Lucia Dancing

These queens Emma Dewey and Shayna Olsan joined me for this dance in celebration of our bodies, this shared sunny moment, and fresh air to breathe. The elemental joy of movement, together, is an irreplaceable gift. So much fullness in this dance! Waxing and waning sways and falls.  I am going to miss these women when the summer comes and those few of us left in Brunswick go our separate ways. I know that the wisdom and love we have all shared will carry me on in the coming months/years of this new twilight zone world. Until the next outdoor dance! Note: Video footage condenses space! Music:  Funky Sensation by Disclosure ft. Gwen CcCrae Blue Tirana by Tony Malaby, Johnny Åman, Peter Nilsson, Per-Oscar Nilsson

This post is dedicated to my grandmother, Nana, for inspiring me to sink into form and fill up space fully with my body. I love you and am thinking about you as these days pass in quarantine and spring blossoms. Emma Dewey joined me for this exploration and it was magical. A full 25 minutes of improvisation in the glorious sunshine and this wide open field, I felt truly struck with a creative energy I haven't in a while. I am so grateful for this moment and this duet. A dear mentor shared an article with me by the Chronicle for Higher Education, about the idea of productivity during COVID-19. This is a quote that she highlighted in particular, that resonates deeply with me in these times: "Now more than ever, we must abandon the performative and embrace the authentic. Our essential mental shifts require humility and patience. Focus on real internal change. These human transformations will be honest, raw, ugly, hopeful, frustrated, beautiful, and divine. And they will b...

On Earth Day 2020, I am honoring an amazing dancer and a close friend, Kitrea Takata-Glushkoff. This is her dancing on the frozen Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's oldest, deepest lake. Her movement and this sacred space embody the grace, vulnerability, and gratitude my dancing journey has been touched and inspired by. I am so excited to honor the earth and all its waters today with her dancing. Kitrea's words: Reverence Baikal’s sound is a feeling. a feeling – in the soul of every being whose lifecycle she has nurtured, since her own birth 30 million years ago. a feeling - physical - as I lay my back against hers, and share in her movements – her ice shell plates rifting and subducting and colliding into one another. Baikal awakens. She slurps and scrushes and crunches. I dance to her life. her life of feeling. her feeling of sound. I sculpt her through dance. She paints the melody. I move in reverence. She rests- a never-ending pearly smooth plain. I rest, and inha...

Today I feature Emma Dewey and Lucy Sydel, two of my biggest movement inspirations. Missing these two a lot! Here is a dance we all joined in together, to the song Heartbreaker by Alabama Shakes. I danced to this song in an earlier post, "explorations of the couch", and found that my movement was yearning for something new and more melancholy here as I dance in the snow. Perhaps it was the emotional intensity in the song matching with the unsettled world and the cold air and the knowledge that out there in the world Emma and Lucy were also diving into this dance. Together and alone. Alone and together. I love watching the way that everyone leans into the reverberations of the song in their own unique style. Emma spinning, Lucy playing with balance. There is a shared energy even though we are all far away. This song reminds me of those 8 am warmups while snow fell outside Edwards and we all woke our bodies up with swings and twists in unison. Bouncing up and down, the power ...

One of my favorite dancer friends, Lucy Sydel, and I, collaborated on a duet to this song we love. Dedicated to Professor Aretha Aoki. Thank you Lucy for creating the video choreography! If you are interested in looking at more of her amazing work, check out Dance Indoors on Instagram. To see my full explorations of this song and the sunny corner, see this blog post:  https://luciadancing.blogspot.com/2020/03/sunny-corner-by-stereo.html