Friday, July 3, 2009

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

So much has happened since I last posted in preparation for JOYISM!'s May 1st debut. In a snapshot, I fell on my head two hours after the fabulous show, had a late night soiree with the hospital, resisted rest and recovery for a few weeks, went to Minneapolis for a great conference with The Saartjie Project, started a new, fascinating dance teaching job with a bunch of little children at a private school's camp, and now, for the next big stretch of leap into more Joyistic living, I'm facilitating a dance and leadership program for teenage girls.

Mind you, I'm still learning to rest well, eat well, and organize my life. The simple building blocks of health still evade me some days: food, sleep, and water are not always my top priority. So as I mastermind my way through a maze of possibilities for what programs to put together for my youth, my world is spinning and staring me straight in the face at the same time.

Last week on my way home after an exhausting day at camp, a group of teenage girls cursed me out on the green line train. They were offended by the smell of the food I was carrying and made an awful scene in front of a quiet train of iPoders and book reading commuters. Embarrassing...yeah. But more than that, I was in shock. I just didn't understand the intensity of their verbal attack. I thought, perhaps if I'd had some applications to my dance program, they might have been able to shift their aggressive articulation into some positive art-making. Who knows, maybe one of them might of been my star pupil.

So since then, I've been reflecting on the cosmic slap of that incident. Hmmm, I pondered, this is my constituency I'm reaching out to. These are the young women I'm attracting to me. What in the world have I gotten myself into! What is their world, what do they want? And then the other part of my brain is like, "teenage girls" are not a monolithic group of people. They're diverse in every way and now I have the awesome task of putting together a movement-based curriculum that will appeal to everyone who comes.

I am excited and overwhelmed at the same time. I am humbled and extremely confident in my abilities to do this, to turn these girls on to infinite possibilities of what their lives can be. When I explain the program to other women, they nod in agreement, wishing there'd been some safe, open, stimulated space for them when they were coming of age and learning the ways of rejecting and critiquing their bodies, talents, voices. Here in the program, I'll be facilitating a series of movement workshops, with occasional guest speakers, that encourage a radically different approach to life than the limiting options of mass media and contemporary culture.

How about looking at our bodies as the source of our power, and not objects subjected to other people's power? What happens when we believe enough in our own stories, in our own form of expression that we don't depend on other people's songs and dances to validate our lives? What happens when we create intimate, safe spaces for sharing and creating art with other young women exploring the same complexities of the coming-of-age journey?

All this and more coming to a summer program near you! Wow...watch out world, the dance is on!

2 comments:

  1. i'm so proud of you lady! keep dancing and shining :-)

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  2. It's so beautiful that you were able to objectify the incident of the teenaged girls on the train and use it to strengthen your approach to how you will work with teenaged girls.

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