A meeting with dancers
Did I mention that my first professional career was the Dance? Did I mention to you that it took many years for me to accept my destiny, and that was actually a good thing? Because in that path of not acknowledging that the dance and music are my passions, I sought to study other interesting things, like comparative religion, and languages.
But the dance and music have always been present in my life, since my first memories as a child in Manila. I think before I even had a consciousness that Dad and Mom were my parents, I saw them as two beautiful people singing and dancing in front of my crib, and I of course followed them by jiggling away my cute baby fat and screaming high C notes with Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo. And then since I never suffered from stage fright, my parents always made me sing and dance in their parties for friends. This voice I have is nothing really out of the ordinary. It’s just that I associate singing with happiness and pleasure, so whatever comes out of my body is pure fun. And the dance is like breathing. Can’t live without it.
I cannot conceive dance without sound, and vice versa, I cannot conceive music without movement. The two go together. Even more so, I think that every movement and every musical note is associated not only with a feeling, but also because we are cognizant individuals, each movement and sound is associated with an idea, a word.
Long time ago in the peak of my career as a dancer, I choreographed a solo piece. It had to do with birth, or giving birth, to sound and life through the elements of earth and color. I dirtied my body live, right there in front of the audience, and also got my body naturally painted also there live, as I moved and slid and twisted and turned on a long white canvas cloth filled with humid soil and different colors of wet body paint. I used music that was played backwards and it sounded so weird, it stood up the hairs of those listening. And when the music stopped, I kept moving while reciting a poem I wrote about mothers, and love, and sex, and births, and death. The pauses in which there were absolutely no sounds, were necessary silences to magnify my thunderous passion for life. I was blessed to have that experience. I also laughed at the end of it, to see the faces of the people watching my almost naked body covered in paint and dirt. The once pristine wooden floor of the studio was filled with paint and dirt as well; it was so liberating to do that.
Once I worked with a brilliant choreographer who was my first “boss” so to speak, in my professional dancing career. He first worked on the movements, for it was movement that inspired him to express himself. Then, he’d go searching for an adequate musical piece that could go with the movements. It was crazy because what was once rehearsed in an 8 count, for example, all of a sudden had to be rehearsed into a 12 count. Or worse, we’d rehearse free flowing movements with no counts, just breathing rhythms. And then all of a sudden we’d have to adjust the timing of movements to music that had its own different rhythms. From my point of view, he was insane. But insanity is a subjective thing. Insanity is practically necessary to an artist, because what we usually term “insane” is really just another way of saying that we are daring to break the conventional, we are daring to be bold, we are daring to try different things that need to be expressed or else we will wither away and die. A dancer needs to be free.
Another choreographer, also brilliant and at the same time so vulnerable, was a beautiful and exotic woman who I met right before going to college. Well, this lady blew me away. She’d take Caribbean drum and percussion music, and make beautiful dance to express what we are. We come from a land of sun and waves, of coconuts and sex, of rainforests and giant birds. I took some of her afro-latin modern dance classes to actually accompany my older sister, and little did they know that this was going to change my life forever. I realized that I could do all this stuff and feel good, feel a connection with the divine, feel more than anything else I had ever felt, including the Zen moments of that second breath when I used to run marathons (yes, I was also a runner). But dancing was the real deal. It makes me happy and it makes me feel sexy.
So I danced with a guilt, because I was brought up thinking that dance was not a career but rather a hobby and something you do in parties. Nonetheless, I took dance classes almost like they were illegal. I’d bike up to the state college a few blocks away from my private college (where I studied comparative religion), and in that bigger state college my second life had its hidden education in dance. I knew I was in trouble because I knew that deep inside, even if religion tweaked my curiosity, what really made me vibrate were the dance and the music.
So this was my dilemma. I was so afraid of telling my Dad that after 3 years of him paying for my college education, I wanted to quit studying religion and just be a dancer. Of course, I didn’t tell anything to my Dad. I finished my Bachelor of Arts in religion with a college scholarship to get me through the last year, graduated (but kept dancing in my “hidden second life”) and went back home. And the first thing I did back in Caracas was audition for a dance company, to hell with everything else.
That was the start of a decade of psychological suffering. I actually danced in two companies. One was the “serious art” modern dance company, and the second was the “pop culture” fun jazz dance company in the evenings. During my time in the dance studios and dance performances, I was free, I was empowered, I was happy, I was life. When I went back home to my parents, I was confused, guilty, angry, frustrated and very upset trying to get them to understand that no, I wasn’t made to be a philosopher/doctor/nun. I was made to be a performer because you, Mom and Dad, made me realize that I inherited from you both the good voice and healthy body to express myself in the performing arts. But they didn’t seem to get it, and they’d worry like hell about “my future.” (But what is a future without a happy present????)
So anyway, you might ask, “Why didn’t you move out and get your own place?” But you, my generous and patient reader, are aware that a dancer works to dance, she doesn’t work to become a millionaire. At least that is my point of view and my general experience. So I kept dancing away (thank God for my stubbornness) and avoided any deep conversations with my parents, and we established a weak but workable relationship while living together under the same roof. I will always be grateful to my parents for that, for allowing me to live with them for more than a decade, without paying for rent out of my meager dancer’s salary.
Then, I began to sing professionally. I think by that time (4 years had passed since I had returned from college) my parents had given up on convincing me to drop the arts for a living. What was even more surprising was that they watched and heard me dance and sing in a major TV show, and it marked the “before and after” of our relationship. Suddenly, Dad and Mom became my fans. They not only taped the shows I sang in, they distributed it to friends and family. They would take their friends to the places where my band would play. This time of my life was just absolutely beautiful. It was also the time I met the man who would become my husband. I grew both professionally and as a person. I came into terms with me. My happiness had a chain effect. I made hundreds of people happy. I made people dance and cry, shout and laugh…through my single voice and my now very skinny dancer’s body. I knew how to play with people’s feelings through a song or a movement. I felt powerful and at the same time humbled, by the gifts of song and dance that I could only give back to nature and humanity. So I performed each show like there was no tomorrow. I consecrated each moment of my life to this, to express life and love, pleasure and pain, through my voice and my body.
So that is perhaps why I will never stop singing or dancing. Absolutely all my experiences in different scenarios and audiences, big and small, pretty and ugly, rich and poor, open and closed, many and few, but in general all these experiences in music and dance as an expression of myself to share with others, are associated with plenitude. ("Plenitude: The condition of being full, ample, or complete.")
Even if now my job is related to languages and service at an Embassy, every day I move and sing. I no longer require an audience. My stage is life, and my pleasures are simple. I can breathe, I can sing, I can stretch. I express myself through moving words. Therefore, I am.
Oh, and the title: A Meeting with Dancers…that’s because last night I met up with some young dancer friends whom I worked with recently for 3 years in Broadway/Las Vegas style shows for local casinos (I was the lead singer/star), and that encounter with them spurred me to write this memory, in gratitude for the experiences I’ve had as an artist. I think I might be insane enough still, to pick up a microphone and dust away my shoes, to perform again this year. That would be a cool birthday present to myself because in several months I will blow out 50 candles on my cake!!!! Wow, so you see... I always must conclude my chronicles like this:
Did I mention that my first professional career was the Dance? Did I mention to you that it took many years for me to accept my destiny, and that was actually a good thing? Because in that path of not acknowledging that the dance and music are my passions, I sought to study other interesting things, like comparative religion, and languages.
But the dance and music have always been present in my life, since my first memories as a child in Manila. I think before I even had a consciousness that Dad and Mom were my parents, I saw them as two beautiful people singing and dancing in front of my crib, and I of course followed them by jiggling away my cute baby fat and screaming high C notes with Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo. And then since I never suffered from stage fright, my parents always made me sing and dance in their parties for friends. This voice I have is nothing really out of the ordinary. It’s just that I associate singing with happiness and pleasure, so whatever comes out of my body is pure fun. And the dance is like breathing. Can’t live without it.
I cannot conceive dance without sound, and vice versa, I cannot conceive music without movement. The two go together. Even more so, I think that every movement and every musical note is associated not only with a feeling, but also because we are cognizant individuals, each movement and sound is associated with an idea, a word.
Long time ago in the peak of my career as a dancer, I choreographed a solo piece. It had to do with birth, or giving birth, to sound and life through the elements of earth and color. I dirtied my body live, right there in front of the audience, and also got my body naturally painted also there live, as I moved and slid and twisted and turned on a long white canvas cloth filled with humid soil and different colors of wet body paint. I used music that was played backwards and it sounded so weird, it stood up the hairs of those listening. And when the music stopped, I kept moving while reciting a poem I wrote about mothers, and love, and sex, and births, and death. The pauses in which there were absolutely no sounds, were necessary silences to magnify my thunderous passion for life. I was blessed to have that experience. I also laughed at the end of it, to see the faces of the people watching my almost naked body covered in paint and dirt. The once pristine wooden floor of the studio was filled with paint and dirt as well; it was so liberating to do that.
Once I worked with a brilliant choreographer who was my first “boss” so to speak, in my professional dancing career. He first worked on the movements, for it was movement that inspired him to express himself. Then, he’d go searching for an adequate musical piece that could go with the movements. It was crazy because what was once rehearsed in an 8 count, for example, all of a sudden had to be rehearsed into a 12 count. Or worse, we’d rehearse free flowing movements with no counts, just breathing rhythms. And then all of a sudden we’d have to adjust the timing of movements to music that had its own different rhythms. From my point of view, he was insane. But insanity is a subjective thing. Insanity is practically necessary to an artist, because what we usually term “insane” is really just another way of saying that we are daring to break the conventional, we are daring to be bold, we are daring to try different things that need to be expressed or else we will wither away and die. A dancer needs to be free.
Another choreographer, also brilliant and at the same time so vulnerable, was a beautiful and exotic woman who I met right before going to college. Well, this lady blew me away. She’d take Caribbean drum and percussion music, and make beautiful dance to express what we are. We come from a land of sun and waves, of coconuts and sex, of rainforests and giant birds. I took some of her afro-latin modern dance classes to actually accompany my older sister, and little did they know that this was going to change my life forever. I realized that I could do all this stuff and feel good, feel a connection with the divine, feel more than anything else I had ever felt, including the Zen moments of that second breath when I used to run marathons (yes, I was also a runner). But dancing was the real deal. It makes me happy and it makes me feel sexy.
So I danced with a guilt, because I was brought up thinking that dance was not a career but rather a hobby and something you do in parties. Nonetheless, I took dance classes almost like they were illegal. I’d bike up to the state college a few blocks away from my private college (where I studied comparative religion), and in that bigger state college my second life had its hidden education in dance. I knew I was in trouble because I knew that deep inside, even if religion tweaked my curiosity, what really made me vibrate were the dance and the music.
So this was my dilemma. I was so afraid of telling my Dad that after 3 years of him paying for my college education, I wanted to quit studying religion and just be a dancer. Of course, I didn’t tell anything to my Dad. I finished my Bachelor of Arts in religion with a college scholarship to get me through the last year, graduated (but kept dancing in my “hidden second life”) and went back home. And the first thing I did back in Caracas was audition for a dance company, to hell with everything else.
That was the start of a decade of psychological suffering. I actually danced in two companies. One was the “serious art” modern dance company, and the second was the “pop culture” fun jazz dance company in the evenings. During my time in the dance studios and dance performances, I was free, I was empowered, I was happy, I was life. When I went back home to my parents, I was confused, guilty, angry, frustrated and very upset trying to get them to understand that no, I wasn’t made to be a philosopher/doctor/nun. I was made to be a performer because you, Mom and Dad, made me realize that I inherited from you both the good voice and healthy body to express myself in the performing arts. But they didn’t seem to get it, and they’d worry like hell about “my future.” (But what is a future without a happy present????)
So anyway, you might ask, “Why didn’t you move out and get your own place?” But you, my generous and patient reader, are aware that a dancer works to dance, she doesn’t work to become a millionaire. At least that is my point of view and my general experience. So I kept dancing away (thank God for my stubbornness) and avoided any deep conversations with my parents, and we established a weak but workable relationship while living together under the same roof. I will always be grateful to my parents for that, for allowing me to live with them for more than a decade, without paying for rent out of my meager dancer’s salary.
Then, I began to sing professionally. I think by that time (4 years had passed since I had returned from college) my parents had given up on convincing me to drop the arts for a living. What was even more surprising was that they watched and heard me dance and sing in a major TV show, and it marked the “before and after” of our relationship. Suddenly, Dad and Mom became my fans. They not only taped the shows I sang in, they distributed it to friends and family. They would take their friends to the places where my band would play. This time of my life was just absolutely beautiful. It was also the time I met the man who would become my husband. I grew both professionally and as a person. I came into terms with me. My happiness had a chain effect. I made hundreds of people happy. I made people dance and cry, shout and laugh…through my single voice and my now very skinny dancer’s body. I knew how to play with people’s feelings through a song or a movement. I felt powerful and at the same time humbled, by the gifts of song and dance that I could only give back to nature and humanity. So I performed each show like there was no tomorrow. I consecrated each moment of my life to this, to express life and love, pleasure and pain, through my voice and my body.
So that is perhaps why I will never stop singing or dancing. Absolutely all my experiences in different scenarios and audiences, big and small, pretty and ugly, rich and poor, open and closed, many and few, but in general all these experiences in music and dance as an expression of myself to share with others, are associated with plenitude. ("Plenitude: The condition of being full, ample, or complete.")
Even if now my job is related to languages and service at an Embassy, every day I move and sing. I no longer require an audience. My stage is life, and my pleasures are simple. I can breathe, I can sing, I can stretch. I express myself through moving words. Therefore, I am.
Oh, and the title: A Meeting with Dancers…that’s because last night I met up with some young dancer friends whom I worked with recently for 3 years in Broadway/Las Vegas style shows for local casinos (I was the lead singer/star), and that encounter with them spurred me to write this memory, in gratitude for the experiences I’ve had as an artist. I think I might be insane enough still, to pick up a microphone and dust away my shoes, to perform again this year. That would be a cool birthday present to myself because in several months I will blow out 50 candles on my cake!!!! Wow, so you see... I always must conclude my chronicles like this:
thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.