Are You Still Immersed In The Process? How Content Culture Can Cap The Artist

 It felt so good to move, undulate, and slide into a deep second position to recoil into a contorted contraction. It truly felt like breathing. Surely, I adore codified technique. However, taking a contemporary class last night taught me way more than I bargained for.

Get out of your headspace, get out of the mirror, ditch the "content concept" and just dance. I reckon that is my honest thesis. I felt like Jodie (without my Cooper) as I whisked across the floor. Throughout class I thought about the likes and wisdom of dancers like Robert Battle and Matthew Rushing. While dancing, I recalled both of their sentiments that included abandon and connection (to the floor, to the movement, to the work...) while dancing. Truly, I felt that. Suddenly, I am met with a challenge. Maybe it's culture or maybe its Maybeli— nope! It's definitely culture. For about one minute, I wrestled with walking off of the floor, grabbing my phone, finding a proper angle to record, propping up my phone and getting footage. Hm! What I now know for sure is that this dance journey and a great class are like the new choreography sections you're learning for the show that opens in the next month. You have to allow it to settle in the body.

During class I started thinking "Well, maybe I can get content", "Maybe I can use this for IG", "I need something to post...possibly something to prove." and it was at the end of those moments that I made a decision. "No" to all of it. I will spare you the sentences on how the studio has become a place of vanity, aesthetic and a few other things and suffice it to say this. I am returning and arriving. Returning— I am getting back to that place in dance where the process mattered for the building up of the artist and for the audiences. As for arriving, I am stepping into a zone in my dance career where the work speaks loudly for itself and into a place where complete immersion inside of the studio takes me to a greater level of artistry, teachability and skillset. *Exhale* 

Will you join me?