You can take the girl out of the ballet but...
You know that saying, "The one that got away?"
If my relationship was with dance, then The One for me would be ballet. Oh ballet...your seductive tendues and the siren call of your above 90 degree developes...no matter what happens to dance and I, no matter how many years we've spent apart or lost contact I still find myself reminiscing about the good old days when the most stressful part of my day was landing a triple pirouette.
This past week I've been in Victoria setting a piece with the Elev8 Youth Dance Project. Due to the talented facility of the students I found myself dipping into a movement vocabulary I have almost forgotten about. Of course as I have the studio to myself this week to work at Dance Victoria I can't help but now feel the pull of many different directions. My worry is that I can create imitations of a technical aesthetic and not be truthfully making movement that is essentially an extraction of me--making dance that I believe or what I think will be successful or expected as opposed to allowing myself to feel vulnerable, take a plunge and make something that might potentially not be liked and/or "fail."
I think what it all comes down to is knowing what you want to make. Even if you loose sight of it for awhile and come back to it, as long as your creative goal is clear then I think sometimes that's all you can ask for.
Of course at this stage in the game, it appears that everything has been done. Everybody has influences and I think it would be silly for me to say that all my movement is original. I'm in no way reinventing the wheel here, folks. But I do think it is how you assemble all your many influences that make work original and/or innovative. That's how you share your vision, your lens, your interpretation, of how you see the world.
AFB