‘What advice would you give to your graduating self?’ is a question I keep seeing posed in this moment where there has been a welcome influx of dance artists speaking/ writing about their career trajectories online. 2020 marks 10 years of navigating this freelance dance life for me and so this question piqued my interest as a way to reflect on the last decade.
My advice to my younger self would be to take care of the things you take with you: the memories/ feedback that you categorise as the most important, that you will in turn spend the most time thinking about and using as a motivator to propel onwards. Be wary of the instinct to collect primarily the difficult experiences, offhand remarks and criticism – notice as they burrow underneath your skin and live within you. These things will spur on reactionary decision-making and yes, you can grow and learn from areas of weakness/ perceived weakness, but could you also find time to acknowledge your strengths and give them the nourishment to flourish? Be specific when you curate the positive experiences – not only letting them live in saved emails or notebooks that you can locate when you need a reminder of why you’re doing this. Let the experiences/ memories/ comments that give you heart reside closer to your heart and be with you always as a catalyst to grow – find the seeds of wonder and the impulse to share them, as often as responding to the roots of discomfort and challenge within your body. Believe in the compliments that amplify your strengths as much as the criticisms which fuel your insecurities. You don’t have the capacity to take everything with you, so be aware of what you are choosing to bring along for the ride. Be ready to accept that you may need to let go of some things to make room – you will need to continually update your resources for the ever-changing present but select carefully to preserve your archive, striving not only to survive but also thrive.
Would I have listened back then? I don’t know…but I’m trying to take note now! So, in an effort to take my own advice I want to collect here some of the landmark experiences, conversations and feedback I’ve got in my archive that I am encouraging myself to remember to hold closer as I travel on.
Thinking back to my postgraduate year of training at NSCD, I still marvel at a creative session which Rachel Krische lead us through. We each developed a short solo of movement and then partnered up to watch one another on a one to one basis. Rachel asked us to observe our partner’s movement with the intent that we were watching to understand their approach to movement enough that we could imagine unzipping their body and climbing inside to perform our own movement study in their body. So often, I find myself encountering learning somebody else’s movement – translating their movement onto my body, but this experience felt so powerful in each person keeping ownership of their own movement sequence but with the possibility of approaching it with yourself as the ‘new’ body. Something about this really appeals to me, looking back, as a way of elevating empathy to a physical experience.
Sticking with studio experiences, 3 years ago I attended Kerry Nicholls’ Professional Development Lab in which Hannes Langolf lead one of the workshops. A moment that really struck me in this workshop occurred when all of us clustered together and Hannes asked us to put all of our effort into getting across to the other side of this cluster of bodies. When everyone approached this task simultaneously, it became an impossibility – every movement was contended, challenged and dampened out as no one was prepared to give ground. After a pause, Hannes asked us to restart with a shift in our intention to let people pass and to give our utmost care to helping other people get to the other side. Suddenly the whole mass was shifting, yielding and able to pass through harmoniously – while you were helping others, they were prioritising you, and suddenly everyone was able to achieve the original aim many times over. It was such a beautiful moment of collective understanding that really excites me as a model for approaching unity and achievement.
Another day, another studio (oh how easy it used to be!), and I arrived to take a professional morning class in a crowded studio midway through the week. I got chatting to the friendly Giacomo Pini – a familiar beacon amongst a sea of less familiar faces – and as class was about to begin, I started to sidle away. Giacomo questioned why I was moving towards the back of the room, and encouraged me to stay in the space we had been warming up in – centre front of the action. I did and enjoyed the challenge of being visible in a space whilst playing ‘catch up’ having not done the previous classes of the week. After class, I thanked Giacomo for his generosity in welcoming me to stay in the space he had found for class, and he shared that he feels he benefits from my calming presence when we take class near to each other. A seemingly insignificant exchange, in a day to day scenario and yet it has left an imprint on me – however inwardly frantic and tumultuous you’re feeling perhaps outwardly you might be offering grounding support to others without realising.
Stepping outside for a moment for a countryside walk, and an enquiry from Oscar, the child of a family friend: ‘So even as an adult, you use your imagination every day?’ That I could answer yes seemed such a fizzy wonderful revelation for him, and a reminder for me to keep tapping in to the playful outward investment in imagination as much as the inward wonder.
To finish, I’m going to search out an email from Fiona Millward sent at the close of working on Rosemary Lee’s ‘Under the Vaulted Sky’. Fiona thanked each member of the team for the individual qualities they had brought. I considered her word choices entirely fitting for each person she thanked which makes me believe her choice of words for me may also be a good fit. So, this is me taking a moment not to leave them tucked away in an email, but to remember them with the same clarity with which I hold more critical observations, and to find a way to move on registering that these qualities are strengths within my practice:
“Effie, for your steadfastness, caring, and heart in all your undertakings.”