I miss sitting by windows and looking out at trees and letting my mind wander and coming back with cool little intellectual trinkets. Sure, I'm still doing creative things, but without the written word, I feel like an imposter, like some mute alien took over my body and I don't recognise it anymore.

I'm not me without writing, just as I am not me without dance. I don't know who this other person is who is living in my body now, but I don't like her. She is not me. She's some namby-pamby watered-down butt-kissing wimp who has bought into all the things I used to rail against. The 9-to-5 job? She doesn't feel safe without it. The discipline of dance? She has put on an extra 30 pounds because she doesn't move around anymore. The contingency plans for every aspect of life? She melts my brain down trying to set them up, even though I know trusting God was so much easier (foolhardy, maybe, but at least my brain wasn't being eaten by acid every second of every day worrying about every possible potential problem the future might bring). The adventurous spirit that led her all over western Canada and created so many wonderful memories? She's pretending she's been buried alive in some hole in the ground where Satan cooks hot dogs in the summer heat.

I'm not sure how to banish this imposter living in my skin and get me back.

Reflections On Stories From The Incandescent Years

I miss this place and I want to write something here, but I'm not sure what.

I've been scrolling Facebook for two hours and am mostly writing this in an attempt to get myself to just stop and do something productive. Supper is in the oven already, but the dishes haven't been done in three days. I had dental surgery yesterday and they told me not to exercise, but what else is there to do?

I want to listen to music, but I want to buy more, as I'm getting bored with the variety I have (which sounds ridiculous even as I type that; I have over five thousand songs in my iTunes, which apparently equals over fifteen days).

Recently I've gotten into vapourwave, specifically climatewave (which is to say I've gotten into early '90s smooth jazz). It's the only thing besides dance that calms (or at least drowns out) the scream of static coursing through my brain every second of every day. That music transports me to when I was a child and everything was predictable and safe -- Mom was always in the kitchen making supper around 5pm, Dad would spin records well into the evening and then put on an instrumental CD for us after we were tucked in for the night, Grandma always had cartoons and 'coffee and cookies' for us whenever we went to visit, and we'd watch Grandpa slice apples in his chair with his little paring knife against his thumb while he watched the news. Church was on Sundays, and we'd go to Kosmos or Zambelli's afterwards. Incandescent light still cast a warm glow over everything (maybe the phasing out of incandescent has contributed to the phasing out of human warmth and connection). We were poor, but we were comfortable. We lived out on the exposed fields of the vast prairie, but we were safe.

When they say 'music is my drug,' maybe this is what they mean. I have always felt more comfortable thinking about the past than the future, but now I'm using the music of the past to actively block out the present. The present is filled with angry people and the AI takeover and 'we're moving forward with another candidate' emails and fluorescent lights and grey fast food restaurants and my brain screaming but not in words and the persistent feeling of time moving too fast. If black holes really do slow down time, somebody should install one by the moon so we can all catch our breath once in a while.

Maybe then I could see the stories again.

I used to write mundane little stories here, whole blog posts about computers crashing and construction delays and moments with friends. Stories that took maybe five minutes to live through, and would have been forgotten in a few weeks if I hadn't put them here.

That's what life is, isn't it? A thousand tiny stories that make up who we are.

My parents, though not artists, are both born storytellers. My dad is the unofficial keeper of the generational stories, the ones that he heard at his grandfather's knee and has passed on to us (and all the neighbours). I got my comedic timing from my mom, who has a one-liner for every occasion. Buying gas while running errands can become a hilarious encounter by the time she gets back home to tell us about it. To not be able to see the stories in my life the way I used to feels like losing myself as a person. Have I lost the stories because my memory doesn't work? or does my memory not work anymore because I lost the stories?

Maybe all I have to do is re-cultivate my eye for story. The only thing is I'm not sure how to do that.