Rolfer, Dancer, Teacher

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Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 7

The final week is done of my first Rolfing® training assist. It ended up being a big push to the end getting in as much as I outside of class while mostly wrapping up in the classroom. We wrapped up a day ago and I’m finding myself deeply grateful for the experience having learned a lot and set up a decent base for assisting again (in fact I’ve already got one loose offer to assist another instructor sometime in future). I’m also very grateful to friends, old and new, in the swing scene here who’ve helped me feel at home, and kept my nights busy with delicious food and equally delicious dancing.

Day 43 – September 26

uc516_day_43_kakes_dawn_tributeMonday came on fairly bright and early. The legendary Dawn Hampton had passed the night before and I was on and off Facebook through the morning checking out the tributes, stories, and videos of this incredible human.

In class we spent the morning reflecting on our 10 series clients and what sort of results we had gotten with them. Watching the reflective process for the students was great particularly since I see the 10-series as being a strong self-teaching tool for Rolfers early on and throughout our careers. Session 9 with the 13-series clients followed with a little bit of a bittersweet feel moving towards the end of closure.

After class I caught a ride from Neal over to Heather Starsong‘s studio where I got a personal movement session. We worked a lot on spinal mechanics and getting my axial diaphgramatic structures relaxing and working together. It was a beautiful session and is probably going to be processing for a few months to come but I then got to have a 2 mile walk down to Kakes Studios for the Boulder Swing dance as a way to integrate. Had some great dances again with a nice tribute to Dawn then a couple of friends invited me over for Sazeracs and some chat time before taking me home probably later than was best for me to be out.

Day 44 – September 27

UC516_Day_44_Dancing_at_Baurs.jpgTuesday came on bright and early with a trip down to Snooze for breakfast then more 10-series presentations and my second demo session with my post-10 client. The afternoon rolled into mostly students trading sessions with each other which provided a nice break from holding space for outside clients and generally feels like we got a more relaxed energy and got to see the students interacting a bit more openly as practitioners.

Dancing this night took the form of a drive (or being driven) down to Denver for Joe Smith and the Spicy Pickles at a restaurant called Baur’s. The band was really damn good and it makes me wish we had the sort of infrastructure in Raleigh/Durham to support larger bands having weekly gigs like this. I got to meet and dance with a few new dancers I hadn’t run into yet and we headed home tired but satisfied.

Day 45 – September 28

uc516_day_45_skeye_brewingWednesday night saw me up early for the last session of my 3-series trading with Neal. The session with Heather had given me a few ideas of spots to work on and Neal incorporated that info nicely into a nice wrap-up session for our work together.

We spent the morning in class trading tips and tricks that we’d picked up along the way and watching Neal’s final session 10 demo. The student’s 10th sessions in the afternoon were again sort of bittersweet thought mostly sweet as the students closed out with these clients. I’m not sure if it was because they’d done movement as well or because it was closer to close or just luck of the draw but this round of closure felt more open and warm with gifts and cards exchanged and the like.

After class, Neal gave me a ride up to Skeye Brewing on his way home and stopped off to grab a beer with me before heading on. When we arrived, the beginner lesson for the dance that night was still going on and we got to talk a little bit of my philosophy for teaching dance. The crowd for the dance was on the smaller side but also nicely intimate and a lot of good dances (and a few brews) were had. I caught a ride home with one of the local teachers and had a really nice conversation about dance pedagogy before being dropped off at home and promptly crashing.

Day 46 – September 29

uc516_day_46_waterloo_group_photoBy this point in the week it was beginning to feel like a rather intense, though worthwhile, haul through a lack of sleep. It wasn’t really intentional, just between the work with Heather and Neal I think we’d reached a sort of critical mass where some of the body shifts were interrupting my sleep for a bit.

Undeterred though we kept rolling on with class which was all about the final post-10 sessions today. My final session with my post-10 client came together really well and kind of made me wish I were closer. She asked if I had a card and I had to confess that I lived half a country away but would do my best to help put her in touch with someone who might be useful to her locally. Following class about half of us went over to Asher Brewing for a couple of beers and some conversation. Several of the students have family or significant others coming into town at this point so we got to talk a bit more about those folks and life beyond the classroom.

And reprising the start of my dancing during this course, some of the local decided to take another trip to Waterloo in Louisville for some Balboa dancing. The picture above is missing a good number of the new and old dance friends I’ve made here but I think it tells the spirit of this group well and I’m deeply grateful for the welcoming arms of the swing scene here.

Day 47 – September 30

uc516_day_47_class_photoGraduation Day!

This was another early morning for myself and Neal as we had individual student evaluation interviews to do. Everyone passed with plenty of room and we got to talk with each student about their strengths, their challenges, and what we might recommend they pursue next in their development. Energies were higher overall than they had been in a while which I think is a testament to how much work goes into training as a Rolfer and how much of a relief it is to cross the finish line. The closing ceremony and graduation went great and then I crashed hard and just went to lie down on the floor a bit.

Following a reception at RISI, the class and families went out to Element Bistro for a drink. Neal and I hung around for an hour or so then headed to J&L Distilling for a final drink and debrief ourselves. When I had first booked my flights, Neal and I had planned this time thinking we’d need lots of time to talk out what had happened in the class but because we’d kept open lines of communication and feedback the whole time there really wasn’t much left unsaid and we spent the time instead talking about my heading to Boston and Neal’s upcoming trip to Peru.

Final night’s dancing in Colorado came courtesy of a gypsy jazz band called La Pompe playing at Brik on York which was a fancy pizza place in downtown Denver. A local dancer gave me a ride down and instead of pizza I ended up ordering a charcuterie plate that took most of the night to finish off. Had some great dances, especially in the second set when patrons started clearing out and we were able to move some tables and dance at the foot of the stage. One thing I’ve been noting a lot lately is how much of a difference it can make to dance with an audience around. At a standard swing dance everyone is kind of just doing their own thing, but at a restaurant or bar, dancing kind of makes us part of the entertainment and it’s been interesting to note how much that adds to the experience for me and kind of eggs on experimentation and play.

I got back home around midnight and tried to get to sleep fairly quickly for my flight the next morning.

Day 48 – October 1

uc516_day_48_denver_airportThe last day in Boulder dawned a bit earlier than I would have liked, but with a 1pm flight to catch, an hour+ bus ride to get there, and the unpredictability of the lines at DEN, I decided it would be best to be up at out early. I had hoped to take my host to Snooze and to get myself a flight of fancy pancakes (still a brilliant idea) but by the time we arrived at 8:30 the wait was nearly an hour and would have been pushing it on my comfort zone with the time.

So instead I just hopped the bus to DEN, barely made weight on my bags stuffed with goodies from Colorado breweries and distilleries, and settled in to wing my way to Boston for Tinkerbal and seeing some dance and Rolfing friends I haven’t seen in quite some time. Today’s photo is from a little space in DEN above the trains in Terminal C that I’d just never noticed before, keeping a bit with this whole trip’s theme of noticing details and continuing to learn.

I landed in Boston around 9pm, caught an Uber to the dance that night and surprised the hell out of a few old and dear dance friends by being there. It was a lovely reception back and I wish I had gotten photos of the silly lobster dance contest, but I decided to just enjoy it rather than being a shutterbug. Staying the night with an old dance student of mine who lives near the venues and I slept in on Sunday longer than I have in a while.

Conclusion

It was a really wild ride getting to this point, having just completed my Advanced Training and getting asked to assist, working out how to make it fit with my current homeless state, and getting better insight both into how much I do actually know and how much there still is to learn in this work. I’m grateful to Neal for taking a chance with me and to all the students for their patience with both of our learning curves and for their presence and energy in class. And probably most importantly, a huge congratulations to AJ, Chris, Drew, Haley, Katie, Kyle, Monica, and Tiffani on making it all the way to being Certified Rolfers!!!

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Continuing Education, Rolfing, Teaching, Uncategorized

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Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 5

Week 5 of assisting my first Rolfing® training is in the books. I’m feeling my stride with the teaching, learning a lot, and finally finding some serious time to go out dancing. It seems like we’re both gathering momentum towards the end and at the same time feeling like I’m short on time to do all the enjoying of Boulder that I want to.

Day 29 – September 12

Today was the first day that Ray McCall joined the class to assess Neal as an instructor. Having watched Lael be assessed in Brazil and now Neal, it’s interesting to see the first jitters play out with people far more experienced than myself. Neal handled it well, but was clearly wound rather tight the first half of today and going into his session 6 with his client. In the afternoon he settled out and it was a pleasure having Ray in class.

uc516_day_29_kakes_studioAt the end of the day, Ray came up to me and asked who I did my movement training with. When I responded that it was predominantly Monica Caspari and Lael Keen and asked why, he said it showed in how I approached students and gave feedback and that I clearly moved from my center and expressed out through my limbs. I took that validation and compliment gladly then went out to Kakes studio for the Monday night classes and dance with Boulder Swing Dance.

Day 30 – September 13

uc516_day_30_poptart_therapyTuesday was session 8 with my 10-series client. Ray was not observing this day so I got to head into the integration sessions of the series without the extra observation. After some hemming and hawing and discussing, I ended up going with client’s desire to try radial decompression for the 8/9 part of her series. It felt like a little bit of a risk since traditionally it’s an upper and lower session, but the session ended up being helpful to have demo’d for the students, several of whom had been nudged to do radial decompression sessions in their Unit 2 despite never having seen a RD session.

The session went well but I think the extra charge around trying to determine the “right” session type to do was showing a bit in the general class energy as we moved towards the afternoon. One of the students decided to go out and get Pop-tarts which she hadn’t had in, I think she said 6+ years. So toasted pop-tart therapy was the order of the evening and towards the end of the day we got to have some good conversations around long-term challenges with the work and such.

Day 31 – September 14

uc516_day_31_irish_snugSession 7 for the Monday/Wednesday clients today. There’s nothing quite like watching a room of Rolfers pulling on gloves and putting fingers in mouths and up noses. It seemed to be a pretty significant session for Neal’s and several other clients and was a particularly interesting day to sit with and hold space for.

Feeling a little worn down I headed down to Denver after class for Balboa practice where I got to evoke some interesting imagery to help a few dancer friends with body mechanics and flow. Then went over to The Irish Snug for a few beers and dancing to Gypsy Swing Revue.

Day 32 – September 15

uc516_day_32_merc_stairsLast day of classes for the week and this time I was doing my client’s session 9 with Ray observing in addition to the class. Given that a new person would change the dynamic of the room a bit, I made sure to introduce my client to Ray outside before anything got going; all the same it was interesting watching how the extra observer affected both mine and my client’s nerves a bit. Fortunately, she and I have been building a nice sort of teamwork effort all along the way and we could lean on that a bit to keep her session moving in awesome directions (including a nice ‘wink wink’ type, “you’re doing such a great job today” comment from my client). I asked Ray for feedback afterwards and he said it was a great advanced type session but maybe to find ways to pull it back a bit if I’m going to teach further. I expect if I continue to teach that that sort of balancing act between client needs and abilities and student needs and abilities will be a long-term project.

Following class I picked up a dancer friend from Boulder and we headed down to Denver for a Harvest Moon Ball dance at The Mercury Cafe. I both love the Merc and at the same time still find myself a little intimidated dancing there. Nine years ago the Merc was the first place I’d spent more than a few days dancing outside of my home scene and the level of skill combined with the level of play there made me feel like I had no idea how to dance. I don’t run into that as much anymore, but I was reminded of that feeling and the challenges of trying to find my groove 2000 miles away from home. All in all though it was a lovely evening and I got to meet some great folks who I had never danced with before.

Day 33 – September 16

uc516_day_33_royal_archOn the advice of some dancer friends, I got up semi-early on Friday and headed out to hike up to Royal Arch. I’d been warned that it gets pretty crowded on weekends and had heard the phrase “nobody works on Friday in Boulder” the night before at the Merc so I had a little trepidation when I didn’t make it out onto the trail until past 10am. All the same, several hours, some beautiful views, and a lot of sweat later, I made it up to the Arch and a gorgeous view of Boulder below. Along the way I had some great conversations and meetings with fellow hikers including several sets of folks from North Carolina. It was another reminder of how much happier and more sociable I’ve been getting since selling my house 4 months ago.

I made it off the trail sometime around 2 and headed over to check out J&L Distilling, a place I’d heard Ray recommending to Neal in passing. What I had expected to be maybe 30 minutes to an hour of exploration turned into over 3 hours of hanging out when Jon Martine, his wife, and a friend just happened to show up and sit down next to me. Jon had taught the Anatomy lead-in week to our class the week I had been absent and will be teaching a stand-alone day next week. I had a great time hanging out and chatting with them and being introduced to some off-menu cocktail options like the Atomic Beet Down.

Day 34 – September 17

Friday night for unclear reasons turned into a night of extremely little sleep. I had intended on getting up early to hike part of Mt. Sanitas again but woke up feeling like that would be a bad idea. Instead, knowing I had two birthday parties to go to that afternoon, I spent most of the morning fitfully trying to nap and watching Netflix when that failed.

uc516_day_34_cakeThe first party, and source of today’s photo, was for my nephew who was turning 1. It was a struggle getting over there and settling in at first but once I got to talking with family for a bit it turned out to be a really lovely time. This trip has been fairly short on family time due to the constraints of not having a car at first and lots of energy just going into learning my role in the classroom so it was nice to have most of the nearby family gathered to hang out and catch up for a bit. The birthday boy was clearly enamored with the cake and I ended up staying a lot longer than expected with the evening’s finale being taking both my niece and nephew for a bunny spotting walk around the neighborhood.

From there, I briefly dropped by home to pick up my dance shoes and change then went to meet a party of dancers at License No. 1 beneath the Boulderado hotel for a joint dancer birthday celebration. A band I hadn’t heard before called Banshee Tree was playing and they were mostly fast and consistently great. There were a LOT of drunks to dodge in a very small dance space for a while but around 11:30 on their final set it started to clear down a bit and I got a really nice set of dances in with a local dancer who I’d never met before doing half-time Lindy in order to keep going to the last of the super fast songs.

Day 35 – September 18

uc516_day_35_flatirons_hikeSunday saw another hike, this time up the Flatirons trails, not too far from but significantly easier than the Royal Arch hike I had done on Friday. It was again wonderful just being out in nature, being sociable, and also getting to spend a bit of non-dance time with the dancers I’m getting to know or connect with again and who I’ll have to say goodbye to all too soon.

A few hours hiking was followed by a delicious lunch at Zoe Ma Ma and then I went home and basically crashed for about 12 hours sleep catching up from Friday night and recharging for the week ahead.

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Rolfing, Teaching

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Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 4

Week 4 crossed the halfway point for both students and myself with this Unit 3 Rolfing® training. What started feeling incredibly spacious and like we might be here forever is beginning to pick up steam and nearing that fever pitch where parts of the internal monologue start saying less “la-di-da, so much time” and more “oh crap, how are we going to get everything in?!”

Day 22 – September 5

uc516_day_22_music_festivalToday was Labor Day and thankfully and enjoyably a day off. This made for the final day of a nice 4-day weekend and a good chance to unwind and sort of take stock for me. I spent the morning relaxing, checking in with some dance friends, and getting some more ideas of how to get more connected with Boulder again. While it had been great to have 4 days off I also hadn’t planned a lot of activity for it and ended up feeling a bit cut off from people.

So there happened to be a Labor Day Weekend Boulder Creek Hometown Music Festival going on complete with duck floats, a Zucchini car race which looked similar to Pinewood Derbies but with Zucchini as the car basis instead of a block of wood. There was also the seal-your-self in balls for floating on the water pictured above but sadly they seemed limited to kids about 8 or younger. I tooled around the festival for a few hours then got tea at the iconic Dushanbe Tea House then happened to find my way to Press Play bar and arcade on Pearl Street. Finally I made my way to Kakes Studio at 9pm for some dancing to Jeremy Mohney.

Day 23 – September 6

uc516_day_23_smile_muralTuesday was session 6 (back line) with my client. As I had walked in to class today the mural above had caught my eye. This mural sits across from the Rolf Institute and while it spans the whole building, the “Your smile matters” part had grabbed my attention this morning. I’m not sure what to share about it other than to say that smiling has been one of those things I felt I had to force for a long time and this year has been a brilliant space of finding ways to have it start coming back naturally. Thanks to the mural for reminding me that it is a powerful and valuable thing to have back too. 🙂

Day 24 – September 7

uc516_day_24_lake_runWednesday seemed to be a day with a feeling of divergence. Students had their session 4 (inner line of the leg) with one of their clients while having just finished session 6 with their other client the previous day. It had also been a week since they had seen this client and most recently had done movement sessions with them. While it doesn’t seem like much, that week break is the longest any of the clients will have gone without getting work during the course of this series. And something about the further shifting placement of sessions between the two clients helps to nudge that feeling of “this is going to be real work soon” since clients in a practice situation are rarely coming in on the same session on the same day (though it is fun when the stars align and all your sessions one day seem to have the same theme).

With the end of today I realized it’s the halfway point for me, everyone else’s halfway point having been over the weekend. I’d hoped to spend more time being active and getting in a bit better shape while I was out here but have so far felt a little sporadic about it. So as I’m getting out dancing more I also wanted to start being more active elsewhere so I took a run around the lakes by RISI after class and got this gorgeous picture of the sky reflecting off the water.

Day 25 – September 8

uc516_day_25_poop_fairyThursday morning saw me early into the office for another run around the lake which happened to include running into this delightful sign. Today was session 7 (head, neck, mouth, nose) with my demo client which is probably most often the weirdest session of the series to most people. It ended up being a great session but one where the time got away from me a little bit and I was relieved to find that my client didn’t have to start work until slightly later than usual so we had time to get her out the door without creating a problem.

After class I had a dance friend coming in for a session and got to spend an hour or so doing a more casual session not under the observation of a 10-person group. It was really nice to have that moment to just get back to working for the sake of working for a bit and to have the conversation time to catch up a bit on how the dance scene is in Colorado lately. We got dinner, had some more conversation, then headed off home.

Day 26 – September 9

uc516_day_26_denver_colleagueFriday was a class day today since we had our whole week shifted by a day on account of Labor Day. So it was a day that demanded less work from me since Neal was demoing today, but we had a lively conversation about trauma and how to work with it in the morning.

I finished up class and drove down to Denver for what was intended to be dinner with a colleague, who I’d met in Scotland, followed by going to a dance. However, due to awesome conversation and tasty foods and beverages we ended up hanging out until after midnight and I bagged on going to the dance which ended at 10:30. The photo for today is of one of his coffee table books which just seemed quirky enough to make me think it would be a good photo for today. We had some delicious food at a place called Cho 77 and then walked around the neighborhood for a bit catching up and talking about assisting and such before having a final drink in which we finished off a bottle my friend had brought back from Scotland which seemed a little poetic somehow and a great way to end the week’s work.

Day 27 – September 10

uc516_day_27_lindy_and_libationsWEEKEND TIME!!! This morning started with sleeping in followed by barely making it up in time to go meet a new dance friend and her boyfriend for brunch. Bagels from Moe’s Bagels were the order of the day and man they had a lovely home. He’s an architect who has lived in Boulder for 60+ years and designed and built several of the homes on the block, culminating in the current home which was just incredibly beautiful. It was a fun and interesting sort of reminder of what that sort of commitment to one place might allow for as I’m currently wondering how much longer I might remain in the Triangle. Following brunch we took a nice easy hike around the foothills area and then I headed home for the afternoon.

A bit of article prepping and vegging out to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell brought me dance luck in the form of a Facebook post. At about 4pm, I happened to catch a post about live music and dancing at Stem Ciders in Denver. I headed down to Denver a few hours later for some solid swing with Odessa Rose and some tasty cider. The crowd was small and a bit more social than dancy that night but the band was good and the energy picked up after the lesson at the first band break. Also ran into a dancer who was a recent transplant to Denver and spent some time talking Rolfing and moves and many other things. It continues to amaze me how much of my energy to socialize, chat people up, make small or large talk, and enjoy being in a crowd has been freeing up since I sold the house.

Day 28 – September 11

Another drive down to Denver Sunday morning, this time for a chat with my demo client. Since she’s interested in potentially training to be a Rolfer it has always been my policy to make time to talk about Rolfing training outside of the treatment room. Not that it can’t be discussed in session but there are so many nuances that could be lost if one was constantly trying to talk and receive or give a worthwhile session. So down to Denver I headed with a registration packet and a copy of one of Dr. Rolf’s books for her. It was a great talk with lots of nuance both about possible ways to go about training and about what being a Rolfer is like for me. I continue to be more excited about the possibility that she will end up becoming a Rolfer and at times it was hard not to burst out with “OMG go already, you gonna love it!!!”

uc516_day_28_snarfburgerTook my time heading home after a leisurely fancy Mexican lunch at Leña and a trip through what a colleague had described as Denver’s fanciest Goodwill. After getting home I ended up taking an extended nap that lasted from something like 3:30-7:30. I woke up hungry and decided to go for a walk to find dinner. After a few Google Maps searches I finally landed on going to Snarfburger which is an offshoot of Snarf’s, my to-date favorite sandwich shop chain in Boulder. Incidentally it appears that Snarfburger is located in the spot where Daddy Bruce’s Barbecue used to be.

I’m going to end this post waxing slightly poetic about Daddy Bruce’s. I was introduced to Daddy Bruce’s by Michael Polon in my Unit 1 training close to 9 years ago now. I was jonesing for some barbecue one lunch and asked if there were any good places. Michael sent myself and a few of my classmates down to Daddy Bruce’s which, oddly enough, was right next door to the campus of Naropa, the Buddhist university in Boulder. It was about as bare bones of a barbecue shack as I’ve ever been in but it felt like a breath of fresh air walking in for me. There was basically just room for take away or there may have been 2-3 tables. Everything was served in Styrofoam take out trays with piles of meat, a side or two, and a generic store bought sandwich cookie for dessert. The beef ribs were pretty hefty caveman style eating and downright delicious. The older black gentleman running the joint, who I can only assume was Daddy Bruce, appeared to run the entire operation by hand including doing all of the calculations for order pricing by hand on a sheet of paper. It was one of those places that somehow just etched itself in your memory and felt like you were stepping into something just rustically authentic and unfettered by the dressing up that so often accompanies barbecue restaurants nowadays and it gave me a taste of home in my first training when I was deeply in need of one. It’s a place I expect to miss just a little bit for many years to come if not every time I come to Boulder for the rest of my life.

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Personal, Rolfing, Teaching

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Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 3

Week 3 of this Unit 3 basic Rolfing® training has begun to feel like something of a different animal. We’re getting into the core/deep sessions of the series, students are starting to settle and hit their stride with their clients, and overall the momentum of the class feels more stable and up-and-running. The 4 weeks we still have to go feels at once very distant and almost an inevitable conclusion rushing towards us.

Day 15 – August 29

UC516_Day_15_Jeep_RenegadeFirst day getting to drive into class instead of taking the bus. While I had arranged to rent a compact car, the rental agency saw fit to upgrade me after a 5 hour extra wait to get a vehicle at all. So for the upcoming month I had a Jeep Renegade to drive around town. First day or two driving it were a little nervous being that I’m unused to the shape of it; but at the same time it seems like another potential step forward in terms of getting used to standing in the full width of my body (something I’ve been working with for the past few years ever since John Martine’s Neural 2 class).

Today was Neal’s demo client day so I mostly got to sit back and observe with interjections of ideas when necessary. Continuing to get more comfortable with observing student sessions and adding input at appropriate times and such. There’s definitely an art to this that I expect will take some time to fully embody. That said, 12 years of teaching dance is definitely serving me pretty well in terms of feeling semi-comfortable jumping into it.

Day 16 – August 30

UC516_Day_16_PhoSession 4 demo day for me today. Session 4 remains a curiosity for me in terms of trust. For those of you not familiar, session 4 in the Rolfing 10-series works the muscles of the inner leg and thigh up to the pelvic floor and hips. It’s the first time in the series that you start really digging into territory that many people have never had touched therapeutically and it still amazes me sometimes how clients will trust me to work in odd areas after having only known me for a few hours of direct contact.

I’d spent a decent portion of the weekend mulling over and mapping out some various options for the session then ended up discarding more than half of those ideas mid-session. Session went great and as I’m continuing to settle into my side of the work I think my client and the students are getting better info and better results.

On the challenging side, I feel like my days seem to just be show up to class, do class things, get dinner, go to bed. I expect it to keep shifting as we go, but I’m hoping to start finding more of a social life here again soon so I can feel like there’s more to this trip than just work and survive. I’m also being patient with this evolution, letting it come, and keeping in mind how much change has gone down for me already this year.

Day 17 – August 31

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j-Lz0D5_ck

Today was a fun and chill day. It was 2nd Movement session day for the clients who are doing movement work. One of my goals for the movement work was to do what we could to evoke a greater sense of play and to that end, we started off class with a John Cleese video on creativity. The thought behind this video being as much to evoke play in the day’s sessions as to suggest ways of staying open to grown and creation in the Movement work longer term so the Movement ideas continue to grow and evolve rather than becoming stuck in rote memorization.

Today felt like a good reminder about patience with growth. Planting ideas like creativity and play are these long-term sort of projects that require one to plant seeds, then sit back and not meddle too much while students work it out for themselves. Taking this as a good reminder too to be patient with some of my own growth aspects that are bubbling up this week.

Day 18 – September 1

UC516_Day_18_SunsetAnother grey day for my session 5 with my client. Got into some really rich territory and I’m feeling very grateful for having a client who’s down for the whole multi-faceted journey of the 10-series. It’s interesting to find myself leading someone else through some of the changes I went through as a Rolfer® and sort of evoking the idea that to help others as fully as possible you also get to be open to the work changing you as a practitioner as well.

Today marked our heading into a 4 day Labor Day weekend which I’m both looking forward to and have a bit of trepidation about. Lack of social time so far is starting to wear on me a little bit and although I am planning to hit up a dance in Boulder on Monday, I’m unsure how I’ll work through the extended downtime.

Day 19 – September 2

UC516_Day_19_Sunny_SkyNot a great deal to report for this Friday. I was riding pretty high off of doing two really fun demo sessions and feeling like we had some solid rapport going with the students. I sort of semi-snoozed through part of the day then took myself out to see Don’t Think Twice at the local movie theater. It was a good if entirely chill day to the extent that this is basically the only photo I took that day and wasn’t really even thinking about documenting for the day.

Day 20 – September 3

UC516_Day_20_Mount_SanitasSaturday morning I decided to take a hike up the trails around Mount Sanitas on the west edge of Boulder. Set off on foot from the house with about a 2 mile hike to the trail head. The last time I’d gone near Sanitas was about a year ago taking a night hike through the valley with a newly graduated Rolfer friend. We had hiked what turned out to be the very easy part of the trail which is the valley section on a nice easy slope. The summit trails turned out to be around 1350 elevation gain and then descent over about 3 miles. It was a beautiful hike and one I’m thinking might get repeated a few more times while I’m here, but definitely more intense than I was expecting.

Hiked my way back through Pearl Street Mall, got some street tacos, then napped and read for a good portion of the rest of the day.

Day 21 – September 4

UC516_Day_21_Deer_in_YardDeer in the yard across the street from where I am staying this morning. Today was a little exploration and a lot of chill time. Took a drive down the foothills to Golden, CO and Denver. Took an afternoon nap and did some reading on student papers that need to be done by Tuesday.

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Personal, Rolfing, Teaching

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Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 2

Week 2 of assisting is in the books. Made a lot of headway, a few energetic ups and downs but all in all feeling pretty damn successful and building a lot of momentum. Ending it up with a quiet weekend in Lafayette and getting ready to throw down another great week as we get into the middle sessions in the 10-series.

Day 8 – August 22

UC516_Day_8_Coffee_Small_ThingsMonday was my first chance to watch Neal do a demo session following my not-so-great first session on Thursday. I’d spent the weekend occasionally mulling over what I could recall from past demo sessions but wasn’t coming up with much that I could say for sure. So today I finally got to get fresh eyes on a demo session with the intent to learn for myself about demoing instead of working and I picked up as much as I could, particularly on how and when the quiet spaces came into play.

My own quiet space for the day is cast in today’s picture. I was up early before class and figured I’d take a trip in early to sit at Tod’s Espresso Cafe around the corner from the Institute. Getting my first for-here order there I noticed that they use a wax pencil to mark the saucers with the order and name. It struck me as cool and a smart idea and was something I don’t think I’ve seen at any other coffee shops so far. So it was a good reminder for me about appreciating the little things and what I call “honoring the moments of brilliance” in the learning process.

Day 9 – August 23

UC516_Day_9_Straight_to_bedTuesday I finally got to redeem myself. After the 5 days between my first and second demo session, we got to get into session 2. This time I was prepared a little differently and my client and I had already discussed a few ways to alter my approach that seemed like they’d serve everybody. So a few deep breaths and dive in to the session with a focus on recovering and getting momentum going in a good direction. Thankfully, it worked!

The session went really well, the client and I started to connect better and I felt myself start to relax into the flow of the session and start drawing on my whole skill set again rather than trying to do the session I thought people wanted to see. The session felt just fundamentally better than the first round and feedback from all sides was a lot better. That said, my energy just totally tanked afterwards. Whether it was just relief or relief mixed with other stuff, I’m not sure, but I napped through lunch, struggled to keep my eyes open during the second half of class, and basically went home and straight to bed at 8pm that night.

Day 10 – August 24

UC516_Day_10_Grey_DayKind of a grey and overcast day today, really the first one since I’ve been here. Nothing particularly substantial to report for this day. I’m starting to feel comfortable in the rhythm of wake up, get to class, do class things, go home, relax and sleep, next day. I booked a car rental today for most of the remaining time I’ll be there, which feels like it should open up some new possibilities. Much as I’m enjoying class, I do find as I settle in a bit I’m starting to want for some time to do things other than just bouncing between the Rolf Institute and home.

Class definitely felt a bit lethargic today. My energy started there after sleeping about 11 hours but slowly kept perking up more and more through the day. Starting to get excited for my third session with my client and hoping to have two good sessions to set a solid trend away from the funky start.

Day 11 – August 25

Things really started coming together today. 🙂 My third session with my client went great and we are starting to build some momentum not just on the educational side for the class but in terms of our rapport and playing around with some challenging movement work during the sessions which I think will greatly benefit everyone’s experience. Starting to find a bit more flow both with demonstrating and with providing input and support during the student sessions. Going through our final sessions for the week it seemed like everyone’s energy was coming up in bits and pieces and there’s more freedom of exchange in information between clients and students and teachers.

Around lunchtime during the class day, I got a message from one of the local Bal dancers letting me know there was a small thing happening at Waterloo in Louisville that night. As I was still 24 hours from having a car, I managed to bum a ride from one of the Boulder dancers and got in a few hours of dance and camaraderie with some lovely folks I haven’t seen in about a year now but hopefully will be seeing (and dancing) more of in the next 5 weeks.

Day 12 – August 26

UC516_Day_12_DoggiesTook a house-sitting gig for the weekend looking after a friend’s dogs (and chickens, and butterball cat) while she and her husband are out of town. I’d set my car pick-up to be 10:30 this morning so I could get over and have an early day, but instead they told me when I got there that I couldn’t pick it up until 4. So a few hours of napping and running errands filled my day until I was able to pick up the car and drive out to Lafayette and meet up with the pups. Nothing particularly challenging or intriguing about today, just handling stuff, getting a car (definitely a relief), and then hanging out with these two for the rest of the evening.

Day 13 – August 27

UC516_Day_13_Nice_NephewGot down to Westminster today to see my sister and my niece and nephew. After being unsurprisingly woken up early by the dogs I got breakfast, took them for a walk around the lake, then headed over to my sister’s. We hung out for a bit, took the kids to the park, flew kites, etc. and this was my first time getting to meet the younger of the two. Spent some time minding the kids (mostly watching Daniel Tiger) while my sister ran a few errands then I headed back in time to make sure the critters got fed and the chickens got put to bed for the night.

Dinner ended up being a lovely solo time at the bar at The Post Brewing Co. A few nice craft beers with a buttermilk cheddar biscuit, hot chicken, creamed cabbage, and a whoopie pie about the size of my fist. Then home to relax with the dogs and get to bed early for some much-needed rest.

Day 14 – August 28

UC516_Day_14_Sleepy_Dogs

This was pretty much my view and activity level for the day. After the dogs woke me up early, I got everyone fed then went back to sleep for a while. Took the pups for a walk then they promptly fell asleep at my feet for most of the rest of the day while I watched some movies, did some writing, etc.

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Rolfing, Teaching

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Adventures in Assisting – UC 5.16 Week 1

This will be the start of the story of my first time assisting in a Unit 3 basic Rolfing® training. I just completed the first week of my 7 weeks here. The class actually runs for 8 but I did not come in until the second week because to do so would have given me only 2 weeks in between my trip to Scotland and the start of class. My goal for relating this training is to have one defining picture per day and a small-medium blurb on the day’s events. I’m hoping this will allow me to keep up with posting weekly both to stay in touch with friends and clients back home and also to not end up swamped three months down the road trying to relate a 7-week experience into a couple thousand words. So, here goes…

Day 0 – August 14

UC516_Day_0_Burger

Following a couple late nights of concert-going with friends, I boarded a plane from RDU at 9:30 AM and landed at DEN about 11:15 local time. Although I missed the AB bus by a hair, a friendly woman who was arriving for a flight offered me her day pass which seemed like a good little bit of luck to kick off my time here. Bussed it to Boulder, met my host, took a nap, then went out for a bit of burger therapy at Larkburger to help get landed and grounded before the training starts tomorrow.

Day 1 – August 15

UC516_Day_1_Class_SignGot up early on Day 1 of the training to meet Neal at Lucile’s down near Pearl Street Mall. Lucile’s holds a special little spot in my heart for doing grits pretty damn well so far from home. I didn’t actually find it until I was almost done with either my Unit 1 or 2 training, I can’t recall at this point.

Neal and I had a good discussion over a hearty breakfast then headed up to class. Day 1 was a lot of talking and a little bit of curious energy for me coming into a group that had already been working together for a week. I jokingly posted this photo on Facebook saying I had achieved opening band status and showed up a week late for my first rockstar move. Mentally I felt oddly at home in the classroom and started getting my footing adding in thoughts without stepping on Neal’s toes. Physically, my GI system was doing not-so-happy things, though I’m unsure whether it was something I ate or my body was more nervous than my brain was letting on.

Day 2 – August 16

UC516_Day_2_AltarOn Day 2, the class was complete. One student had been delayed returning from a wedding over the weekend and didn’t make it in until Tuesday. So we had postponed setting up the class altar until that morning. There were a lot of strong ideas and emotions fit onto this small space and Neal and I were both a bit surprised by how intense the setting up was. My contributions were my now requisite class offering of Escazu chocolate bars and the knit Eeyore that one of my classmates from Brazil had given me.

I also did my first short demo session on one of the students (neck work, mostly stuff I learned from Jan) and in the evening the students got to meet their clients for the first time with some time to chat, do intake, and make some plans.

Day 3 – August 17

UC516_Day_3_WaitingToday’s picture was taken out at a coffee shop as I waited for my client to show up for a meeting before class started. Our first session would be the next day but because she wasn’t available in the evening, I had offered to meet her for coffee in the morning to talk about the work ahead and any questions she had. I had thought about asking how she’d feel getting a photo together but honestly was so in flow talking to her that the thought didn’t even occur to me until after I’d headed to class.

Neal and the students all had their first session today and Neal and I both noted how it felt like it shifted the momentum of the class to be able to finally get to work after 2 very long feeling days of talking. And again I felt a little bit behind the group as I wouldn’t get to work with my client until tomorrow.

Day 4 – August 18

UC516_Day_4_Closing_DownHad my first client demo session today. I think so far I’d been feeling like there was a sort of beginner’s luck going with the class. Good instructor who I seem to get along with, a young but mature class all of whom seem really solid in their skills, and my demo client seemed like a great candidate for being a class model. However, that luck took a stumble on my first demo as I talked WAY more than necessary. After finishing my demo and receiving that feedback from basically everyone in class I was… a bit downtrodden, but mostly fine with it. All-in-all a recoverable mistake and it’s been a good misstep to chew on the rest of the week in terms of how I’d communicate this aspect differently to someone else doing a demo for the first time.

Student sessions in the afternoon went great and I’m getting a better sense of how to offer advice to students. It’s also clear that the ability to see a whole classroom like I can in dance is going to take a while to transfer over to the Rolfing classroom. Nonetheless I ended the first week’s class mostly happy, grateful to be there, and doubly grateful for the 3 day weekend.

Day 5 – August 19

UC516_Day_5_Jims_DoorFriday morning came earlier than I would have liked with a 10:30 (I know, boo-hoo, so early /sarcasm) appointment for a session with Jim Asher. One of my goals to make the most of this trip is to get some work from some of the master Rolfers in the Boulder area. I’d seen Jim do a demo working with a child at one of the annual meetings but otherwise had no exposure to his work. At this point I’m not going for aches and pains but for optimizing mechanics, continuing to open more freedom in my movement, and just to keep learning about the work experientially. I don’t know how to encapsulate the session well at this point other than to say it continues to amaze me how much power I find in the touch of practitioners who’ve been Rolfing longer than I’ve been alive. It both gives me something to aspire to and gives me something to be awfully patient with as I expect there’s just no substitute for time and practice to achieve those sorts of levels.

The rest of the day was filled with glorious napping. 🙂

Day 6 – August 20

UC516_Day_6_Twin_LakesDay 6 took me back to the Rolf Institute for lunch with Thomas Walker, my original Unit 2 instructor. Thomas was in town to teach a workshop and sticking around through next week for a faculty meeting. While I’m not in a huge rush to assist again, I did want to get on his radar about being available down the line and we talked some shop around the new course series he’s teaching which I had taken part in last summer.

I went for a walk around the Twin Lakes near the Institute and relieved some distinct memories of walking that area in my Unit 2 when I got overloaded a time or two and had to find a way to settle my energy. I had intended to take the bus home, but for whatever reason, switched up and kept hiking the 5-6 miles back into Boulder. A quick check of the movies playing diverted me to go see Kubo and the Two Strings, then grabbed some dinner and headed home with slightly blistered feet and slightly more reddened face (I made sure to put sunscreen in my bag after I got home, oops).

Day 7 – August 21

UC516_Day_7_Pack_For_AdventureNoting that I had failed to pack a few obvious staples like a water bottle, umbrella, or any shoes that weren’t sandals, it seemed like Sunday was going to be a good day to take stock and restock. I had come out with some intention of restocking my wardrobe from the vintage stores of Boulder and Denver and it occurred to me I might as well go a step further and get some gear like a new pair of hiking boots since the pair I’d had since Boy Scouts had bit the dust a few years back. So a few errands later, I had some new gear and a pair of hiking boots on order with REI since they didn’t have my size in stock.

Following this and some chill time, I met a colleague who was in town for Thomas’ workshop down at Pearl Street Mall for dinner and some tasty beverages. A few hours of chit-chat about my assisting, her class, and some nice time walking around the mall then she hopped a bus back to Gunbarrel and I took a leisurely walk home through twilight Boulder.

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Rolfing, Teaching

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First, Make It Not Suck

The title of this article is my Rule #1 that I give new dancers who are worried about being desirable to dance with. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that you have to be a great dancer to be fun to dance with and, in my experience, it’s simply not true. Some of my favorite and memorable dances are with total beginners who were just having so much fun that they couldn’t be bothered to worry about whether they were doing it right or not. I generally tell people that if you can make the dance not suck, then it’s already in C+/B- territory and anything beyond that is gravy. And making it not suck is typically as simple as the following three factors.

It Sucks If It Hurts
It Sucks If It’s Creepy/Threatening
It Sucks If There’s a Weird Power Differential

Generally speaking, if it doesn’t suck it’s pretty good. You can be off-time, you can only have 2 moves, etc. and you can still be plenty enjoyable to dance with. I tend to remember this best from a friend in tango who put it as something like “Sometimes it’s great to just walk”. To be clear, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have dances that suck once in a while, but if you keep these three things in mind, I think you’re already ahead of the game for being a delightful person to dance with.

It Sucks If It Hurts

no-painThis one seems simple and obvious, but it’s amazing sometimes how easy it is to forget. I see a lot of this as stemming from “I have to get the move right” style thinking with dancers, really at any level. Trying to forces moves or movements runs a high risk of doing something that doesn’t jive with yours or your partner’s body and worrying about making the move work or end a certain way lends itself to forcing it. Yes, it’s lovely to hit that 32 count sequence just the way you thought or simply finish a basic turn on time, but doing so at the expense of your body or your partner’s body kind of ruins the moment.

I work with this in beginner lessons by building moves off of natural movement and teaching the dance with people moving together throughout rather than dividing leads and follows, teaching them a specific movements separately, and then pushing them back together and expecting them to suddenly match each other. While it can be more complex learning this way, it focuses the learning on partnership instead of individuals and helps make lead/follow interaction the primary energy of the dance rather than footwork. If people are thinking about their feet first, they tend to lose sight of the fact that there’s another person attached to them. If you focus first on that human interaction, it’s much easier to avoid hurting each other or be aware of it and shift when it happens.

And to be clear, this can happen at any level and with both genders. I regularly hear complaints about painful leading from several male instructors in my area and I’ve chosen to stop dancing with one female instructor who routinely gripped my hand so hard that I would worry about having to work with it the next day. Pain or comfort are achievable at any level of dancing, choose comfort.

It Sucks If It’s Creepy/Threatening

no-creepingIn the context of dance I think this mostly translates to “don’t assume you have the right to anyone’s body, time, or social interaction”. It’s easy and rather enticing to say things like “the boundaries are just different in dance” but I believe this often gets taken as “the rules of engagement around consent are different too”. The act of dancing with someone is just as much a negotiation as any other social interaction. The more it’s a balanced interaction where “no” is treated as a completely legitimate answer, the less likely this is to be an issue.

Again, I think this boils down to making the interaction human first and dance second. It’s easy when you’re in a new social environment to start to compromise on boundaries, particularly if you’re worried about seeing the other person on a regular basis. This may be different in other scenes, but I think the influence of Southern culture in my area means you often see people avoid challenging the few creepy apples at a dance because they would rather put up with the behavior than deal with a potential conflict. I don’t think there’s some singular right answer to this, but as we as a society are starting to talk about boundaries and consent more, I hope to see these conversations start happening one-on-one in the dance world more and hopefully enough of those will lead to some really great shifts.

It Sucks If There’s a Weird Power Differential

power-differentialThis is probably the most pervasive but also the most subtle one and therefore easier to overlook; enough so that I spent most of a year saying the first two make it not suck aspects before I thought of this. As much as we love to talk about equality and togetherness in the dance scene, there can also be a lot of hierarchy at play, partly real partly in our own heads. When you set up a perceived power differential between lead and follow or experienced dancer and newbie it makes the dance more about roles and less about humanity. It also makes it much easier for things like dancesplaining to occur and for dancers who feel they are in the less powerful position to be less likely to hold their boundaries if one of the first two ways of sucking occurs and less likely to speak out for what gives them joy in the dance.

I had lunch a couple days ago with a former dance student and we got talking about the challenges of this when he was a beginner. Now, for context, this is someone who routinely speaks in from of large groups of people and performs original songs in public; I consider him to be incredibly brave, creative, and very willing to engage with the challenges associated with growing in any skill. He told me that he found there tended to be two types of dancers offering him feedback as a newbie, those who’d ask if they could make a suggestion and others who would launch unprompted into critiquing his dancing or telling him “you know what you should do…” Watching him talk about it, I could even see his body shrink in on itself as he talked about the second type and the memory of being criticized.

Don’t get me wrong, criticism and understanding what and how to do things better is an important part of growing as a dancer. However, there’s a time and a place for it and more and less effective ways to communicate these concepts. I see lots of “better” dancers telling newer dancers what they should do without realizing that they are presenting the information in a way that widens the gap between them rather than bridging it. Ineffectively worded or improperly timed feedback like this tends to create a subtext messaging of “It’s not OK for you to be new or learning; you should be better” and even without poor feedback this is the sort of message that I see a lot of people telling themselves.

It’s normal for there to be a difference in experience, you just don’t have to turn it into a difference in power or value. Feedback can be a tool to raise people up but it can also be a tool to bludgeon them into being less than. And again, this can happen at any level; there are several instructors in my scene who I routinely observe and receive complaints about dancesplaining through entire dances on the floor. When you drive this kind of wedge between yourself and your partner, it pretty much kills the team vibe of a dance partnership and turns it into two lonely people holding hands and doing moves at each other.

If It Doesn’t Suck, It’s Generally Pretty Good

There’s an old Woody Allen joke that pizza is like sex “Even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good”. While I like the idea of the joke, I think it’s a bit off the mark. I look at it through a bit more of a lens of pizza or dancing or sex don’t have to be the most amazing pizza/dance/sex I’ve ever had to be good, but if something sucks there’s almost an addition of insult to injury that makes it all the worse. Having recently had the worst Chicken and Dumplings of my life a couple weeks ago, I can say that, like most comfort foods, when it’s decent dance is kind of inherently good, but if you make it terrible it will irritate people enough that they’ll shut down from you, talk about it to their friends, or post about it on the internet.

At it’s core, partner dancing is a shared experience. So long as you aren’t doing any of the above and putting your partner or other dancers around you on guard then it becomes easy to step beyond our standard social boundaries and create a shared experience. If the dance turns to suck in one form or another, then those boundaries tend to harden into barriers and both partners (and the floor around them) lose out on that social interaction.

Making it not suck also frees up a lot of energy and attention for learning. When something sucks, and even when it’s just a sucky feeling of your own creation through self-judgement, there is so much time and energy spent by the mind in either defending or reinforcing that sucky feeling that much less learning/growth occurs. When it doesn’t suck, there’s a lot more room for empowerment, for focus on the task being learned, and while not always completely safe there is a lot more safety available to take the risks and push into challenging territory that growth and learning requires.
dont-hurt-them

And the TL;DR version of all this, summed up much more succinctly by the Dalai Lama: “Our prime purpose in life is to help others. And if you can’t help them at least don’t hurt them.”

 

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Dance, Self-Care, Teaching

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Stepping Away from The Lindy Lab

About a month and a half ago I ended my tenure running a dance studio and one week ago I finished cleaning out the office at The Lindy Lab. It was a dream I’d had for about 10 years and 3 years ago got the chance to try making it a reality. The greater reality turned out to be, not so much a nightmare, but more one of those weird confusing WTF dreams that just leave you questioning your own brain and feeling like you may not get back to sleep that night. So I’m moving on to other pursuits and wanted to put together a post to share my experience so I can close out with friends and community on why I’m doing this and hopefully express something that may be useful to future folks walking a similar path.

TL;DR version: I took a moonshot on setting up a studio to try and spark transformation in my scene and found I couldn’t create or gather enough support or buy-in to make the idea sustainable for myself. After watching my own energy flag for close to two years, I chose to get out before I soured on dance and did my best to leave the scene with a great space to create in.

What This Post Is and Isn’t

This will be, to the best of my ability, an honest telling of why I chose to move on. It was, in many ways, a difficult tenure and a difficult decision to leave and I don’t want to candy coat that. I also want to be clear that in trying to speak truthfully about my experiences, I am, for the most part, at peace with the past on this or actively working to making peace with it. There were a lot of frustrations and results that I will likely never fully understand the “why’s” but I have plenty of responsibility in that as well. I’m grateful that I got to take the chance I did and humbled by what I learned from it and will try to cleanly communicate both the positives and negatives that lead to this course of action.

Backstory

I’ve been dancing in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill swing scene since 2002. I grew up in this scene, took lessons from just about anybody and everybody who was teaching and grew immensely as a person through dance. I found a love of body mechanics in dancing that lead me into my career in Rolfing which, in turn, deeply affected my teaching. I had a longer term vision of buying an old church to forge a mixed-use space to house both my Rolfing practice and some sort of dance/movement space. The Lindy Lab at Triangle Dance Studios was a way to test the concept in a rental situation before I considered buying a space. It was also intended to be a space for growth, creativity, and exploration in dancing which I felt had never been strongly offered in this area since I started dancing.

Creating a Space to Support the Dance

I’ve written before about the difficulties I had with the studio build. But suffice to say in the course of about 2 months I spent probably $10k and 400 or so hours of my own time plus a lot of friend’s man hours building a space to raise the level of ambiance for our scene. It has significantly raised the bar for the studio that owns the space and nudged the owner to take some steps to improve all the other studio spaces there. I hear from the studio owner that people rave about the studio but really nobody seeks me out to say thank you and there seems to be a general lack of care from other renters and dance scene for trying to care for the space. People tend to break things or move things out of sight and make no effort to replace or even note that they have broken things. It has helped me understand why the studio owners tend not to go all out on their spaces and the past year I’ve had the refrain of “this is why we can’t have nice things” in my head more times than I expected to. While I’m happy for the improved spaces for the scene and proud of what we built, it ultimately seemed like people responded to a different space a bit, but not enough to affect their behavior towards taking greater care of the space.

Teaching From a Radically Different Head Space

To put it succinctly, I have taken a fundamentally different approach to teaching dance than any other instructor I have seen on the swing dance world stage. I took my training as a Rolfer and developed a way to help people find dance in their existing movements, using what they already know and treating dance as inherent rather than something that must be taught. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of faults as a teacher and I believe that pretty much every teacher out there does something better than I do. But I built my teaching to provide a base that would allow people to travel and learn readily, giving them a “first principles” base of knowledge to be able to fill in the gaps from things other teacher don’t say (or don’t know to say). I tended to receive comments from students who traveled that they rarely encountered an international teacher saying something about mechanics that they hadn’t heard from me already and I’d taught it more succinctly and accessibly.

Lack of Return Students

The response to classes was a somewhat baffling combination of intense appreciation coupled with lack of attendance. While I consistently received praise for the style of teaching and was told it made the dance far more accessible or made people comfortable in a way that nobody else had, such statements also frequently came from people showing up once and never returning. I also encountered a number of people choosing to take from an instructor who was closer even if they felt they got less from that instructor. I’ve been over this many times with friends and fellow dancers and we’ve never really been able to determine if people couldn’t tell the difference in the quality of material or simply had other priorities or goals. But frankly it was disheartening to find myself teaching someone how to do another instructor’s material without it hurting them or their partner (when prior instructors had just shrugged at or been completely oblivious to the pain) and then have those students just head back to previous instructors. I had some really great engaged students 2-3 years ago, but somewhere in the past year and a half that seemed to disappear and a sustained lack of excited students eventually wore down my excitement for teaching.

Did Not Play Well With Other Instructors

I had high hopes going in but found it pretty much untenable to work with any other local instructors. Where I had expected collaboration I more often ran into passive-aggressive silence and where I tried to show respect to former teachers I mostly saw them reference me as someone they taught, oblivious to the fact that I spent the middle 5 years of my dancing career unlearning habits from them in order to be the dancer I am today. Suffice to say I’d seen some of the drama and instructor bullshit coming up in this scene and had hoped to change the conversation. In the course of several years, I feel like was wholely unsuccessful and ended up being just as bad. Some of the standard instructor power trips in the dance world are hot button issues for me and I hoped to set an example or talk to other instructors in a way that would help, but when I didn’t get far I got frustrated and started getting on my own little petty tyrant power trip.

I’m quite sure I was as much of a pain in the ass to other instructors as they were to me and I just generally found that it was more effort than benefit to work with anyone who I hadn’t trained. I would have liked to have things turn out differently but I’ll echo a sentiment I heard time after time the last few years that the instructors (and I include myself in this) are some of the most off-putting people in the scene and one of the primary reasons that more people don’t step up to help. I was fortunate enough to have some friends willing to kick my ass about it when I was making things ugly and I already find my interactions with people being lighter as I’ve basically removed myself from any need to be in contact with that energy.

Timing Suuuuucked

In general, I think there was also a strong element of timing to all of this. Attendance rose and fell but seemed to be in an overall decline in general for the last 4 years or so, even before I started Lindy Lab. Options like Groupon and Living Social seem to have run their course in this area so options that used to provide quick boosts to prior studios didn’t amount to much. In general, it seems like this area is in a bit of a dip in terms of advanced dancers getting more into jobs or marriages or whatever as well so while that core hasn’t disappeared it has become less consistent week to week than it was a few years ago. It does seem to be starting to uptick as I’m handing things off, so I’m heartened, but generally I felt like I spent so much keeping things going through a trough in the cycle that I stopped having much interest in sticking around to push things back uphill once the cycle picked up again. And, on a personal level, add in things like a multi-year house renovation and a 5 year career overhaul and by this past spring I felt pretty certain I wasn’t going to have anything left to give if I kept going.

Deciding to Quit

All these factors came together earlier this year to culminate in a decision to quit. I say I’m quitting because I’m trying to take ownership of that word. It’s a word I haven’t been comfortable with as long as I can remember and I think it’s about time to redefine it for myself. I’ve spent many years in my life holding onto situations, activities, and relationships where I was not getting back the energy I put in and I’ve slowly come to understand that that just doesn’t serve me long term. So, having given it a good 3 years, trying as many angles and tactics as I could without completely tanking myself, I’ve decided to quit with as much integrity as I can and move on to other pursuits.

Space to Grow

Ultimately I am quitting both to create space for myself and to create space for The Lindy Lab. If I had continued to head the studio, I believe it would have taken me an awfully long time to rebound even if it had been possible. Stepping back and turning it over to a committee of committed and excited dancers creates much more space for LL to grow again. It also frees me up to focus on aspects that I did enjoy, namely teaching and special events. And frankly, I find I’m greatly happier having my evenings free to spend with friends, fix up my house, cook, read, etc. The person I’ve been trying to be for several years now has arrived much more readily by creating space than it did by pursuing achievement. The Lindy Lab was an amazing vehicle for me to grow and learn and, for a time, to spread some Lindy Love to some wonderful people and I look forward to seeing it grow and change under new leadership.

The Hopeful Aftermath

I spent a lot of my past year wondering if I was just in the way. And while I don’t think it will just completely rebound, it does seem that attendance has already started to pick up as we’ve worked through handing things off over the past two months. There is definitely space for someone excited and motivated to jump in and start teaching Lindy in the area and the workload is already being spread better than I ever managed to do it.

I just had a former dance student who travels and lectures on education tell me he presents some of my teaching tactics all over the country to great success. A Rolfer in Portland who I was talking to about teaching asked me excitedly if I would be willing to share a workshop on how I teach dance. So it seems that whether I decide to teach again or not, some of the key tenants that I wanted to get out to the world are getting out.

And perhaps simply put, I think I’ve finally managed to swap out “Try to change the world and hopefully that will make me happy” for “Let myself by happy and see how the world shifts”.

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Dance, Personal, Self-Care, Teaching

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First On The Floor

The last two nights, I taught a pre-concert beginner lesson for Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra which was playing for a 2-night series of Duke Performances shows.  The band was fabulous, both nights were a packed house, and both nights the new dancers were enthusiastic, creative, and happily socializing with each other.  But a curious effect emerged the second night.  Where the floor had almost always had at least 2 or 3 couples on it Friday night, it ended up being completely empty of dancers for most of the Saturday show.

It got me thinking about the TED talk below from Derek Sivers.  One of the things I have been working on with beginners is how to present getting on the floor in a way that makes it easier to make that leap.  Particularly in a hall full of seated non-dancers, people can feel awfully intimidated stepping into the space between and audience and a band.  The Friday night dance had enough experienced dancers on hand that usually at least one or two couples were willing to brave the floor and others would follow.

On Saturday night, there were few experienced dancers on hand.  With the lack of experienced dancers to get the floor started, it never seemed to really build momentum.  It got me wondering if there are better ways to help new dancers feel comfortable enough to be the first on the floor.  I haven’t had a chance to try all of these ideas out yet, but I have a rare free morning, so I figured I’d write them down and see what people think.  I’d also be interested to hear other’s experience with getting dancers to brave the floor at not-exclusively-dance events.

Use the Buddy System

One thought that I haven’t tried yet is to suggest that several couples take to the floor at once.  It seems to me that being that it isn’t really until you’ve got 3 couples out on the floor that it gets easier for more people to go out.  So what if rather than trying to go out as a solo dancer or couple, one gathered a few people off the floor to go out at once.  Imagine it as the difference between someone trying to start a solo Charleston jam on their own versus putting on a T’aint What You Do and having multiple dancers descend on the floor at once for a Shim Sham.

Have the Band Invite People to Dance

Jazz musicians as a whole don’t always have the best reputation for liking dancers.  I’ve been a shows before where it wasn’t clear if a band was open to dancers or not and it definitely has opened the door when someone in the band says something like “the dance floor is open”.  My experience has been that lots of people are just waiting to be given permission to be creative, try something new, or just get on the floor.  I try to make this explicit in the beginner lessons, but I think permission from the band might carry more weight once the show starts.

Get Them Chair Dancing First

Perhaps another thing that keeps people off the floor is the way that they sit and watch a band.  I find most jazz concerts people sit very quietly as if listening to a lecture.  For me, if I’m feeling intimidated about getting out there or I’m not feeling terribly creative, sometimes it helps to just take a song or two first to bounce in my chair, let myself connect with the music, and let it draw me in more as I start to move in bits and pieces.  I haven’t tried this with a beginner class yet, but maybe it could help to have them sit and chair dance for a little bit before getting up to find a partner.

Ultimately, Let Whatever Happens Happen

In the end, I’m not going to try and force dancers on the floor.  I do think it is interesting though how people can be having a great time in a lesson and then never make it out for a dance that night.  I tend to think it is less an issue of desire and more one of confidence and the more I can lower that barrier for my students, the more they can enjoy the night and add something special that only that combination of music and dance can provide.  I’d love to hear about it if anyone tries any of the ideas above and I’d be grateful to hear anyone else’s thoughts on things they’ve tried to help new dancers get on the floor more easily at concerts like this.

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Dance, Teaching

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The Basic as Savasana

Last night I taught a class for the first year anniversary of Cirque de Vol studios staff holiday party.  It was a group of all teachers in various circus arts (hooping, aerial silks, trapeze, etc.) so they were taking to the lessons and within a few minutes, happily spinning, twirling, and flinging each other around the floor.  Things got rowdy and raucous and I wanted a way to introduce a texture of calmer energy into the mix.  So, given that the crowd would all be familiar with various movement forms, including yoga, I decided to tell them to think of the basic like Savasana.

Thinking about it this morning, I felt like it was a pretty good analogy.  For the beginner, the basic is a place to rest and reconnect before going out and doing the next crazy, new set of moves.  And as a growing dancer, the swingout, like savasana, becomes a place to deepen practice and feel out both the holes in your dancing and the beauties in it.  And as the swingout becomes ingrained, it is something you can always come back to and a place where there is almost an infinite space in which one grow and evolve for as long as you continue to dance/practice.

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Dance, Imagery, Teaching

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