Trust.

And so the pendulum swings again, this time diminished somewhat by gravity and I lie awake for only about 90% of the night. Just those tiny dips below the surface of consciousness are enough to wake up feeling exhausted instead of insane. Each time I recognized I was dreaming, I would, based on some meticulous logic from the underworld, wake myself up. So I know that I dreamed. I do not feel undermined by my psyche and am feeling thankful for a new state of mind from which to create.

Before rehearsal, I took the bus to Golden Gate Park and saw parts of the city I hadn’t experienced when I lived here. The sky was storybook blue; the color of my grandmother’s Raggedy Ann doll dress. Both the sun and wind had sharp edges to them, gently poking me in my skin. The scale of the trees and hills made me feel both big and small. I wanted to exercise my brain in a way that wasn’t making a ballet, so I brought my camera to make some photos. Something about this felt like a continuation of sleep in that the park did not seem quite “real” and I was playing experiences out non-linearly. Perceiving through a camera lens, I could go in and out of objects and more than once, after spending minutes shooting upward at the branches of a tree, rotating and rebounding on a vertical axis, I raised my head up to discover I did not know where I was.

Today was a shift in trust. Trust seems like a big word with dire stakes. To not trust might be a condemnation of the other person, that they are untrustworthy, but we are constantly negotiating these boundaries. It’s not that the dancers previously had a mistrust of me nor I of them, and then we won it from each other. We simply did not know. They did not know if I would be able to see them as they are or would I simply force an imprint that would feel like an itchy sweater. They did not know if I could fall in love with them enough to discover new, untapped possibilities in them. I didn’t know if they would have unconscious prejudices so deep as to sabotage all of it. And whether we know it or not, we are waiting to find out; we are on some level acting with a little bit less of ourselves and are holding back, so that we may not be hurt in entirety. We only left part of ourselves vulnerable.

And so today everyone walked into the room with a big breath out. There was no more subtle apprehension and there was a little more fun.

READ SAN FRANCISCO 06