While tidying up my harddrive, I found this from 2018. I think they were notes for a talk I gave at the Or Gallery for the Vancouver Institute of Social Research (VISR).
Practice is a commitment to long-term intimacy with something.
A commitment to getting to know something better, to know something deeper, by returning to it over and over as we do with the body of a beloved. We go over familiar places in order to discover it anew. We look below what we think we know in order to discover what we don’t know yet: new territory, new depths, new choices.
At the same time, practice is also a commitment to being with the old. The familiar is still there, still part of our beloved, transformed by time and new experiences. We commit to noticing how old habits might change. To discerning when something is still useful, and when something can be let go of, allowed to retire into memory, where it acts upon us in different ways. Practice then is also a way to go back in time: to visit with old teachers, with our teachers’ teachers, with our ancestors. Sometimes we go back so far that we go into the future.
And because the body is a constant changing organism, practice is also, for me, about being present. Not always about doing but also about just being. So that we can tune in to what is there, what might emerge, what is emerging.
I am a dancer, choreographer and dramaturge – I make dances, I help others make dances. My instrument is my body. My materials are space, time and the human body. My body then, is both my tool and my material. Looking at your body, however, is a difficult thing. Practicing on your instrument is a difficult thing. There is an inherent struggle in the fact that I AM my body; yet I must observe it as I practise.
A musician friend of mine once threw his flute, a flute that cost thousands of dollars, into English Bay in a fit of rage against the instrument, against the impossibility of perfection. I know his rage, but cannot throw my body into the ocean so easily.
And so I come to the word “struggle”, which is a huge part of practice.
When I think of the word “struggle”, it takes me out of the walls of the studio. It takes me out into the world where I encounter other struggles - my own and those of others.
The struggle to be kind.
The struggle to find love.
The struggle to find shelter.
The struggle for justice.
The act of dancing is to constantly figure out how to situate myself to all these struggles. Because dancing for me is a situating of the ever-changing body in ever-changing time and space.
The act of living becomes inseparable from the act of making art.
And the question I often end up asking myself is: how can I practise art making so that I can get better at living on this planet?