Day Twenty - National Choreography Month

So after doing pretty much nothing for the entire second week, I went on a huge tear and choreographed three dances in two days. Two of them I covered in the previous post (Day 18), but then I started and finished another tap solo: Lecrae's Chase That. (This is what I meant when I said it was totally feasible for me to catch up on a three-days-per-piece timeline in the space of several days.)

Out of all the projects I had planned for this month, this one probably scared me the most (with the possible exception of Rattle Me, Shake Me), just because of the sheer volume of content in the song. Of course, being a rap song, it's packed with words, but that also means it's packed with rhythm and it covers a LOT of ground lyrically. Rap, as an art form, is adept at blending metaphors and imagery, using pivot words to take you from one mental image to another (this is also what I love about the songwriting of Steve Taylor), which kind of stretches your brain -- as it's supposed to. But it's also tricky for a choreographer like me who likes to match the mood of the movement to the mood of the lyrics. The music, being a canned beat (as is traditional with rap), isn't much help mood-wise either -- it's more or less the same loop for the entire song.

(Incidentally, this is why I'm not as into rap as I could be -- I love the style of lyric-writing, but it always kills me a little bit how uncreative the musical arrangements tend to be. Lecrae has been known to use violins -- Chase That is one such track, in fact -- and seriously that makes a huge difference, but as far as I know, he's the only one seriously experimenting in musical terms. That said, I realise that the main point in rap is the lyrical prowess and it would be difficult to keep a great arrangement from overshadowing the lyrics. It'll be really interesting to see how the genre develops and matures over the next twenty years or so as future rappers build on the work of artists like Lecrae.)

Anyway... the dance: Actually, I've done so much choreography in the past three days that I'm not too clear on which one this was. But out of all the musical climaxes I've tried to choreograph in various disciplines over the past four years or so, this was one of the ones I think I actually managed to capture in motion. I'm actually very proud of myself, particularly as tap isn't my first dance language. I'm noticing, too, that I'm getting better at this pacing thing -- not overusing things as much and thereby killing the climax when I use the overdone genius idea yet again (after putting it in every chorus).

This piece was intentionally a solo. Although my relationship with God is not great right now, this has always been my goal in my art -- to glorify God. And even though I've spent the last two days (in particular; the past year in general) mostly lashing out in fury that God isn't listening to me, there's a tiny part of me that still wants to give God the glory in my art. There's still a little piece that wants to chase His glory and not mine, and the chorus of this song is kind of an adopted mission statement (the story in the verses, obviously, bears little resemblance to my own story).

Day Eighteen - National Choreography Month

Written 18 January 2016, 3.13pm.

This month I've actually done a lot of dances that I've meant to do for a very long time and simply never committed to. I've wanted to do On The Other Side since before I owned tap shoes, and both Westminster Bridge and Love Divine were basically in complete sketch form and all I had to do was finalise the details. If I did nothing else this month, I cleared out a backlog of dances that really should have been polished off months ago.

One bit of glad news is that the month of straight tap has been doing exactly what I hoped it would -- focusing on always, only tap for almost three weeks now has allowed the ballet side of my brain to recharge and now some ideas for ballet dances are starting to creep back in. As tempting as it is to jump on them immediately and include them in Nachmo, I'm making a conscious effort to let then percolate. I'll pick them up again in February.

So far this month I've completed five dances -- Surrender; Love Divine; Rattle Me, Shake Me; On The Other Side; and today I polished off Westminster Bridge. That leaves another five still on the original list. I don't think I'll actually get all of them done this month, but even what I have right now is a huge accomplishment. I think I did like five dances total in 2015 (okay, it was actually more than that, but it feels like I've done more in three weeks now than I did all of last year).

Since I covered the first three a bit, here are some (sort of) brief reflections on the outstanding two dances.

On The Other Side: For years this was in my head as a dance for six. I only choreographed one rhythm line this month but I'm thinking I might expand it for two or six at a later date. This is less 'logical' and building blocks-y than I usually choreograph my tap stuff. I'm enough of a novice that I still tend to work in terms like 'two sets of paradiddles,' or 'one set of shuffle-ball change.' I'm not brave enough to take one of this and another of that, mess with the rhythm, and shove them in six counts instead of eight. Knowing that, and in an attempt to make my (tap) choreography less stale, I intentionally made this piece more 'off-kilter' than I usually do. I put in some stuff from a tap dictionary that I had never done before in an attempt to force myself to learn something new on my own (I have a tendency to learn nothing outside of what we work on in class). This is also what one might call lyrical tap -- I tried not to be a slave to the lyric rhythm, but I also took some of my shading cues from the rhythm of the lyrics.

Westminster Bridge: I actually don't really remember much of this one because it literally took me like an hour and a half to write it. I seem to remember it not sucking, so it must not have been too bad. It's a trio, and I think this was the really fast one (there was a really fast one in here somewhere).

Dream Funeral

Originally written 2 January 2016, 11.36pm.

Lately I've been realising how much I think about death, particularly my own death.

I've mentioned on this blog before that I was suicidal for the better part of nine years. That time is past, but even after the suicidal thoughts were gone, I still thought about my own death a lot. Because I'd been suicidal for so long, it seemed normal to me. And because I'm an (aspiring) artist, it also stood to reason that I would ponder my own mortality more than the average person.

It never occurred to me that this might be strange until after Christmas. Over the past two weeks, like five people I know have gotten engaged (and I knew of at least eleven before that), and while everyone's talking about wedding planning and stuff, it began to occur to me that I'd never really even considered my own wedding or marriage. My (chronically single) sister has planned out her entire future wedding down to the amount of seconds it will take her to walk down the aisle, and I'd never thought to work out anything more specific than 'I'll be in white.' This might not seem strange to you until I tell you that I have my entire funeral planned out.

I'm not dying -- at least not of anything chronic (sometimes it feels like it though -- but my rant against the Canadian Health Care system is for another day). There's nothing in my life that is generally a harbinger of an early death. I mean, I could be taken out by an accident or something, but at the moment, I'm likely to live another seventy or eighty years (if the genes are any indication).

The other day I was thinking about this, wondering if maybe it was odd for me to have planned out my funeral while all my friends are planning weddings. Then I realised that in nearly every novel I've written, I make a cameo. And in almost every novel that features such a cameo, that character dies. Usually they die young, and usually they die suddenly -- one was murdered, one died of a virus, another indirectly committed suicide. But they're usually the 'me' character -- the one I identify with the most. And usually that character's death drives the book's plot. I've been dying vicariously through my characters. Why?

Again we turn to Kyrie. Only in Kyrie did I actually write a funeral, but that funeral was almost exactly the one I've planned out for myself. I featured some of the same songs I want played at mine, I featured the 'open mic eulogy' idea I want for my funeral, I featured a dance -- the same thing I want at my funeral. I focused on the heartbreak of the first-person narrator and the dead character's closest friend. It was pretty much my dream funeral.

The character who died was the 'me' character. Her goal was to touch people's hearts and encourage them as they trod the weary path of life -- as is mine. Her goal was to bring truth and beauty to a world that increasingly despises both -- as is mine. She had the courage to pursue her dreams of being an artist and when she died, although she touched the lives of many, and many missed her, there were 'villains' at her funeral: her parents (caricatures of everyone who's ever told me I was stupid and worthless purely because I'm not wired for a 9-to-5) and the director of the show that she was performing in when she died (who, as the narrator noted, mourned only the great talent he had lost, not the person herself).

In reflecting on that story, I recalled how much of my life has been spent in despair over this black hole in my heart and soul of feeling like I wasn't important to anybody. The question that has dogged my entire life since I was about nine years old was, If I died, would anybody miss me? That question fueled the lengthy suicidal episode and it still haunts me now. I asked my mother once and her response was, "Pfft! Of course I'd miss you," but it was so flippant and she seemed to think the question was ridiculous and annoying -- just like everything else about me. I'm not sure that if I died today, anybody would miss me for more than a week. And maybe that's why I took it so hard when my cousin died. After we got the phone call saying she was dead, my parents' reaction was, "well, God's in control," as if that settled it. They didn't ache, they didn't hurt, my mother didn't shed a single tear, though heaven knows my sister and I sobbed until we couldn't breathe at her funeral. They didn't mourn. They didn't care. They literally just shrugged and moved on. Less than a month after her death, my mother actually got upset at me: "Look, I don't know why you can't just move on already!"

Again -- less than a month after the third death close to me in as many months. The death of a child. And we're not counting the divorce-deaths in this tally.

And I'm starting to wonder if that's why every spark of life and joy and peace has shriveled up and died within me -- if that's how my parents react when a child close to them has died, how will they react if I were to die? Would they even care? Would they mourn me at all? Would they even notice a difference? And this is my parents. If I'm inconsequential in the eyes of my parents, how much less am I loved by those who aren't obligated to love me? Would I even be lucky enough to get a funeral? Or would people just send pithy cards to my parents with their regrets because they had work and call it good enough? Do I mean anything to anybody?

Some time ago, I wrote a post outlining my personal mission in life, and I've already alluded to it in this post. I want to touch people's lives. I want to encourage them and bring them a spark of hope or joy, the same way David Meece, Terry Scott Taylor/Daniel Amos, White Heart, and so on have brought to me. But if I can't even manage to touch the lives of my own family, never mind the random people I've happened to cross paths with in my life... then I've failed.

People always say on their deathbeds that the most important thing in life is the relationships you have and the people whose lives you've touched -- your spouse, your children, your parents, your family and friends. So many films, so many books, so many stories have that at their core. I'm one of the very few that have picked up on this long before actually dying, but I'm so inept at it. I want to know that I've helped somebody keep their chin up for even one more day. I want to know that something I created helped bring refreshment to a soul weary of this depressing world. But I don't know that I have. I don't know if I or the work of my brain and my hands have been important to anybody. I don't need to be famous. But I want to know that my life meant something to somebody.

Day Ten - Dancing In Character

My latest project for National Choreography Month is turning out to be more of a big musical theatre number than a tap piece. This didn't surprise me too much, based on my post-secondary education thus far, but then I started to realise that the few dances I have managed to choreograph over the past few months have had distinctive characters in them. They're no longer twelve more-or-less-the-same beautiful dancers without a personality. Even though all of the dancers in a piece might be following the exact same kind of character (or stereotype), at least they have a character. It's not just bodies flailing around in a stylised fashion anymore. It's bodies moving with purpose, at least setting a theme if not telling a story.

A quick perusal of my recent choreographic output finds a tired old man, being escorted to heaven by a child and a dozen angels. There's a young woman grieving the death of someone close to her -- to the point where she's hallucinating. There are three game-show girls in the sassiest piece I will probably ever dream of choreographing. There's a legion of angels surrounding and comforting a terrified child in the dead of night. There's the wind running through the prairies -- grass, grain, and water dancing in praise of their creator. There are the aforementioned couples at a party and the dangerous-but-attractive man leading the naive girl on in Surrender.

And maybe this is where I'm getting stuck. For so long I've choreographed beautiful-but-plotless pieces (Speechless, Early In The Morning, God's Promises, more recently Dancing On Light...). And I still sort of expect that of myself. I love watching huge dances with lovely choreography and it usually doesn't bother me (in fact I often prefer it) if there's no main characters/soloists, so I try to emulate it. And in some pieces, I think I've done a decent job. But I haven't been allowing my choreography to move in the direction it wants to go lately. Apparently right now the creative brain wants to make characters, to create a mood at least (though not necessarily a specific story). Are rules and restrictions on particular pieces necessary? Absolutely, or nothing worthwhile would get done -- everything would have too much variety to make sense and not enough repetition to hold it together in one cohesive whole (this previous sentence is brought to you by my music theory profs -- I knew that music degree would help my choreography).

Part of why I've been reluctant to move into a realm with more character(s) is that I don't really know how. The first time I'd ever really been asked to take on a character of any kind in a dance was in my first year of college. I had been dancing for over ten years and the idea of dancing in character had never even crossed my mind until that teacher asked it of us. I mean, I knew about all the big ballets -- Swan Lake and Giselle and Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty and so on -- but it had never occurred to me that they had to dance in character. I assumed the costumes, the sets, and the story written in the programme did all the work without really giving it any thought at all. It took me at least a full year to begin to wrap my head around it (and my head is still not completely around it -- how can you be in character non-verbally?). I always understood the concept of acting in character, but dancing...? I don't really even know where to begin. Dance is so codified... actors get to use the English (or whatever) language and street-level body language -- things that the average audience will understand, at least at a subconscious level. Dance, however, is so rare, so elite, so stylised, that the average person doesn't know how to watch it and as a result won't pick up on any of the subtleties that are supposed to be conveying character.

So how to choreograph a character clearly? Some of it is the responsibility of the performer, yes, but some of it is dependent on me, the choreographer. And to make it more difficult, I'm not even choreographing within my primary training -- I only started tap dancing when I was eighteen. I've still got a lot to learn about the dance form itself, never mind within the choreographic side of it.

Anyway, I'm getting off-topic. But I found the recent infusion of characters (or at least stereotypes) into my choreography interesting.

Day Five - National Choreography Month

My proposed setlist from the end of December is still more or less the finalised setlist for this month (although I may have to add some Daniel Amos -- it's looking a little deficient). It's only day five and I've already finished two pieces... plus I took Sunday completely off from choreography. If I'm going with the rate of one dance every three days, I'm a full day ahead of schedule.

My approach so far has been to choreograph the songs which seem to beckon dances more readily. (Translated: I'm doing the easy ones first.)

First dance: Surrender.

The very first time I heard ELO's Surrender the entire premise, look, and feel of the dance popped to my mind, ready-made. The mood and story of the dance remained virtually unchanged from the moment I first heard the song. All that remained was to zoom in on the actual choreography that would convey the story -- and even then I had some of the pieces already.

It's a dance for ten (five couples), but the focus is on one particular couple and the other four mostly make up the setting. It borrows the general premise/theme from story-songs I know and love (Crumbächer's Jamie, Steve Taylor's Jenny, Veil Of Ashes' Angel Falls) -- a naive young girl gets flattered (or perhaps pressured?) into a sketchy romance. The featured couple meet at a dance, they 'fall in love' and start dancing together, but throughout the piece the guy starts getting more and more possessive and the subtext becomes darker and darker, meanwhile the girl keeps ignoring the alarm bells that surely must be ringing in her head. The whole piece builds to the end pose: they're suddenly alone, and she's in his clutches -- literally. It could be a jab at rape culture, it could be a jab at hookup culture -- I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this one yet, but it'll be dark, in the vein of Daniel Amos' Doppelgänger (think Real Girls).

Second dance: Love Divine.

The is an adorable Phil Keaggy song with heavy Beatles influence. The first time I heard this, I knew it was a duet and I knew what the costumes would look like. Plus the dance's ending sequence pretty much came ready-made with the song (and it took a lot of self-discipline to not use that sequence for the whole song because it worked so well).

This song is a night-and-day difference from Surrender, thematically. Love Divine is a song of joy and love from Keaggy to God, singing about how this love saved him and thrills him. It's infectiously happy. It was a bit strange doing a dance ultimately about the widespread corruption of the concept of love and then doing this dance about the perfect, unadulterated (though certainly misunderstood), and free love of Jesus -- the way love was originally intended to be. I went from choreographing some of the darkest depths to the lightest and sweetest in two days.

What's next: I'm thinking David Meece's Rattle Me, Shake Me.

Prelude: National Choreography Month

This is the first National Choreography Month (Nachmo) I've been able to participate in in two years. While I was able to manage NaNoWriMo through both years of college, choreography is a little more time-intensive so I couldn't do Nachmo.

I'm feeling pretty uninspired for this too. But at least I have a tiny bit of a game plan right now (which is better than my last NaNoWriMo attempt... I didn't even have a game plan at the end of NaNoWriMo, to be honest).

I haven't been inspired to do any softshoe (ballet/pointe or jazz) choreography since before Brittney died. When she died, of course, I still had a couple of works-in-progress to finish so the effect wasn't immediate, but once I had finished all of those, I was screwed. Nothing has really caught my attention since. I've written a few original pieces since then, but I worked far too hard for every single one of them (as in: pulling teeth out of a crocodile would be easier) and although I think there's some really beautiful sequencing in some of them, none of them consumed me the way that, say, Sanctuary did. To further the example (and to inform the newcomers), Sanctuary basically ate my life for about three months until I finally choreographed it. The song wouldn't let go of me and I could not rest until I had completed the dance to it. And until Brittney died, that was generally my process: I would stumble on a certain song that I just HAD to choreograph and then my brain would keep mulling over the song whether or not I consciously tried to choreograph it until I had worked out the dance. I had no choice. The song more or less grabbed me and dragged me along for the ride.

Now I know there are dry spots. I know it's not always going to be that easy. But what shocked me was how dead I feel now that there are no ideas, no sparks, nothing to catch my fancy. It seriously feels as if my soul has died. I always thought there might be at least a little something you could coax out though it would be harder than before. But no -- there is nothing. Just apathy.

But -- that's softshoe disciplines. Tap is another story.

I'm always reluctant to choreograph tap because I'm such a novice at it. I've spent so many years dancing and choreographing melody and (occasionally) lyric that although I have pretty good rhythm, I hardly ever choreograph it. Right now, though, even though I couldn't choreograph a pointe dance if my life depended on it, I have tap dance ideas oozing out of my ears. I'm finding myself tap-dancing around the house more than ever before, even though at the moment I'm taking five times more ballet classes than tap ones. So finally it occurred to me that rather than beat myself into the ground trying to come up with the next Sanctuary when it's simply not there, I should do something completely different.

I have decided to spend Nachmo (I keep wanting to type 'nacho') choreographing small tap dances. Solos, mostly, but maybe a couple of trios or something. Also, since this year Nachmo has rolled out a music video submission page (jury's still out on whether or not they will accept Canadian work at this point), that's my new goal (which is why I'm planning on doing solos and small dances rather than focusing on my great love and higher skill level, namely choreographing huge groups -- I don't have huge groups to work with right now). Maybe it's a new year's resolution? I don't know. I suppose it was a new year's resolution that got me choreographing in the first place, so it might be worth a shot.

I'm not sure how many dances I'm going to shoot for. If inspiration hits, it's totally feasible for me to choreograph an entire tap dance in a day (*cough* The Double), but then again, I don't know if I want to bank on that for thirty straight days, particularly when you take into account my work schedule and my dance schedule. I'm thinking maybe two or three small dances a week... if I can even find that many songs to work with. Right now the (still rough) setlist includes the likes of:

~ Chase That (Ambition) - Lecrae
~ Love Divine - Phil Keaggy
~ On The Other Side - Michael W. Smith
~ Wall Of Sound - Loyd Boldman
~ Independence Day - White Heart (haven't choreographed some White Heart in a good long time)
~ Jingle Ka-Ching - VeggieTales (hear me out... with the right treatment, this is prime satire material)
~ Rattle Me, Shake Me - David Meece (because it would be a fantastic video)
~ Surrender - ELO (I can't listen to this one without dancing anyway, so I might as well make it official)
~ Westminster Bridge - Doctor Who season one soundtrack
~ What Is The Measure Of Your Success? - Steve Taylor (this one is a maybe).

If I wind up sticking with exactly that, that's one song every three days. It just might be doable. But in the meantime, I'll keep combing my music library for more potential tap pieces and the list might get a bit of an overhaul yet.

Dancing At The Edge Of Time And Memory

23 November 2015, 12.08am.

On Sunday we got a call that my grandpa -- already in frail health -- has been diagnosed with a superbug.

He may die.

Apparently the last couple of weeks he's been talking about how he's so exhausted and how he just wants to sleep and not have to wake up.

At first I took this news fairly resolutely -- he's been ill for several years now and it's always kind of in the back of one's mind... this Christmas could be the last.

But then suddenly I remembered that he's been asking for months for my sisters and I to come and do a dance performance in the nursing home where he lives now. I didn't have anything prepared and I wanted to wait until I actually had several pieces in a danceable state. And then life happened and I forgot. When I remembered today that I had said I would -- and especially how he's been looking forward to it -- I cried as if my heart would break. What if we don't get it together in time? What if he never gets to see us dance? He's been so excited to see us dance and I haven't given it to him yet. And maybe now it's too late.

Plus, there's this matter of living on the edge of time, knowing it's coming but not knowing exactly when, walking on pins and needles, knowing he can't live forever but not ready to live without him yet. And what do you say to a person who's close to death? With the three deaths earlier this year, I had no warning, no time to say anything I might have wanted to say. They were just taken and I had to live with the fallout. But now I have the chance to say anything I want -- but I don't know yet. And the stupid thing is, I probably won't know what -- if anything -- I have to say to him until after it's too late.

I do this all the time. Going to the doctor is an exercise in frustration because I have a whole big list of questions going into the appointment but when they ask if I have any questions, every single one of those questions is completely gone. And I don't remember until I get home and start coughing again and go, oh yeah -- I cough until I can't breathe for nearly a full minute. Is that a problem? Same at the bank -- "Do you have any other banking?" "I DON'T KNOW MY BRAIN DOESN'T WORK WHEN I'M IN A PROFESSIONAL BUILDING." And it terrifies me that I'm going to think of something I wanted very badly to say to him two minutes after he dies. And then I'll hate myself for the rest of my life because this time I actually had the chance to put a sentence together and I didn't because I totally forgot every word in the English language and what if that was something he really needed to hear?

30 December 2015, 12.52am.

Against all sanity, I arranged this performance. Yes, over Christmas. Yes, despite not having rehearsal space. No, I have no idea what the floor is actually like in the performing space. No, neither dance piece is really in great shape. We perform in fourteen hours.

I'm so done with everything. I had set aside today for rehearsing, particularly my solo, which I have yet to do full-out all the way through (also I remembered that I still HATE solos). Instead, I have spent thirteen hours going over the house with a fine-toothed comb looking for the power cord for my video camera.

This may not seem like a big deal, but the fact is that if I want to get into the performing arts, I will eventually need a portfolio of my previous work. In dance, that's video footage. This performance will be particularly valuable as it will be me performing my own choreography -- that counts double. It shows both my skill as a dancer (don't laugh) and my style of choreography. This doesn't even include the educational factor for me -- if I have footage of myself performing my own work that I can review later, it will provide invaluable feedback on what worked and what didn't and I can use that information to refine what I do and how I do it.

Except, of course, I can't use the video camera because it can't be charged because I can't find the stupid power cord.

So as a result of this fruitless search I am now frustrated beyond words, I haven't practiced at all, I've lost an entire day of my life that could have been productive, and I still don't have a useable video camera. To buy a new cord for my perfectly good and now utterly useless six hundred dollar camera? $125. For the cord.

My grandpa had better enjoy this show. He's going to be the only one lucky enough to see it.

Christmas For The Broken (Music Day)

Usually I'm that really annoying hyper-Christmas person who starts working Boney M. and Michael W. Smith into the music rotation in the middle of August. But this year, it's already Christmas Day and I'm still not feeling it.

It was an awful year. It was right around this time of year that I heard from Brittney for the very last time -- although I didn't know it. It was at Christmas 2014 that I last saw my cousin, my aunt, the family friend we lost, and an entire family unit out of our extended family -- we didn't know it then either. I distinctly remember my uncle hugging me after our family Christmas last year and telling me to 'be good' -- his usual way of saying goodbye. Less than a month later, he left his wife, God abandoned me, and so began the Year From Hell.

How do you celebrate Christmas when the loving family who swore they'd love each other and stick together through thick and thin is either dead, banished, or not speaking to each other?

Peace on earth and good will to men.

This year I learnt that despite all my extended family's insistence to the contrary, their love for each other is EXTREMELY fickle. And if these people are willing to leave spouses and children, if they are willing to skip freaking Christmas after a year like this because of some spat with some in-law, how much longer until it's me they're leaving? How long until they tell me they don't love me anymore, the same way they're telling everyone else? How do you expect me, your niece, to believe you care for me and want the best for me when you are willing to walk out on your own spouse just because you decided you didn't like them anymore?

Does anybody not see what is wrong with this?

Title: Where Are You Christmas
Artist: The Piano Guys
Album: A Family Christmas
Year: 2013
Label: Portrait
iTunes here; YouTube here.

This arrangement is a prime example of when the beautiful is so lovely is also makes one sad -- or at least melancholy. It's an experience that's getting more and more rare these days, but one that really should be getting more frequent. There's 'sad because it's so awful,' there's 'sad because the lyrics are sad,' there's 'sad because of extenuating circumstances,' but this is the increasingly rare 'sad because of its sheer beauty.' The piano melody throughout the piece gets me every time. And then the girl's plaintive voice comes in with that question: where are you, Christmas? and it somehow sounds just like me.

What happened to Christmas with all my aunt and uncles laughing, with the voices of all of the children ringing happily off the ceiling? What happened to Christmas where love pervaded the room and not an awkward tiptoeing around pretty much every single subject we always used to talk about?

Death happens. I get that. My cousin didn't really have a choice in the matter. But divorce -- that's another story. That's your own selfish choice. That is a very clear message that the people you said you committed to don't matter. You committed to me. Don't I matter?

I can never be assured of that again.

Music Day - Comedian

So guess who else has a Kickstarter going?

Steve Taylor is perhaps the most controversial and most well-known figure in CCM history. He is one of those rare figures in CCM who has managed to be both controversial and well-known for longer than a year. Plenty have been controversial (Petra, post-¡Alarma!-era Daniel Amos), but are not known by today's generation of Christians -- their perceived sins were forgotten after a year or two. And plenty have been well-known (Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith), but not really boat-rockers.

Steve Taylor, however, managed to get signed to Sparrow Records -- historically one of the biggest labels in CCM -- which gave him a far bigger potential audience to start with. Add to that a few strong opinions about controversial topics, his knowledge of sarcasm as a first language, and an uncanny ability to pick just the right details and/or wordplay to infuse colour and the unexpected into a song, and you have a recipe for an infamous artist. Even after he stopped releasing solo work, he kept writing songs... my generation of CCM listeners is well acquainted with songs like Breakfast, Shine, Reality, and Million Pieces (Kissing Your Cares Goodbye), all made famous by the Newsboys.

Then the Newsboys Americanised and the brilliant songwriting of Steve Taylor seemed doomed to disappear forever.

But then, two years ago, he launched a Kickstarter campaign with the eventual goal of recording another album with himself on vocals -- his first in over twenty years (the previous Steve Taylor album, Squint, came out in 1993). Naturally, hungry fans pounced on it and if memory serves the campaign was fully funded in twenty-four hours.

This song was a result of that campaign and the resulting album.

Title: Comedian
Artist: Steve Taylor And The Perfect Foil
Album: Goliath
Year: 2014
Label: Independent release
iTunes here; YouTube here.

Now there is another Kickstarter campaign in the works. Steve and his band (which includes Newsboys alum Peter Furler on drums) intend to record an EP, so if you want more of this, go support it here.

Now -- if you're still with me after all that ancient history and the advert -- about the actual song.

I'm not even going to attempt to explain a Steve Taylor lyric because I'll probably get it wrong, so read the lyrics and form your own conclusions here. There's some really great wordplay in the first three verses though (The saints came marching in this morning / And they marched back out the door / Wholly offended...).

Musically speaking, this might be called progressive (I don't actually know, I suck at this genre-classification thing). The music is really sparse until the three-and-a-half-minute mark when the cymbals start competing with Steve's voice for first place in the mix. An electric guitar joins in about a minute later, only to drop out for the ending: a haunting synthesized half-spoken repetition of the phrase Man makes plans / God laughs... (although maybe it only sounds haunting to me because I was watching the Doctor Who episode The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances last night... the voice in the song reminds me a LOT of the voice of the kid saying "Are you my mummy?") This song is significantly mellower than the rest of the album (I very nearly featured Double Negative today instead of Comedian), so if slow songs aren't your thing -- and I don't blame you -- do check out the rest of the album, because if memory serves, this is actually by far the most mellow song on it.

The Musical From Afar and Chronic Indecisiveness

28 November 2015, 11.04pm.

Christmas musical weekend at my college. And I'm not there.

I see the pictures from my friends who are still there. I can almost smell the makeup and hairspray and plywood from the set, I can see the spotlights cutting through the artificial fog on the state-of-the-art set, I can still hear the voices of the school's best singers and performers, I can feel the angel robe draping over me, and I can still taste the apples we were provided with backstage.

How many times since I graduated have I dreamed about this place? Literally dreamed -- at least once a week I find myself back in the dorm hallway, overjoyed to be back. Invariably I find a friend or two and am disoriented when I find a freshman in a room that once held someone else. And then I wake up. Suddenly the nine-hour drive I thought was behind me is undone, and I'm still here in Alberta.

It wasn't school itself that I liked. I didn't exactly enjoy finishing out a ridiculously hectic semester by writing four papers in 36 hours. Oh sure, I loved some of the classes (all the performing ones, anyway -- musical theatre workshop and choir and dance and voice lessons), but mostly what I liked was performing. And in prairie Canada, that school was probably the best place to go to cut one's theatrical teeth. If I could go to that college without having to actually take history classes, that would almost be a dream come true -- something so good I might commit to never leaving.

So why am I not there this year? And why am I not sure if I'm going back next year?

First answer: money. College is not cheap. Especially when your $1800-a-semester meal plan is basically unusable to due the horrendous schedule and you end up spending even more money to buy food because you're not actually eating in the cafeteria.

Second answer: dance. Longtime readers know how much I love dance. I thought I could give it up -- and I committed to giving it up for two years when I went to college. Long story short, I didn't have to give it up entirely, but I did have to go from training at Advanced One to taking classes at Grade Three. And I lost a lot of stamina, a lot of technique, and a lot of the joy in my life. I've spent my year in Alberta so far overdosing on dance classes -- I'm currently taking the heaviest dance schedule I've ever attempted and I still feel so far behind my peers who kept training at the advanced level during my two-year absence. The stamina and technique and definitely the joy is back in my life, but the thing is, to return to college, to return to theatre, I have to give this up. Yes, there are some dance classes at the school, but the reality is that for all intents and purposes, I have to give up dance. I have to pick one or the other. I have to either go back to college, back to theatre and the life it infused into me after years of just being a shell and turn my back on dancing or I have to stay here, keep training at my actual skill level in dance and dying inside every time I see backstage pictures from the many performances that the school puts on every year.

I've been agonising over this decision ever since I realised this past semester how much I loved acting. And the pressure only got higher when the people around me, the people in my program and the people in my dorm started telling me that I should stay, that I should continue on for a Bachelor's degree in performing. I didn't know what to do with that. I'd never received such validation -- ever, in anything. Most of the time, people never notice me as a person, let alone any strengths I have.

And I'm going to end up hating myself, no matter what decision I make. It probably won't matter if I pick theatre or if I pick dance. I'm always going to be thinking, what if I had done the other thing...?