I think I found my new earworm

Adelaide Fringe 2020

In a creative process littered with malapropisms, Kath & Kim references and camaraderie, the world premiere of Retrieve Your Jeans came together with professionalism and creative flair.

Through the subtle humour that draws from the performance of the everyday, the performance does what all good art should - reveal something about our human nature, retrieves our homophonic genes; through vignettes on how we interact, the solitude of human struggle and how we find refuge in community.

Or not. Retrieve Your Jeans neither puts on airs nor endeavours to be philosophically prescriptive. The piece is equally successful as a child-friendly, everyone-loves-Toy-Story, heartwarming departure into another fantasy world, one where we find the struggles of everyday life endearingly funny. 

Free this weekend? Bring your mates, or bring your kids, and find out how washing machines, laundry lines, and folding denim can evolve into a whimsical piece that draws you in and leaves you wanting more. And still have plenty of time for a good dinner, or drinks after.

Full disclosure of bias: I was a fly on the wall during the production.

I'm not sure when exactly,
friendship is a funny thing, creeping up on you slowly
you get used to having someone around,
when they are around long enough,
they become
a permanent fixture in your heart.

I'm not sure when exactly,
that Sadness and I became friends.
But, in any event,
we are close.

I'm sorry I can't laugh and
talk of nothing all the day long
with friends who don't know Sadness
the way I do.

I don't hate you, Sadness
I wish more people weren't so afraid of you
I find you
perfectly beautiful
a lonely and often quiet soul
and all the more beautiful for it.

I don't blame you, Sadness
for your all-consuming nature
and the wall of unavailability
we've built around us.

I just wish more people could
know you like I do
revel in you like I do
enjoy you like I do
and see really,
how you co-exist with Joy,
and not not invite you to parties.

Movement is life

What it is about art, that the impetus for production is repression and deprivation? War, sickness, separation. Death. Unresolved love. Crises of the spirit catalyse art. The more we repress the subconscious it seems, the more active it becomes, the more its activity seems to bleed into consciousness and find an eventual manifestation.

The other day I was having a conversation with an Israeli about how much I loved the Israeli approach to movement, and how much respect I had for their movement techniques such as gaga and Feldenkrais. I reflected on how dancers here possess a totality of movement that seems to come from a much deeper attunement to the mind-body connection. She said with a sense of humour that it was because in Israel, where we are surrounded on all sides by the intensity of conflict, war, and crisis, we search for something else to focus on with greater intensity. We search within ourselves.

Perhaps it was environmental pressures that selected Israel to become the mecca of contemporary dance it is today. Richard Wolpert hypothesises that the mind was made to move; that the nervous system was evolved to allow complex movement, citing the example of the sea squirt, which digests its own nervous system for food once it has settled on the rock it will call home. It no longer needs to move, so it no longer needs its brain.

The humble sea squirt, incidentally,
may also present a potential treatment for mesothelioma.

There is something deep within us that needs to move. Whilst it stretches the metaphor to say the sedentary lifestyle is eating our brains and causing strokes, even in the language of evidence based medicine, we know this to be true.

We are in a generation which venerates the mind and dismisses the body. Yet the language of movement is impossible to quantify and analyse through the language of cerebral science alone. It needs to be embodied to be fully understood. That is what dancers do. Research movement. The connection of movement to the body, the connection of moving bodies to each other, the connection of movement to rhythms.

As the world turns to the advancements of medicine and technology for the elixir of health and youth, there is a need to return to the arts. To come back to what is within us, the fundamentals of who we are, and embrace and enjoy what it is to be humans - minds made to do, and to move.

Whatever will be will be

Do you want to be a dancer
It means travel
It means loneliness
It means poverty
It means toil
It means sweet passion for perfection
for expression
for a voice that can be felt more powerfully than words
It means doubt
It means conviction
It means love
You should only be a dancer
if you cannot be anything but.

Do you want to be a doctor
It means hard work
It means fighting
against systems that don't really work
for people who don't always help themselves
losing battles
but giving hope
It means stability
It means reliability
It means respect
It means empathy
It means sorrow
It means love
You should only be a doctor
if you cannot be anything but.

I can say now that I've travelled the world
I've lived a double life
I cannot be anything but.

I will be what I will be
but only as much as it matters
for what matters most.

You can only love

for you cannot do anything but

to find what matters most

is not what you love

but whom.

Two lefts don't make a right

I don't believe in the one, the right person.

But there are people who are more mature and ready for a relationship; the person who doesn't always have to be right, or in the right, but validates your feelings equally alongside his.

You're in a tricky situation when you are with someone who thinks they are in the right; they are justified. In doing so, they invalidate your feelings. Ie in their head, your emotions are irrational. You are in the wrong.

The person who always wants to do the right thing often ends up inadvertently doing damage. They doesn't see the grey. They bottle up negativity and hide weakness. For underneath the guise of loving words and long-suffering silence, barbs of self-righteous contempt for you cut more slickly than overt argument.

You could both do the same; both think you're in the right; sweep frustration under the carpet. Or you could end up playing the weak, irrational tyrannic who can only do wrong; a narrative written by their desperate need to do right.

A mac between two windows

Restored when you revisit -
refreshed the pane stares back at you.

Through the looking glass
what once felt a bittersweet torture -
the years apart -
has become
a lopsided work of art.

Letting go of what you love is hard but sometimes necessary

Lying in the dark
I can't sleep caffeinated
Reminder to self

Little Things With Great Love

"God does not call us all to great things, but calls us to do small things with great love." 

-Mother Teresa

Trying to soothe the chronic feeling of inadequacy with the balm of reminding myself that I am enough. I am reminded that it is not about how I want to fashion myself and serve my own ambition, but it is truly that I am His work, and I am fashioned according to his exact purposes.

Today, conversation turned to a hawker who worked from 6am to 10pm frying char kway teow and happily drove his Mercedes to work every day. Then, to a multi-millionaire businessman who, in university, made many friends, enjoyed life, and was mostly having his homework done for him by his more intellectual friends. Then, to someone who loved fiddling with watches, and now consults with top watchmaking companies.

Char kway teow

One capitalised on his culinary skills and became a hawker. Even though he may not be widely acknowledged with a Michelin star, the people who know of him appreciate his work, and he is the local's secret.

The other capitalised on his social intelligence, in working through the system to achieve their own ends, and became a businessman. He followed his interest in people, in talking to others, in managing money and making profit. He might not be as famous and high-profile as Bill Gates, but I doubt that was what he wanted.

All three pursued their passion. Did they know what they wanted? Yet each person created space in their lives to keep doing what they were passionate about.

Every moment of our day, every opportunity that comes our way, we are equipped with the sum of our experiences, skills, temperament and character, and we are leveraging this to move forward. Formally or informally, we are carving our own training pathways, and creating our own opportunities.

Too introverted. Too weak. Bad sleeper. Overthinking again. A litany of deprecation that never ends. I realise that everything is relative, and these weaknesses don't just mean that I am not cut out for something. It means I am better cut out for something else. When it comes to what I want, I would be a fool to think I know what that is.

What I do know is what I am passionate about. God. Loved ones. Writing. Dance. Health.

I realise that His grace is sufficient for me. I am reminded that all I can do is do what I can, with as much love as I can muster. Appreciate what I have. Make the most of the opportunities that lie before me.

I look at the love that I have, and the love that I have not, and lay it all before the one who loves me more than I can conceive of love.

"Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” 

-Matt 11:29-30 NIV

Deconstructing performativity: What is art?

After class with Natalie Allen, the warm-down discussion of the day was dance workshops recently attended. Natalie described how in one of them, one of the tasks was to take something from someone that you wanted.

She described how a fellow participant took her wedding ring, and her emotional response; how she had to tell herself that this was a task, and she would eventually get it back.

The human state of being vulnerable to have something taken from you, being vulnerable to give is laid bare here. The difference between giving and stealing here is made clear - it is a matter of consent. When someone takes something from you, when it is consensual, it is a gift. When someone takes something from you when it is non-consensual, it is stolen.

When someone takes something from you during a task where you are instructed to allow it, is that really consensual? Is the consent inherent by consenting to the context? In the context of attending a dance workshop, perhaps yes. But did she really know what she was getting into before that? As a larger reflection on our human condition, do we really consent to the environment we are in? Do we know what we are getting ourselves into? I recently found out that in certain cultural contexts, if you expressed admiration of something someone else had, they were obliged to give it to you.

Out of all belongings, taking someone's wedding ring is loaded.

Superficially, the ring is of value - it beautiful, or precious. The object of desire. Its value reflects our deeply-rooted cultural understanding and valuation of marriage. The impulse of taking that from someone else perhaps reveals our biological drive for a mate, and the ongoing narrative of competition that is involved in the process of mate selection. Or at a metaphysical level, the desire for deep and meaningful connection with someone else.

The tradition of the wedding ring, something to be worn at all times rather than kept away, opens itself to the vulnerability of theft. The symbol of the wedding ring, as a public declaration of the married state, should theoretically shield you from unwanted advances. Yet, human nature being what it will, opens up a reverse psychological driver.

That right there. Performance art.