Not alone...

Seems I am not alone in my feeling the need to hibernate my dance a little bit. Paulette's latest newsletter came out today, and here is a snippet:

"Now I need to take a little more private time for myself.  I have decided to take a year’s sabbatical from performing, and some teaching. I, too, need time to feed my soul, to process, and to find out where I am in the dance now. I do know that I love to teach, and therefore I have a few select teaching engagements in the next year, which I am excited about... 

But I cannot go on full force like I have been, and continue my life on the farm with my husband and my adorable menagerie, and also run my fabulous new shop, Cultivator General Store. I need to take time to find out what my next dance steps are...


My amazing troupe, the Gypsy Caravan Dance Company, will be on hiatus as well, with the other dancers off to their own adventures for now. My dancer/student/friends, the Caravan Dance Collective, will continue on without me in some shape of a troupe, to their choosing, while I take my time on my private journey. I am thankful for their support with my decision. And who know where I will end up?"

Read the full newsletter HERE.  Scroll near the bottom to see this portion.

Paulette, I wish you well on your road through these questions, and hope you find answers that fulfill your heart and soul. (And I know I still owe you a visit, Momma. *mwah*) The journey continues...

Jane of all trades?

Trying to be everything to everyone can be exhausting. I know! I've tried!

Looking back on the evolution of my dance, I can see a sort of wave-like motion. That is, like a wave pushing forward which swells and swells and swells....and finally breaks and crashes and eases upon the shore... Yep, I kinda feel that is what my dance has done.

I started out so simply--much like we all do. Just an image of dance that felt natural and came naturally from my combination of instincts plus research into many different styles which appealed to me. My roots were in cabaret/folkloric, because really that's all there was around here at the time. "Tribal" was not yet a household word, and though I knew of group improv and had the videos, that wasn't what I was trying to do, per se. I just liked dancing, especially with other like-minded women, and I enjoyed exploring all the bits and pieces of theory and aesthetics that my teachers and friends brought into my field of vision.



As I learned more, and added new ideas to my bag of tricks, I wanted to bring them all together somehow. I liked that I was a fusion dancer working among other fusion dancers, and had that freedom. My teachers and friends encouraged me to blend and follow my bliss, and I was not shy about doing so. Of course it was all with an eye toward what would be most effective and appropriate on a given stage, but even with those "soft limits" on my creative output (maybe even partly because of), things began to fracture a bit. That is to say, I understood that doing a dark, moody sword piece at a sunny afternoon faire wasn't really going to be effective, and nor was my folky costumes and music going to have the intended impact at the goth club. So naturally, I felt the need to divide these diverse portions of my dance into some kind of categories. There was costuming for this venue, and music for that venue. And even a vocabulary of movement and treatment which rocked over here, but wouldn't really work over there. So every time we staged a piece, we would pick and choose from these many different components to piece together the ideal setlist for the show we were intending to do. And taken at face value, that sounds idyllic, doesn't it? Being able to adapt and adjust in such a way that we could present several really different bodies of work based on the venue and the audience is a valuable skill.

But the result wasn't quite so simple or ideal.