Writing Challenges Me...

To organize my thoughts. To manage my time. To consider how I might be perceived. To be disciplined in my practice. But it also takes more time than I can afford, especially this week.

On the point of writing, many years ago, I decided to create and write a short story as a gift for a friend. I had given myself a deadline to pass on the finished product as a Christmas gift, which meant I had about three months. I dedicated a minimum of an hour every day to writing, and once the writing was done, I moved on to editing, and then I moved on to illustrating, and then I moved on to crafting a one-of-a-kind-gift bound into a single book. In the end, the process ended up taking me almost eighteen months, the final product was gifted as a birthday present two years later than I had intended.

I'm not sure what purpose this serves... but it has always caught my eye, and one day I found myself standing next to it.

For the past two days I have been completing the final reports for my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship that are due prior to the end of my grant period on Saturday to come. While most of the reportage is more like statistical data, there have been a few moments where it was tempting to try and make some adjustments to the standardized questions and multiple choice answers. But I opted to try and fit myself into the formatted profiles as best I could. For example, if you ever met me in person, you would know that I don’t identify as “Chinese”, but as “Jamaican”, and now I am also a naturalized immigrant in the USA. One series of questions asks about whether we consider ourselves as a “racial or ethnic minority” in our “home” country and/or our “host” country. But it does not provide an option to potentially only consider being EITHER racially or ethnically in the minority. I consider myself to be racially Chinese, but ethnically Jamaican (I will leave it up to you to Google the definitions of each) as both my parents and my subsequent generation in our family was born and grew up in Jamaica. So at least I am not bending the reality too greatly when I answer that I am a minority in both instances.

Going back to producing the “gift” described earlier, I learned a valuable lesson about the discipline and skill it takes to write, which would repeatedly come into play as the years have passed, like when I pursued my MFA in Dance and spent a couple of years “chained” to a word processing program. What I had not realized at the time was that with writing I had been replicating a discipline of dance practice that was simply a part of my daily life. Starting from I was about eleven years old until I had my first major injury nine years later, I had never gone more than a week without taking a dance class of some sort. The doctor’s directive to not be physically active for six weeks almost drove me crazy, and I returned to finding a daily practice in dance or movement, whenever possible, pretty much until I stopped performing. 

1992 on San Francisco Bay. Though I like this shot, it is not intended to encourage anyone to paddle outdoors without wearing a lifejacket. Mine can just be seen readily available on the back deck of my kayak, and I was paddling with a fellow professional guide to get photos of some of the locations to which we took groups.

A subsequent injury with an extended recovery and rehabilitation time-frame led me to seek lower impact activities. I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and thanks to a close friend, I discovered kayaking and life in the outdoors. I always joke that I spent 200 days on the water in my first year of kayaking. I have no idea how much time I actually spent getting out on San Francisco Bay and into pools (mostly with a kayak), but I did it every chance I could create. Here once again, I discovered the great benefit of balance. I was jumping between my life in the controlled architectural environs of studios and theaters into a contra-distinctive life in the outdoors playing on a liquid surface and subject to the whims of weather.

Showing short retrospective on Paul Taylor and his work to a workshop class at Future School of Performing Arts in Mumbai.

Working with a student in Goa.

As I enter the final week of my time in India, I have been reflecting on what I might be leaving behind when I leave. Mostly I have felt like my personal histories with migrancy, injury and recovery, cultural and professional adaptation, have all guided my responses to life and work here. It is could be easy to imagine that when people here ask me for advice that I actually have the “right” answer. But the truth is that I can mostly just offer a perspective born of my own experience with similar situations. There is so much that I don’t know, and at the same time, I recognize how much more I have had the privilege to encounter in the decades of my life as a dancer in the USA and Europe, and not just in the Arts, but in business, managing sports injuries, pedagogical approaches to movement, and a certain liberalism from living where a nonreligious lifestyle is more commonly practiced.

It has been humbling that dancers, teachers and others have found what I have to offer in my teaching and perspectives to be catalytic to their thinking, and to have had enough time to see the effects of my presence. At the same time, I am constantly listening to myself speaking and wondering, “How did I come to have the confidence and compassion that I seem to be expressing?”

On occasion, I will still take a dance class as a student, but I don’t think I have done so without an ulterior motive, for years. Certainly, once I received the Fulbright grant I started to observe and take from other teachers with a decided curiosity around what I thought was effective about a teacher’s approach and content. When I have had the energy, I have ventured to take a few of the ballet classes offered here in India, and I still find a certain child-like joy in moving and finding the embodied knowledge from decades past. More than that, however, I found myself wanting so much for the dancers around me to find the freedom in their own dancing that I so often used to escape reality for even the most fleeting of moments, where I could fly or balance on the point of a pin.

Master class in Delhi at NarenJayen.

I have asked my own dance students, “Why do you take class?” When I was a kid, class was dance. As a pre-professional, class was a safe environment to discover and build new skills to take into rehearsals and performance. As a working dancer, I would focus on how I approached class to match the rehearsals or performances I would be doing later in the day. As a teacher and coach, taking class I try to empathize with the difficulties I see students struggling to master based on what I find easier or harder to accomplish myself and I am much more cognizant of what I imagine the teacher is looking for.

As a side note, beyond the physical limitations that comes with age, I find that I have needed to be more forgiving of myself for NOT picking up dance phrases/sequences as quickly as I once did. Speed to pick-up, and consistent reproduction of, movement sequences is definitely more challenging for me in recent years. “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it” comes to mind as an apropos adage. I used to pride myself in picking up exercises and choreography quickly, and the reality is that it was a skill I honed with constant use that is no longer true of my daily life.

Ballet master class at The School of Classical Ballet and Western Dance.

Admittedly, I have let the discipline of some kind of physical activity every day slide egregiously in the last ten years, and I begrudgingly tell my doctors that my preparation and teaching of dance classes is the primary extent of what I would consider regular exercise. Fortunately I maintain a fairly healthy schedule that ranges from twice a week to every day when I am staging works or on faculty for intensives. This post started about the challenges of the discipline of writing as a hobby, and I may not be much faster at writing these entries, however, at the end of these past six months I have regained some of the fluency in my teaching and dancing that could only have come from the constancy of a mostly daily practice.

Sumeet and Sasha Nagdev hosted a loving "farewell" dinner for me with the dancers whom I have been teaching at their studios. Somehow my hosts avoided being in the picture!