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Today is day 19 of training everyday for at least four hours for 30 days. What is most present for me at this process is self-confrontation. Only three days in to this process Francisco Cordova said to a group of us: "your greatest teacher is your own frustration, resistance and avoidance." He was completely right. In order to move forward I am feeling undeniably confronted with all of my own psychological habits, my own self limiting beliefs, and my threshold to say "fuck it" and throw myself at something that feels too hard to pull off. I thought I already sat with discomfort all the time. I have rationalized that I know about leaps of faith: I have traveled alone as a woman foreign cities, started over many many times, started new dance forms from scratch many many times, rebuilt my life from the foundation up many many times. Yet.... I am discovering so many more subtle ways that I let comfort lie to me. You can spend years building up progressions and preparing to be ready for a flip, for instance. BUT one day there is no progression left to get you there. There is just the flip. And that day you are confronted with what is actually preventing your feat: your fear or shame or avoidance. We will go great lengths to never meet those feelings head on. But to be willing to meet them is to finally be willing to change. You have to just launch yourself at the feat...... and somehow...... you land it. You survive. It wasn't pretty, but what was once impossible becomes clumsily/barely possible, and that it where growth really happens. On this 19th day once again being a practitioner (for me it just happens to be of movement) has shown me everything I need to know about how to proceed in this moment in my life. I find myself on the lip of another huge transition. A leap out of life in Colorado and into one on the East Coast. A leap into owning my studies, owning my practice, and finding my own path. A leap away from apologizing for who I am and how I take up space in the world. Today I did it though: This late-starting, not classically trained, 30-something, scrappy-ass late bloomer did a shitty-ass-kinda-flip-thingy, and now every time will be incrementally better than the last. Today I "broke the jump," as they say in parkour. And the next jump just happens to be moving to Philadelphia to start all over yet again. 
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The summer of 2016 I finally understood what I want to be when I grow up: a movement researcher. Tom Weksler's Zen Acrobatics and Movement Archery resonates with me in a way that synthesizes so many great loves at once: stillness, athleticism, contemplation, playfulness, artistry, being out of my comfort zone, humility, studentship, dance, discipline, community, and exploration. When I watch him and Ido Portal move I see the union of mental and physical intelligence, and a merging of self-practice and humor. This world of movement unites so much that neo-plationic ideals of separation of body and mind dismantled. I feel hungry to sit more, and dance harder all at once. I feel called to make things, to retaliate against complacency, and to listen simultaneously. As a mover I am always curious how performance can offer anything to a world in upheaval, and how we as performers can lend ourselves to finding solutions. I am curious how I can use my body, my participation, and my "here-ness" to dismantle the way we unconsciously participate in the capitalist machine in almost everything we do. I love this video. I love that artists have the ability to shake up the human relationship to nature, to embodiment, to curiosity. "I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
-Rilke Is there anything more beautiful than the improvisational product of neural networks? Can you imagine the hundreds of thousands of hours he's poured into proprioception, sensation, and sound? I love the synthesis of street dance and high art, a dichotomy that I am overjoyed to see collapsing. What a statement to put improvisational vernacular forms and Picasso side by side. That's the world I want to live in. Certainly that's how I've always seen dance. I dance to retaliate.
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