My wrist is feeling stabbed by a knife from shooting so much so I’m going to post some photos from the archives that I’ve never shared with you. I’ve been looking for an excuse, and this pain is a good one.
I drove away from San Francisco after a deeply satisfying artistic experience. As much as I despise and curse this part of it, the absurd constriction of making a dance in three consecutive weeks during 6 certain hours of the day is an amazing discipline. It is so counter to how I experience creativity and I think I would make better work if I could do so when I understand and can channel directly what I am after, however it wants to arrive…but there is another aspect to dreaming that involves endlessly turning over possibilities, and laziness and the disappointment in the limits of reality that make me want to stay in the place of fantasy. Eventually you have to just make something. You have to just do it and I haven’t found a replacement for the crush of prescribed hours in the day with a room full of people who are asking for your output.
I can let unprocessed photos pile up for months.
I can put off writing my blog post for a week. In fact, here I sit, experiencing numerous false starts because I keep thinking of an email I need to answer. And then I get an idea about the falacy of time that I need to research online…which leads me back to Facebook. And I even truly, with great malice, hate Facebook. On Facebook was this Buzzfeed video about a museum collection of sketchbooks. So then I pull out my sketchbooks and notice how many of them are unfinished because I didn’t have one when I needed one so I bought a new one. And I want to start drawing again so I go through my luggage to find my marker pens. And I find this blank postcard I bought and it reminds me of the postcards I used to make by hand using collage and ink (and sometimes insects that had died in the window) and then laminating with my special patented Scotch Tape method and I remember I did that in Los Angeles the first time and it makes perfect sense to start doing that again because making postcards feels like Los Angeles and also I want to so I go to look and see if I packed an X-acto Knife. And then I remember that BalletX really wants to know my music for the piece I’m about to make for them and I don’t feel even close so I start listening to The Five Stairsteps. Now it’s past 10 and there’s no way I’m going get this blog finished for Wednesday.
I have an addiction to the rehearsal deadline in the sense that I’m dependent on it when I know it’s not the best thing for me. Once I have the deadline and the structure, it’s not like I stress to eke it out at the last second. I finished the piece for San Francisco Ballet in basically the 1st week. I have some shame over the need in this and wish I could find the self-discipline to focus so plainly on each of the (probably I could say without too much exaggeration) 10-15 projects I have going at once. It is such a delicate dance creatively. The push and pull between the freedom necessary to create and the structure necessary to finish.
