Qajaq Dancer

I’m flying back to New York City for a quick holiday break, which also means that I have passed the halfway mark of my Fulbright-Nehru grant in India. And it feels as though I’ve encountered a trend where the closer I get to departing from the city I have been working in, the busier I seem to get. For the past six days, I have started working at 9:00am and finished my last class at 9:00pm. Admittedly, apart from last Tuesday, I had a few hours to relax in the afternoon. However, I also had to travel between venues every day, and sometimes that constituted between forty-five minutes and an hour and a half in a car. It’s become a pretty solid reality that I need at least an hour between when I wake up and when I can make it out the door to head to work, and I have been using the fifteen minute walk to Starbucks as a meditative exercise to stay focused on each part of my day as it comes. This helps me avoid feeling psychologically overwhelmed at the length and breadth of activities

Every time I take a car to South Bombay I see Haji Ali Dargah, and I lucked out with this sunset shot. It is amazing how, even when I have only myself to blame, I try to rationalize that an outcome could have been different. Admittedly, I did not come to India anticipating that I would return home with everything that I brought with me. Mostly, I tend to assume that things I use regularly will get lost, broken or die of their own accord. So I mostly travel with backup alternatives, like extra reading glasses, ballet shoes and knowing I can use my iPhone for class music, if my 2 nd generation iPod dies. In this instance however, I may have neglected to collect my iPod and the carry-all in which I keep it, after teaching class yesterday. There is a possibility that I did gather the iPod back into the carry-all pouch and it was later lost from my backpack prior to my returning home. But whatever the case, I did not notice its absence in my bag until I was gathering my stuff for

I have no idea if the “Sunny Side of the Street” was a metaphor for an optimistic outlook on life prior to the 1930’s song that was covered well into the 1940’s by great singers/musicians like Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, to name a few. There is a lyric that explains “I used to walk in the shade with my blues on parade…”, but as a child I was puzzled why walking in the hot sun was preferable to the cooling shade of lush greenery, especially when there was a cooling ocean breeze that might have made its way into the heart of a big city like Kingston. Mumbai continues to transport me back to my childhood, and crossing to the shady side of the street on my daily commute to/from studios or out on errands has become reflex for me. It is actually a reflection that I am less distracted by the anticipation of why I am headed to my destination than being aware of my surroundings in the moment. Look up! Palm trees in beach park in Dadar As I have mentioned before, in

I have wanted to get an entry out, but life has had other plans for me. So I will try to post something now, and hopefully get to more depth of thought soon. Of late, life seems analogous to waiting on the ocean surface for wave sets to come in where my heavy workloads are the surf-worthy waves, and my lighter daily routines are the intervals between wave “sets.” Each set may have a similar number of good waves to surf and catch a ride, but every wave is different, and the intervals between sets of waves can vary wildly. The weekend before last, I was invited to the wedding of a Navdhara dancer’s sister, which I am told followed mostly South Indian traditions. It was a good opportunity to see how my wearing a kurta would both feel and be received in public. When I went shopping for a more formal style of kurta than the ones I owned from my last visit to India, I was caught off-guard when I looked in the mirror, and thought “how Chinese” I look in the short vertical collars and

The Royal Opera House, Mumbai This week in particular, I have come to think of Art as giving humanity a perspective beyond the binary of the living and the dead in a way that does not demand blind faith. Philosophically, Homo Sapiens have struggled with the fact that we have developed language and reasoning beyond daily survival and the biological needs that we have classified as emotions. Seeing dance performed live by accomplished dancers in work by skilled choreographers can transcend the experience of witnessing a piece of theatre, and cannot be easily explained in words. For me, Art can transport me out of a physical reality of awareness of where I might be sitting or standing, but for this to happen, I have noticed that there are a confluence of externalities that contribute to such transcendence. The proscenium, the performers and two choreographers. In a unique Indo-Polish dance performance at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, the Navdhara India Dance Theatre and Zawi

Diwali is described online as a five day Hindu festival celebrating the spiritual “victory” of light over darkness… And as I suspected, my regularly scheduled classes were either suspended, or sparingly attended by students who did not take time off to travel home to spend the festival with family. As the foreigner, I was actually relieved to not be invited to familial events as the additional time I had to myself was very much needed for rest and preparation for the “community” workshops and a major presentation I had to conduct. Testing my audio-visual setup in the auditorium at Triveni Kala Sangam. Most of my friends in, and from, the USA were focused on the midterm elections. And this was my first experience voting with an absentee ballot as a US citizen living abroad. I posted a note on Facebook as I drove by the US Embassy in Delhi where I had performed with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1997, before I was a US citizen. There is something absurdly surreal about trying

This was a performance shot of me as "Baron Samedi" by fellow dancer Orion Duckstein, at Jacob's Pillow back in 2007. I'm not sure who the ghost in the background is. This week was Halloween in the USA and el Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, and Facebook posts were my only clue. The first was when the Taylor Company posted an old shot of me as “Baron Samedi” from the last two Taylor dances in which I originated a role. Fittingly, I will start this post with an anecdote about my mis-adventures in Delhi. I have mentioned that I am staying in a residential development in Gurgaon which is south of Delhi. Well I recently found out that the gates into the development are locked at midnight, and once I traverse the five minute walk along unpaved, unlit roads, I still have to call the building supervisor, Pradip, to be let in. Fortunately, he lives in the building, and seems reasonably good natured about dealing with my late arrivals. Last Saturday around 11:00pm, I used U