Studio Showings

September 13th, 2022

Studio showings, were, by far, my favorite way of sharing work. Sustainable, fun, and it felt as if the audience became a part of the dance. The studio setting also became a place for hosting many master classes bringing educational opportunities to our town that would not have existed otherwise. I like to think of it as giving energy to the 98%. My first studio showing came about as a consequence of a conversation with a beautiful human, Nancy Colohan, who came to our first show at Center Stage Theater in Santa Barbara. The show was called Collective, and it was a collaboratively produced event with dance students from UCSB I was still in touch with. Her prompt to me, was, as a dance maker, to associate my work with higher level/quality of work. At this time, another beautiful human, Stephanie Gilliland, had become a mentor to me. I invited her up to teach a week long workshop at what was then Studio B and to share an evening performance where I premiered a 16 minute work. It was truly a magical experience, and the second time where I had an audience member approach me, to share, they were having a cathartic reaction (a physical, emotional, physical shifting) to viewing the work. 

At this time, in Santa Barbara, there was only one performing opportunity through an organization called the Santa Barbara Dance Alliance, and it was a rite of passage to have work accepted into their produced program. I had submitted this work for their show, and the comment was, it looks too much like improvisation, so the work wasnʻt accepted. I realized, if I waited for someone else to produce my work, the work would never be witnessed, and eventually settled into a rhythm of making work, and hosting studio showings.

Producing a work, in a theater, was not sustainable, and I eventually moved away from that altogether, wanting to live in harmony with a type of life that I thought would add to the vision of humanity returning to living in harmony with the planet. 

Being the change.

In this moment, I am in my painting class, and I think, how much more ease there is in my life, sinking into cultivating a shamanic creative mindful lifestyle, than the days of dance making, yet, there really is nothing quite like it, dance making, and I realize, I am at last, making space to grieve moving on.

Life is a series of new beginnings and endings, and rushing through the endings is a lost growth opportunity.