May-June Events Archive

Sunday, May 2nd @ 2pm
Dancing with the Rising Sirens
with Bellyqueen at
Spring Caravan
Ukrainian Cultural Center
135 Davidson Ave
Somerset, New Jersey 08873
$18

Wednesday, May 8th @ 8pm
Dancing with the Rising Sirens at
Bellyqueen's
Djam at Je'Bon
15 St. Mark's Place, NYC
212-388-1313
$10 cover/$5 minimum

Saturday, May 15th @ 8pm
Dancing in PURE's Groundbreaking
Dance-Theater Work
PURE Reflections: Beauty Reimagined
The Dragon's Egg
401 Shewville Rd, Ledyard CT (Near Mystic)
Note: We are also teaching a BodyLove workshop at 1pm.
$20 at the door
$15 advance

Saturday, June 5th @ 8pm
Dancing and Emceeing in Bellyqueen's
Tamalyn Dallal Showcase at
Je'Bon Noodle House
15 St. Mark's Place, NYC
212-388-1313
$15 Cover/$5 Minimum

Tuesday, June 8th @ 9pm
Performing Stand-Up Comedy at
Karma's Gay & Lesbian Night
51 First Avenue ( bet. 3rd and 4th sts,) NYC
212-677-3160
$10 Cover
No Minumum

Thursday thru Saturday, June 24th, 25th & 26th @ 8pm
and Saturday, June 26th @ 2pm
Dancing in Jehan's
Dance-Theatre Spectacular
Cirque Arabesque
at Manhattan Movemement & Arts Center
248 West 60th Street & West End Ave, NYC
646-385-8493
$35

Third Day Back in Civilization (and email updates)

Although I officially returned from Dunya's blissful Dancemeditation Retreat on Thursday, June 24th, I officially count my return to the mundane world from Sunday because I took a brief weekend sojourn through the magical land of Jehan-world.

In spite of my foot injury, and in spite of the fact that I'd be gone right up until a few hours before opening night, Jehan asked me to dance in her spectacular Cirque Arabesque -- which was a vote of confidence I couldn't refuse.

My mission: Choreograph a routine with fellow amazonian dancer Jaklina (who, at 6'2" and size 8, and makes me look short and round) to complement six other numbers where 1 to 10 other dancers will be performing. This was a vote of confidence I could not refuse.

And somehow, through the use of video, internet and blind faith, we got it together for four amazing shows.

Now... about the Dancemeditation Retreat...

This was my third, for three years in a row ... in a nutshell, we dance for seven hours a day (four hours in the morning, and three in the evening) with a four-hour break.

During the break we rest, meditate, walk, swim, sometimes shop the local fare, maybe hit the internet (although we couldn't pick up a signal this year, and it was a pain to trudge up to the library for wireless).

And we eat -- all ultra-healthy, ultra-vegan, raw food.

Or we don't eat.

Often people will elect to fast, usually eating only watermelon. (Last year I made it through three watermelon fast days.)

But for a reason I never learned there was no watermelon this year, so fasters were confined to a diet of coconut water -- which turned out to be a lot less painlful than I'd imagined

In fact, the only pain was that I was missing all the tasty meals being served, so I only fasted for a day.

But I kind of enjoyed the fast, so I may buy a case of Zico at some point and fast a few days here and there during the summer (it's always better to fast during warmer weather).

The weirdest thing about the Retreat is how time bends, compresses and expands. Things that happened that morning seemed like ancient history; yet the days flew by.

Many times I wanted to blog, but didn't make it to the library.

So I've enabled email updates.

More on the Retreat later.

And my next post will be emailed.... :-)

Writer's Block

When I was in school I wrote a lot of poetry.

I used to joke that this was because I was lazy and a terrible typist (back in the days of manual typewriters... yes, really), so whenever a writing assignment came up where we could choose between a short story or a poem, I went for the poem.

But the truth is I really liked poetry. I liked its precision and economy -- and that if you wrote in rhyme and meter, you could get away with all kinds of bizarre constructions and multiple meanings.

Verse became my specialty and when I started churning out sonnets in the 11th grade, our English teacher made me a poetry editor of the school magazine -- a privilege usually reserved for seniors.

Throughout grade school's 12 years, teachers entered my stuff in citywide contests, and I often got some kind of prize or "mention" but I never thought of myself as a "poet" -- and I never wrote anything for my own pleasure.

When I got to college, I found I was unable to produce anything without being compelled by an assignment, so I signed up for an advanced poetry class -- and was rejected.

I confronted the professor; he felt the work in my portfolio was "glib." But he was impressed by my tenacity and let me in the class anyway.

But he was right... something had been lost, maybe to self-consciousness, insecurity, vanity. I knew I could impress with verse, so I relied on it, even when I didn't have to because it forced me to choose words carefully in a way that blank verse did not. (I believe I know the reason, psychologically, that this happened -- that that is a subject for another essay.)

So nearly everything I wrote in blank verse was unreadably bad and I didn't do well in the class, overall.

For a few years after college, I wrote maybe a half-dozen poems -- all sonnets -- usually dedicated to various friends.

But for the past 10 years I've written hardly anything.

One friend had a "poetry" birthday party a few years ago, so I wrote her a sonnet and recited it to the blank expressions of her DefJam-style poet pals.

And that was the end of that.

This past year I've told a few friends I'd "write a sonnet for them" but the well has felt dry, and even thinking about it made my brain hurt.

Last night, however, as I strained to will myself to sleep through a punishing headache, I found myself teeming with words about, of all things, writer's block.

Here is the result:

Words
packed incomphrehsibly
pressing impatiently
against the fragile pinhole portal
of articulation.
Single spies emerge
disoriented.
The battalion must wait.

Soulful Living: Why Is Cultivating the Soul So Painful?

How interesting that you posted those particular Oliver lines; they have been my polaris since I first saw them in Jungian analyst James Hollis' excellent book Creating a Life 10 years ago.



Hollis offers the useful concept of "resonance" when differentiating between "soul" goals and "ego" goals, cautioning against imposing our will to create resonance.



He writes: " When something is of us, is for us, it sets off the tuning fork inside us... The resonance within us cannot be willed; it happens... But resonance is the surest guide to finding our own right path. It constitutes an inner guide amid the imposing images of the outer world and the constant traffic of the intrapsychic world."



A soul goal may, in fact, coincide with an ego goal (and one of my persistant personal problems has been resisting those soul goals which also happen to be ego goals... what can I say, ego goals scare me...), but very often they do not.



If we are attentive to our feeling sensibility, however, we may be more inclined towards soul goals -- although actually choosing them, especially in the face of resistance of those around us, requires tremendous strength



And in those cases, soul choices are painful; their awareness alone can cause conflict and despair. But once that awareness has been awakened, the path of the ego can be equally painful as we know its rewards will ultimately be unsatisfying.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Foot Update

So... Last Saturday I was upstate and decided to go running that beautiful sunny morning.

About five minutes in, I realize I've gone the wrong way and make a sharp turn on my right heel. And then I feel -- and hear -- a sharp POP in my right heel. For a brief crazy moment I consider "running it off." And then the pain starts.

I limp back.

Fast foward a few days of clinc, ER and podiatrist visits and I learn that I have a heel spur -- a little "hook" of bone which can form at the bottom of the heel, where it connects to the plantar fascia, a tough tendon which helps maintain the arch of the foot.

The spur tore through the plantar fascia, which most likely was the "pop" I heard. Fortunatetly, the foot was not very discolored or swollen when I first saw a doctor later that evening, so it he concluded that the rupture was not disabling. But it was painful.

(Interestingly, the deep-tissue tear caused a pool of blood (hematoma) to well close to the ball of my foot a few days later, even though the injury itself is on the heel.)

Since the doctor I saw on Saturday evening at the Brooklyn DOCS clinic could not take an X-Ray, he advised me to return on Monday.

But, as I learned Monday morning, it turned out that the only DOCS radiologist who took my insurance was on vacation for the week. So that left the Brooklyn Hospital Emergency Room.

Six hours and a minor melt-down later, an X-ray revealed the offending spur.

The treating physician gave me crutches and stronger pain meds and set me up to see a podiatrist in their clinic the following morning (Tuesday)

I arrived a few minutes early to the clinic (a major achievement for me, especially in my state of limp-dom) to find an extremely long, slow registration line and an absent attendant.

Fortunately, I looked pathetic enough to get the attention of one of the medical staff. I showed her my discharge papers and gave her my insurance card. She led me to an administrator's office where he called my insurance company and, after a ridiculously long succession of voice mail prompts, learned the clinic didn't take my insurance anyway.

I had to go to a network podiatrist, but the one my primary care physician referred didn't even answer the phone.

I called another doctor friend who referred me to a pod in midtown -- who, thankfully gave me an appointment on Thursday.

And this doctor gave me good news and bad news.

The good news: Pain notwithstanding, he injury is not serious and should heal with rest -- AND I don't need crutches.

The bad news: Since the injury is on my heel, I need to keep pressure off that part of the foot. Which means wearing this ridiculous weight-distributing Stormtrooper boot for four weeks.

Ah well. Life could definitely be worse.

Yet More Thoughts About Body Image: Getting Lost in the Mirror

When we first produced PURE Reflections, I had learned about a site called The Belly Project, which seeks to create some perspective about that most preoccupying body part -- the belly.

"Our bellies," the site creators, Karen Rayne and Midwife Christy Tashjian, observe in the blog's "About" blurb, "are intimately related our sexuality and to our reproductive lives. ... So, with that in mind, this blog is a place to come and put our bellies in perspective and to share them anonymously with the great wide Internetz."

I contacted Dr. Rayne and told her about PURE Reflections, and she very kindly posted an article, Dancing Through Body Image, on her personal blog.

In it, she quotes Dr. Rita Freedman, whose book Bodylove had provided a cornerstone for the show's development: "A mirror can be a friend or a foe, a source of bodylove or shame, depending on how you view your image."

A few days later, a comment appeared: "Thinking about that quote... Maybe we’d be a little healthier if we didn’t pay so much attention to ourselves, negative or positive?"

This got me thinking about our culture of self-help, self-image and self-obsession. Is the "mirror" more harm than good? And does it serve us to resist it's pull on our consiciousness?

Many months later, I posted the following response:

Alice, your comment reminds me of the old joke about the guy who tells his doctor, "It hurts when I raise my arm." And the doctor says, "Then don't raise your arm."

Ideally, it would be great if we (meaning young women, in particular) were not so preoccupied with body-image. But the fact is that we are -- because our development of a healthy self-image is severely impaired in adolescence.

During the very time of life when our sense of identity should be most flexible, most adventurous, we are bombarded by over-sexualized, unrealistic and rigid images of what a female body should look like in order to be valued and loved.

While some of us are lucky enough to have friends and/or family to sufficiently "mirror" our essential selves as our personalities boil, seethe and ultimately solidify into an internally-based, healthy sense of identity, many of us do not.

Without an authentic, internal self-image, many of us are left forever searching the world around us to tell us who we are and what we should be, and forever condemning ourselves for not living up to impossible images.

This is the psychological equivalent of missing huge chunks of skin or musculature which, on the physical level, provides our viscera containment and definition; it is organ through which to relate to the world.

Without a sense of identity, we are helpless and in pain.

And denial of pain -- as you suggest -- does not heal the injury; it merely covers the wound to leave it fester.

More Thoughts About Body Image: Wallace & Gromit-Style

Here's a really cute video I came across recently which animates real-life interviews with Wallace & Gromit-style claymation.



Note, in particular, the difference between how the men view and feel about their bodies and how the women do (especially in interviews where men are not present).

This eyebrow-raising exchange between a mother and daughter starts around 3:20:

Interviewer: What do you think her best feature is?
Mother: Her ... best physical feature?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Daughter: Oh, oh no! I just cringe! I just don't know what she's going to say and it's freaking me out!
Mother: I don't even know what I'm gonna to say...
Daughter: See! Yes, my mother! This is my mother!
Mother: Her best physical feature ... is ...
Daughter: Oh!
Mother: ... the shape of her body. Her long waist...
Daughter: (snorting) That's what you alway--
Mother: ...and her big boobs.
Daughter: Mother!!
Mother: The shape of her body. You know she's ... she has ...
Daughter: Underneath the fat...
Mother: Yeah...
Daughter: Right.....

And then, of course, there is the issue of how the women view the men (as opposed to how the men view themselves), which comes up with the Sean Connery comment at the beginning ... and the "fig leaf" comment at the end ... Ouch ...