Checkmate

I've talked before about my struggles with memory loss. This frustration with myself came to a head while producing my most recent dance film, but it has long been seeping into every aspect of my creative life and eroding my confidence.

In mid-February, I attended a tap festival. For an extra fee, one could present a piece before the festival faculty for feedback. Terrified but wanting to know where I stood in such a diverse field, I paid the fee and then agonised over which piece to present.

I've choreographed so many pieces, and since my college years, a good many of them have been solo tap dances (because they were easy to film and post on Instagram to show that I really was working on my performance skills -- not that that convinced anybody, apparently). At first my plan was to memorise one of the more recent works, but as the film became a behemoth that demanded every single second of my free time, I decided to fall back onto a much older piece that's been my mental noodling piece since I choreographed it in 2018. This was -- ironically -- mostly because I had it completely memorised and could whip it out at will. My feet ran through it on my work break at least every other day without much thought. I had this piece.

But as the presentation time drew near, the looming dark cloud of dread that I would find a way to forget this piece threatened to eat me alive. I couldn't remember anything else. What made me think I could remember this?

I tried to shove the fear away, knowing that if I focused on a poor outcome, of course I would produce a poor performance. I ran it through mentally a couple times with nary a pause. I knew this piece. I knew this piece.

Thirty seconds into performing it, I completely blanked.

I was in front of Dianne Walker, of all people. I couldn't just stop. So I jumped to the next thing I could remember -- my placeholder set of 32 counts of buck single time steps. And I camped on it for 64 counts -- nearly half the dance. I threw in the few phrases I could remember, but all I could think was I'm presenting my own choreography in front of Dianne Walker and not only am I not doing  the choreography, I'm doing beginner time steps of all things. But I smiled and eventually I remembered some other sections and managed to at least sort of land the ending.

Of course, after such a showing, the consensus of the feedback session was, 'it was simplistic.' I was frustrated, don't get me wrong. That choreography was so complicated and so intricate and I hadn't even done half of it. They hadn't even seen what the dance really was. But not one of them said, 'I could tell you forgot.' These were industry professionals, most of whom have been dancing longer than I've been alive. If anybody would have noticed, it was them.

I went back to my seat after the session and told myself, defiantly, 'I can improv. I don't need to fear memory loss anymore. I can busk.'

See, for years (literally years) I've been wanting to busk. It's both extra cash and practice. What's not to love? But the problem was despite my impressive back catalogue of choreographed tap solos, I could not manage to learn even one of them. And I wanted to have a solid forty-five minutes of solo work in my feet before I went out busking, so my dancing would be worth paying for -- even if it was only a handful of coins. But what I learned after that experience was that I could improv an entire piece in front of a crowd -- even a very knowledgeable crowd. I was completely capable of it. Memory loss could not stop me now. So what if I forgot the dance? It completely within my abilities to improv my way through and now I knew that for a FACT.

It was a powerful moment. After three years of being cut down and shrunk to nothing because of my memory loss, I finally -- finally -- had something that the memory loss could not touch. I could still dance whether my stupid memory liked it or not. I had checkmated my memory loss.

Nachmo, Day 4 - Fear

It is Day 4 of National Choreography Month, and Day 368 of my personal 400 day choreography challenge.

My goal for this month is to choreograph, film, and edit a full-length dance work and submit it to the Nachmo Film Festival in February. Admittedly I'm stretching the definition of 'full-length,' as the show will probably clock in between 30 and 45 minutes, but it will still be the longest single work I've ever done.

I was really feeling the need to do something new and different this year. I've been doing 'choreograph 3-5 songs in a month' for some 8-10 years now, plus I just choreographed 24 pieces in 2022. I wanted a challenge, and decided that a full one-woman show (in the form of a dance film since I live in an artistic wasteland) would be a good challenge for me. I have filmed, edited, and released (previously choreographed) dance films in less than two weeks before, but the longest of those was less than five minutes.

I'm also creating my own sound design for this. Since I want this piece to be my first 'official' semi-professional piece, the last thing I want is to get in hot water for copyright infringement. Given the short production timeline, I figured my time would be better spent creating my own soundtrack rather than trying to track down copyright holders and get permission with so little notice. It also gives me the freedom to do what I want with this piece from a dance perspective -- I'm going to be blending dance styles a lot, and cutting between recorded music to fit the different styles will be jarring and/or inorganic.

This choice to create my own sound design has also lent me my theme for this piece -- all the different ways we communicate without using spoken words. I do have scraps of notes on this theme in my journals and notebooks going back to 2016, so this has been percolating for a while, but I really only started developing the concept last month.

I'm not far enough into this for the fear to have gone away yet. I am TERRIFIED. I'm terrified this show won't flow well. I'm terrified that my in-laws will use this show as another excuse to bully me. I'm terrified that I'm too close to it and won't clean/edit it well. I'm terrified that my very-beginner body percussion passages will be a disgrace to the art form. I'm terrified that I'll get pigeonholed as an artist into this very avant-garde piece that really is a departure from who I generally am as a choreographer. I'm terrified my sound design will be clunky and/or read as 'too cutesy' or too 'manufactured.' I'm terrified that the show will be long and boring and repetitive -- especially since it's going to be kind of a thinking person's show, not easily accessible for the mainstream.

But at the same time -- I've been stuck in a 'choreograph a random song' rut for years and have been long yearning to do something bigger, different, more challenging. I've been wanting to choreograph my own show for over a decade. Fifteen-year-old Kate would have loved to do something like this. If this turns out rather decent, it's a really good 'serious' start for a portfolio, plus it shows everybody who said I couldn't or that I didn't want this bad enough that actually, they're wrong and I can do this and they were wrong about me. This also proves to myself that despite being in an artistic wasteland, I am resourceful and -- dare I say -- skilled enough to create the biggest work of my life. If I can do a work like this here, I can do anything anywhere. I think I need to convince myself of this more than anybody else.

This morning I've been thinking a lot about the words of Czeslaw Milosz as quoted in the liner notes of Daniel Amos' Vox Humana album: 'No-one puts words on paper or paint on canvas doubting. If one doubts, one does so five minutes later...'

I'm trying to not doubt. I'm trying to focus on what a cool concept it is. I'm trying to focus on how much I've wanted to do something like this and how exciting it is to finally be doing it. All I've got to do is press through the fear for the next week or so -- long enough to build up so much momentum and excitement at what's developing that I can silence the fear.

Tune in next time...

2022 Goals Retrospective

I feel more satisfied about 2022 than I have about any year since 2018. I would not yet say I'm in top form yet, but I'm closer than I was.

This year, I...

- choreographed 24 pieces. My goal for 2022 was 14. I literally doubled my output from 2021.

- got 35k into revising Kyrie. The thing I'm most glad about here is how not-overwhelmed I feel about it. For eight years, I would try to revise this novel but my brain would go into nuclear-meltdown mode within literally ten minutes. This year I spent three months making a timeline, then started rewriting entirely from scratch. And we're still going.

- made a Ko-fi page for artistic income... and got my first donation.

- wrote my first poem since before my cousin died in early 2015.

- took an online tap class in which I learned some historical repertoire AND took a summer dance intensive.

- did live improv tap dance for the first time ever and loved it.

- wrote a 50k novel in November.

- performed in two theatre shows.

- got my first paid acting gig.

In many ways, I feel like I didn't do much of anything this year. These were all small changes that (aside from the dance classes) took maybe twenty minutes out of my day, but that was the point. I knew I didn't yet have the mental strength to overhaul my entire life, so I dedicated myself to shoehorning artmaking into my days as they already were, just enough so that I wouldn't lose my skills. It really doesn't feel like I've done much, but I look at this list of things I accomplished in just 365 days and I'm surprised at how big some of these things really are. A full novel? A paid gig? 35k into a project that stymied me for nearly a decade? Twenty-four pieces -- over an hour and a half -- of choreography? At least half of the things I accomplished here were not on my original list of goals for 2022, and all of the rest -- save NaNoWriMo -- were achieved in ways or to an extent I very much had not expected.

All I hope for is for this to double again in 2023. I would be completely happy with that.

Return... To What?

Yesterday was my first live performance since February 2020 -- twenty-seven months ago. It was my first performance as a married woman, the first since my ADHD diagnosis, and the first performance where I didn't know a single person in either the show or the audience.

This was a curated show for National Tap Dance Day, and my class learned our entire piece over Zoom specifically for this show. I didn't meet a single one of my classmates till the day of.

I also had nobody come to see it. My family and my best friend couldn't afford the gas money (who could, really?), my in-laws were camping, and my husband stayed home as a precaution because of his health issues. I didn't have a single person the audience to greet me after the show.

This turned out to be a good thing, as it was far from the triumphant return to the stage that I hoped it would be. Dress rehearsal went well... too well. I tried to push the apprehension out of my mind, but when I pushed the apprehension away, I apparently also pushed away all memory of the second half of the dance. It was an absolute train wreck. It probably sounded like one too. I skipped huge chunks of sounds all while trying desperately to make it at least LOOK like I was doing the same thing as my classmates.

I know it's been a long time, but watching how well everyone else was doing in dress rehearsal after the same two-year interruption that I experienced made me feel even more like a has-been who really never was. I had thought -- or maybe hoped in vain -- that the long sabbatical would refresh my mind and my muscles. Apparently this was not the case. And I don't know how to come back.

So much has changed-- not just in the world, in me. I don't know who I am anymore. I was thrust so quickly into this identity that I never expected -- a wife -- in a time where not a single speck of the rest of my life was 'normal.' I had no anchor on which to build my new identity, so I cobbled together some scraps ('ADHD,' 'forgetful,' and my so-called 'friends' supplied the ever-popular 'too negative') the best I could. I tried to return to the old one -- to 'dancer' -- and my brain said 'no matches found.'

I don't know what to do. Do I try to get it back? I want to. But how?

Ten Years At The Edge

On 10 April 2012, I completed my first piece of choreography.

I had been choreographing in fits and starts for probably about a year and a half before that, and I had been seeing the dancers in my head since around 2001.

I've told the story on this blog about the catalyst that finally got a piece done. I had only just discovered Benesh Movement Notation as a tool for writing down the dances flooding my mind when I overheard my mother mocking my dream to my dad. The rage I felt fueled me to see through the task I set before myself -- namely, to complete choreography to the song Sing Your Freedom by White Heart. I hadn't put much thought into my song choice, but as I think back on it, that was probably a very fitting launchpad. After years of quietly bristling under my mother's authoritarian rule over my words, thoughts, attitude, and activities, I finally had the courage to do something that I wanted to do. She thought I was stupid, but I did it anyway. I still remember the thrill of realising I only had two more sets of eight to go, and then finishing the piece less than an hour later. I emerged that night with a fully-notated Benesh score (which I still have) and a renewed fire and passion for choreography which has yet to be snuffed out by the 'well-meaning advice' of those who claim to care about me.

Over the past ten years, I have been able to perform my choreography both on stage and on film. I've choreographed for musical theatre productions, fundraisers, talent shows, competitions, and short films. I had a piece place first in its category in (virtual) competition in summer 2020. I have been able to at least somewhat distill the pain of three MAJOR personal losses into highly emotional and touching dances that are highly praised by viewers. And to this day, whenever I hear music, I see dancers. They are my companions on long drives and late nights.

I write choreography not because I want to, but because I HAVE to. It's an almost irresistible impulse. There is no balance in the world if I'm not choreographing.

Ten years' worth of choreography -- some 1200 pages, set to roughly seven hours' worth of music.

While some of this has been scanned into the computer, put on backup drives, and (rarely) reprinted, every single thing I create starts out handwritten. Every single mark on these notation scores was drawn by hand (and probably erased and re-drawn at least three times).

Over the course of ten years, I've choreographed 116 pieces, which doesn't sound too impressive until you factor in the five-year performing arts degree and two years of that also independently working toward a musical theatre career (since the college sure wasn't interested in getting me actual experience let alone work in the field they were supposed to be training me for). I've also been working a legit full-time job for the past year and a half. In 2021 alone I choreographed twelve pieces -- all while working full time. This was something I never thought was possible (see also all my rants from 2012-13 about how I would never work a 9-to-5. And, technically, I'm still not, so 2012 me was right as well as stubborn). This year my goal is fourteen pieces this year, and I'm already over halfway there in less than four months. I am on pace for a 50-piece year -- in other words, to almost double my ten-year output by the end of 2023. And I'm working a 'real job' full time. All you who said it couldn't be done -- guess what, I'm doing it. Don't ever underestimate me.

I fully intend to expand my accomplishments in the relatively near future. Since I now have plenty of choreography to work with, it's time to get it seen (well, more regularly). I have at least two full-length shows planned for within the next five years, and I want to start busking this year. I also have a couple of dance films in active pre-production.

Do I wish I was farther along, doing bigger things, nicer films, larger shows, touring more? Yes. And I'd be lying if I said that didn't make me sad and frustrated sometimes. But I didn't quit. Despite all the detractors, I didn't quit.

We're still only at the edge of the dream, folks. There's so much more to come.