Momentum//Chlo and Co

It’s Fall Break for us USF students and I am finally getting a moment to pause and catch up on a little life, i.e. sitting on my couch and watching CSPAN whilst updating At The Threshold and drinking tea. As time moves forward it often seems to simultaneously speed up, so catching ahold of these few breaths is rather refreshing. It also offers a nice break for my body and brain as dance has been asking a lot of them lately, both in a physical sense and in the sheer amount of choreography that my mind is constantly generating and learning these days. 

While seeping in the sense of finality this school year, the idea of momentum has been on my mind, momentum in the sense that not only does university wind down, but life winds up. It seems that a certain amount of momentum must be transferred from the experience of the first into the experience of the second. These thoughts are in regards to most aspects of life right now but feel particularly pertinent to the way that I relate to dance/dance making if I intend to maintain my movement practices as a priority in the following years. As such, the past few weeks have been exciting for one of my closest friends, Courtney King, and I as we have been getting a [[leg up]] on some dance making.

Courtney and I are continuously adding to a little stack of printer paper halves. The top page says Chlo and Co: the ultimate to-do list, and the rest are each a separate list that pertains to some aspect of our friendship: Everything (all the things that have ever been important to us), Pleeps (places and people we want to go/see), Movies, Dance/Film, etc. This last one correlates to our recent website, made to hold all that we have shared in movement. For me, it is helpful to have a concrete place where work can manifest itself. Seeing the projects that we have and are working on lights a bit of a fire, encouraging me to do more. This is the type of momentum that has been drifting across my mind/imagination.

After two rehearsals yesterday, I spoke to my mother on the phone. One was for my senior project and the other for a new piece with Courtney. I mentioned to my mom how enlivening it felt to be consistently moving through the choreographic process and actively generating material. Articulation of this feeling makes me hesitate because I don’t intend to say that it is a rushed or unfocussed experience, but instead that the process of making work with multifarious ideas is important to practice. It is like trying on many different hats (to invoke a possibly overused analogy).

When I think about what will occur in the next few years, the dance question is a hard one to grasp and inspect. It is hard to know how dance will define its role in my life when there are question marks of residence, work, love, art, body, etc. Regardless of how those things land though (because I don’t believe that one should spend tooooo much time worrying about such things), it fills me with (albeit tired) joy to be practicing these skills now; it is an opportunity to find out how it feels best to move when I have the container of an institution providing a handful of specific options, the off campus experience of Dore Dane Company, and the freedom to explore anything of interest with friends such as Miss King.

Maybe I’m just tired because I haven’t had much of a break until now, maybe I’m just excited because Courtney and I had a fab rehearsal yesterday after a stupendous one for my senior project, or maybe I’m just feeling soft about the past, future, and this morning’s foggy feeling of fall, but whatever it is, it all tells me, “momentum.” So, onward! And support the arts! *options below*

  • Friday Oct. 23 is opening night at Fort Mason Center for San Francisco Open Studios 2015. There will be photography by Polly Rose, my mother’s cousin. I hear that Off The Grid will be there — I’ve never been, so looking forward!
  • The Dirty Suitcase — a travel blog by Julia Arenstam following the travel mishaps of Millennials. I have been honored to be a guest writer this week.
  • hers & hers dance collective — the brainchild of Courtney and another beautiful best friend of ours, Melissa Lewis

xx chlo

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