Fork in the road

Every so often I re-evaluate where I am. This isn’t unusual. Everyone does it. Maybe this bout was brought on by nostalgia, by free time, by the weather. I don’t know. I’m struggling with motivation at the moment. With feeling like I’m motivated towards the right things. All too often I feel like my passions are selfish. I’m not certain how to explain that because I mean it on so many different levels. So I’ll pick one passion – choreography – and explain.

Personally
Choreography takes up an inordinate amount of my time. Time that is meant to be dedicated to raising my children or earning money to give them a better life. It doesn’t pay. Or it pays so little as to be borderline insulting. But I love it. I’m driven by it. It lets me collaborate with fascinating people. It lets me explore topics and attitudes that are difficult for me to pin to a page. It makes me a stronger, better person. So long as we are financially functional I can accept this degree of selfishness. Even if so many people in my life don’t understand it. It would be much easier if I were single. I’d do whatever it took to perform and choreograph if I were alone, but things are different with a family.

Globally
We can’t fill a theater. We can barely fill a row these days. I don’t like the idea of state funded art, but I’ve seen what sells. I want no part of it. Reality television and skimpy clothes. If I had all of my dancers take their tops off, we’d be rolling in tips (they are some beautiful women after all). Video dancing and flash sells. So we reach out for state and city funding. We look to foundations. We beg every person we know. For what? To put something on a stage that lasts for a matter of days and impacts maybe a tenth of an already tiny audience? I know this sounds defeatist, but I’m feeling defeated. Why do we create art? Because we have to? Because we have something we feel we need to say? I wish often that my art form were solitary, but is there ever really a solitary art form? Or is it merely that some forms are created in solitude? And truthfully aren’t they all? I choreograph on living, breathing bodies, but that choreography is born when I sleep, when I lie on my floor with the speakers cranked up to 10 until I can feel the music in my blood. Its born long before I show a step to a dancer. They refine and shape it, but its almost like they are editors. The first, raw words are crafted in solitude.

So what do you do when there’s no audience? When the hunting for funding starts to suck away the joy in what you do? When you feel like Sisyphus? I think like this and the ironic thing is it makes me want to create. But I wrestle with how long I can keep at this.

I tell other artists that it is a constant struggle, but its a worthwhile one. We’re doing something special and wonderful. But there is a little voice in the back of my head telling me that someday I’ll need to face reality. I just can’t tell if that voice is a realist or a defeatist. If its the voice I’m supposed to ignore or if I’m crazy to ignore it. Its not like I’m a master who can struggle in poverty in my lifetime knowing I’m leaving some gift for the ages. The work I create lasts for 3 days at best. So I wonder . . .

I have so many works in my head, enough to keep me working for years. And I see the images around my house and wonder if I’m going to get to see those works that aren’t formed yet, if images from those will ever hang on my walls.

Inspiration

I find myself drowning in inspiration, yet lacking for outlets. I hear people say they are uninspired, or that they have no time for their art. There’s a general perception that inspiration is something that should descend upon us, a gift from the universe. That we should be granted the time to act upon that inspiration. It seems to me that the successful artists I know are some of the busiest people around. They have to be. Our world only very rarely supports an artist. So you have to be doing the jobs that pay the bills, put food on the table. You have to be networking, researching, investigating.  All of the time. You have to be looking for funding and building an audience – be it one who sits in a theater or who sits in a chair to read/listen/examine what you do.  Somewhere in there you have to make time to actually create this art that you are in such a frenzy to support. If you can’t summon up inspiration when you have managed to carve out the time to act upon it you are doomed.

Why do we think inspiration should be bestowed? How strangely egotistical. To think that the universe will pick us out and open our eyes. I’m inspired by the people I know who keep with them a recorder, a notebook, scraps of receipts, anything at all. Who are open to what is around them at all times, be it the way the light catches on a window, the hissed discussion going on behind you, or a snippet of music that takes you to another time.

I used to think being open to inspiration meant being ever-present, being truly in the moment. Lately it feels more like being just outside of any moment. It makes you a permanent observer. Sometimes even in your own life.

I say all of this for myself, not aimed at anyone else. Because I realized I’m looking at a long open summer. I think of summer as a time to lazily work. I picture sitting in the sun writing, reading source material for things I want to choreograph. I think that all of this free time will finally let my creativity flourish. But it rarely works that way. Usually it just involves sitting in the sun, which is lovely but is never going to produce a poem or a piece. Summer is my hibernation. Its when the germs of ideas might be planted, but rarely ever grow to fruition. Winter is when I produce. When I’m so busy I can’t see which way is up and I tread water and I create because if I don’t I’m going to go out of my mind.

It seems there should be some place in between. And there is. I simply have to want it badly enough. I carve out the time when things are hectic. I simply have to learn how to carve the time out when there is nothing but time, when its so easy to say “tomorrow”.

This is part of that process. I don’t expect anyone to read these. They are a way to push myself back into creating. To remind myself that when there’s no studio space, no theater, no bodies to work with that I can and should go back to my other love. I’ve let my writing go and it has nothing whatsoever to do with time. It has everything to do with fear. I’m proven as a dancer and choreographer. I have a million ways I can improve, obviously, but I know that I am capable of that improvement. Writing is treacherous. I’ve never trusted the compliments I’ve received. I don’t have the security that it takes to jump off the cliff.

I’m hoping to use this summer to at least climb back out on the ledge and catch the view.