Every Step is Part of the Journey (even when you're just paying the bills)

Like many other dancer/acrobats, my life didn’t go straight from the gym to a paycheck. I was thinking of this today, just having recently fallen deeper into my 30’s, and was remembering some random jobs I have had. Remarkably, I’ve learned some great lessons along the way. Instead of writing a complete article this week, I present this set of nuggets. Everything is valid and nothing is wasted, and here is evidence to prove it!

1.) Scrubbing pots and pans at a Gymnastics Summer Camp:
Some stains are just never going to come out.
Sometimes you have to wear gloves to get the job done.
Half the time, you’ve just finished with breakfast when it’s time to eat
lunch.
People eat way too much.

2.) Waiting tables at Chili’s:
There’s always an opportunity for romance in the workplace.
Your boss is likely thinking the same thing.
If there’s not a rule, create one.
Most of the items on the menu are created by the staff who try to make
their “shift meals” less mundane.
People eat way too much.

3.) Intern at the Kentucky General Assembly (state house of representatives):
Mail is undeliverable to you if your house does not have a number on it.
If all of your family lives on the same street, it’s called a holler.
State reps make little to no money and work full time every other year.
In Kentucky, women where hats year-round: not just to the Derby.
People really do eat way too much. For lunch!!

4.) Intern in US Congress (I worked for Bernie Sanders, I-VT)
If you can’t get there above ground, there’s always an underground way.
The hardest working people often get no credit.
No matter what you do, your constituents will send you hate mail.

5.) Working for Diavolo Dance Theater, Cirque, and my life as an acrobat, dancer, choreographer:
Trust is stronger than love.
You can do the impossible, especially if you can get other people to do it
with you.
You must always have a sound business plan.
Don’t abuse yourself or your subordinates—it never works in the long run,
even if it might get you through some tough squeezes.
People need to have hope and will seek art that creates hope.
Physicality is boundless.
If you expect to fail, you will.
Art is necessary.
It’s important to make art accessible.
It’s important to forget about the money.
Even if you’re at the top of your game, still take class.
Because you’re at the top of your game, teach.
Small backstage rituals that connect you to each other are important (even
if they are completely ridiculous).
Just when you think it’s all about you, it’s not. Ever.
There will always be someone who hates your show—and tells everyone.
There will always be someone who was so moved by your show—and
doesn’t tell a soul.
And last but not least,
If you’re giving it all that you’ve got, you can eat as much of whatever
you damned well please.

Written by Laura Everling
☺

Behaviour & Movement Part 2

My responses were typical. I would stumble, and I would fall. I ran out of things to do, but the time kept counting. I wasn’t allowed to stop and give up. I would lose coordination. Mentally, I got pissed. I was embarrassed. What a stupid assignment! Why am I doing this? I can fly through the air in any position and here I am doing something stupid with everyone watching. I questioned why I was even in school. I decided that I was wasting student loan money and my teacher was an idiot who obviously had a vendetta against me and that all of this was a big waste of time.

Then, just like that, the gibberish in my head silenced. Having gotten through all of the useless questions in my brain, the real question remained. So I hated moving backwards. So what. Why? What am I scared of? My mind flooded. Scared of not seeing where I’m going. Scared of falling. Scared of moving away from what’s in front of me. I have a need to go forward towards what I see or want. I’m scared to look stupid. I’m scared of losing control.

Now I had a task. I needed to teach myself something: how to fall, how to have faith in where I was going, and how to let the things in front of me GO. So I made an entire dance that moved backwards and fell. When I was finished, it made me sick to my stomach, but I felt like a different person. I created movement that I never could have concocted in my head. I let my body do the “talking” and ended up finding new ways to cope with gravity and unpredictability.

Now, I can’t even remember how to be afraid of falling (at times, to a fault!) and my faith in the universe at times appears naïve to traditional task-oriented folk. But on the other hand, I now know one of my “triggers:” - control. Whenever I face into a situation and feel inner resistance, I look at my own control issues. Quite often, they are in there messing with the balance of things. So what do I do? I modify my behavior and my verbiage. I also go into the studio, move backwards, fall, let my body give into gravity and sure enough, my mind opens, solutions present themselves, and I’m back feeling more balanced.

Habits and patterns are safe, but they can also be self-limiting. As we investigate the internal and external sources of our fears, let’s not forget the lessons of the body. Just as a single strand of DNA reflects the larger whole of a person, so do the tiny movement patterns we build for ourselves reflect, for instance, - where we hold tension, what we choose to see, and how we choose to occupy space in this lifetime. We all know the saying, “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” But I also will attest—especially when dealing with fear—that we often can’t see the trees because we’re busy looking at the forest.

- Laura Everling

Behaviour & Movement Part 1

Habits. Patterns. Familiarity. One of the ways that I think we as people “deal” with our fear of the unknown is by conquering it with habits: behavioral patterns that we follow so often that they cease to become conscious. We all have our specific way that we drive to work, we have a certain order of events that we partake in when we get out of bed in the morning, we have certain ways and methodologies for developing relationships, making money, and essentially getting what we want. Psychology talks a lot about social and behavioral patterns and how those can be both facilitative and dangerous. But what about going to the smallest component of our daily life: movement? Consciously or subconsciously, we choose specific ways to move our bodies through space—up, down, quick, slow, forwards, backwards, small, big. What information can these tiny indicators unlock in our personal quests for self-awareness?

When I was in college for dance, I took a course in Movement Behavior which basically required us to look at the ways our bodies habitually moved in response to internal (psychological) and outside (physical) stimulus and to challenge those habits. The idea was to break out of your movement habits so as to break out of your point of reference and expand the place from which you see the world. In the same way that people draw references to entire towns based on their own neighborhoods (“Vegas is so racist,” “All the homes here are the same,” etc.) such do we base our judgments of ourselves and others from the way we position ourselves and our bodies through space.
The key to this investigation is that we typically are unaware of our own movement patterns—which necessitated that we work in pairs. Individually, we would improvise for 5-10 minutes with our classmates watching and taking notes. No music, no sound, no boundaries. Our partners would then remark on what we tended to do—and believe me, repetition was the norm. We each would then have to improvise using ONLY the things we did NOT do, and eventually create a larger piece from these foreign items.

I soon found out that I had a propensity towards direct movement that covered lots of space, was very upright, involved lots of straight lines, and NEVER went backward. Rhythmically, my work was even (never fast and never slow and NEVER completely stopping). Much of this makes sense, considering that as an acrobat (a gymnast and a diver), movement is linear, it always ENDS upright, and the only time you stop completely is when the routine is finished. But going backwards?

As an acrobat, I was great at back flips—so much that they were my specialty. But on deeper investigation, I realized that in flipping backwards, the action of the body is not exactly backward—it’s moving forward (eyes first) in a backward pathway that arches. I laughed as I realized why I had “cheated” for so many years on my back flips and could never quite set a flip straight up without looking back behind me first.

This much was charming. But then the real work came. I now had to do an entire 5-10 minute improv moving backwards.

To be continued...