Qajaq Dancer

When my friend Jeff astutely noted that I might be “cognitively” exhausted from my sojourns here in India, I began to think about how I felt at the end of any time limited period of work. If there was a three week performance run, or a six week tour, or an eight week staging project, the last week always felt the hardest to me. It is as though my body and mind knew just how much energy and focus was required, given that I knew when the end was going to be. Saturday 26th January 2019 was a national holiday, Republic Day. I have often credited professionals in the performing industry with understanding deadlines. When the curtain goes up on a performance, there can be no more delays or excuses. And I have often been caught off guard when encountering professionals in other industries that don’t respect deadlines. I also recognize that completing a project by a certain date or time inevitably is more stressful the closer to ...

It has been a strangely hard week, and I am not entirely sure I know why. There have not been particular obstacles in my way, and I have been able to accomplish all that I need to do each day. So why have I felt overwhelmed and un-motivated to get up some days? I have come to accept that my life has its ups and downs. It has always been easier for me to manage my mood when I have a job to do, and I know that others are relying on me to fulfill my part of the work. It is also equally exhausting for me to be in a consistently positive frame of mind as it is to be in a consistently negative frame of mind. So I choose to view these periods of emotional doldrums as necessary “regenerative” periods, where it is hard to “feel” too much. Common conversation and interview questions are, “what is your favorite… ?” or “what do you like about… ?” At times like these, I have to be careful not to be too honest. Usually I opt to explain tha...

Every year is different is a truism that in the very nature of life and consciousness is immutable. When looking back on a given year, those differences carry more or less impact depending on the perspective of the observer. For me, 2018 was a year filled with sojourns for work, the deaths of great influencers on my life, and a kaleidoscope of self-reflection. Some of my favorite street carts with flowering plants, white guavas, pomegranates & apples. It can be difficult to keep track of the years in which I did certain projects that had me traveling away from my home in New York, but out of necessity, I have kept a travel expense diary specifically in support of filing my taxes each year. In this past calendar year I did a couple short projects in Erie, PA and Chicago, IL. Then after starting my Fulbright in India, I’ve been in Mumbai and Delhi. Somehow, at this point, it feels like I travelled far greater distances and to many more cities than the four mentioned. Roads...

Long Days Dancing and Long Flights Do Not Mix! (December 23, 2018) I like sitting over the wings when I fly, and seeing planes from Canada, Egypt and New Zealand reminds me of how accessible wildly different cultures has become. So I was incredibly reticent to teach a full day and then get on some 17-18 hours of flying, especially with a long layover in London. Now I know that I was right to be concerned. My body was not at all happy, and the unpleasant sensations running though my legs and back made me fantasize a Disneyesque fantasy of what was going on in my body. I imagined all the lactic acid build up from demonstrating heavily for my classes was creating tiny molecules of saturated gasses in my muscles and bloodstream. Then with the reduced atmospheric pressure flying at thousands of feet above sea level, these molecules were expanding and actively ricocheting off each other, making me feel like I was being inflated from within the fibers of my body. It reminded me of scu...