Suspension

There's this special moment that I've finally become strong enough to experience in my training which seems so stupid because when I get there I can tell because no effort is required at all. It exists in all kinds of movement arts that I've been involved in for a long time... this wildly romantic balance that like unicorns and the perfect boyfriend I had hocked up to being pleasant to aim for but ultimately imaginary. With the amount of times I've had this magical place described to me, you'd think I would be prepared for it to happen though I guess in hindsight its like having someone tell you the science of what happens when clouds form and unform versus experiencing the sensation and emotional reaction when you are being rained on...events that are directly related but completely uncomparable. My most common mistake has been identified by my teachers as a fear response, that glitch that causes my shoulder to jerk during a pirouette or my ankles to dovetail at the back of my beat. This, I have decided is not a result of being scared of messing up but rather some strange and divine fear of what might happen if I actually followed the instructions and got it perfect. Would I vanish? Would god speak to me? What's the worst thing that could happen? The imprint of defining myself by flaw is that ingrained. If I could light up the places where I toppled and skidded across the studio the wild brushstrokes of my failure would look something like a desperate futurist painting, full of movement but based too much on the mechanics rather than the joy my teachers say I should discover in my dancing. Where did all the doing and punishing come from? I have been discovering that it’s actually the action of doing nothing that helps me to succeed. That special point of sheer suspension only achievable by winding up the top and then resisting the urge to touch it while it spins. For some reason I am shocked that when I realize that if I follow the suggestions given to me that it works and then I have all of this space and time to play with inside the structure of each movement. The instructions are science and now that I have all that out of the way I can do whatever I want... When I'm at the peak of my swing and my hands peel free from the bar I am touching nothing and I realize that the only thing keeping me from winking out of existence entirely is that I'm having too much fun to go anywhere else.

~ Petra Delarocha

posted 1/12/2011