When I first started to dance again 12 years ago (what!?), I was working totally on my own. Every day for hours (parsed out in chunks over the day), I met myself in an empty space with music and experimentation and play and struggle and learning.
I got used to this, and then I went for my first training at Kripalu and spent an entire week moving and playing and laughing and experiencing with a very large group of wonderful women. When I got home and had to face that empty space again with this deeper understanding of my aloneness, I crashed.
After every training, it was the same. Big crash, followed by learning to work alone again, followed by training, followed by big crash… I did this for years, as I went to Kripalu often.
I started to teach, though, and those days with students helped. I held onto that when I went into my own private practice day after day, hour after hour.
I started to experiment with teaching online probably about 8 years ago. It wasn’t the same. There were technical difficulties that were very limiting (this has changed).
And then pandemic.
I was ready in more ways than most to take my work online. Thank God I started to experiment so long ago so I wasn’t forced to learn all of that this year, in the moment, sinking in fear.
It felt… okay. Not great. Okay.
I put my choreography group on hold, thinking it was impossible to work on THAT online. And remember when we all just assumed things would get back to normal?
Eventually, I went back to working with that group because who knows how long things will be like this and art must still be made.
And things keep getting better as I learn to take my methods to virtual spaces that aren’t really virtual but just different and how I hate that word. There’s nothing virtual about the life changing experiences people still have. There’s nothing virtual about the more-important-than-ever sense of community.
Our physical bodies may not be in the same space, but we are still in the same SPACE.
We can see one another and respond to one another’s energy and we can still share circle and breath.
I used to think, long ago before dance while I was still “just” doing yoga and still immersed in depression, that classes and togetherness were just to teach us how to do it by ourselves, how to have a one person at home practice.
Oh, how much I have learned that the entire point of everything is our togetherness.