Are you ready to start a creative practice? (it’s not as scary as it sounds)

by Lydia Education

Does your mind feel jumbled?  Are you having a hard time identifying your emotions? Do you feel on edge or like your body has unspent energy?  Do you desire internal organization? Do you have something to say but not sure what it is?  I know exactly how that feels– not great.  We created a workshop that can help you find your realignment and leave you with tools for your own creative and physical practice.  Through dance, writing, and movement techniques, we want to help you find your voice, your stillness, and your power.

When I started the MultiGen Framers class, it was fairly new territory for me.  The very essence of this class is that it welcomes beginners to advanced dancers of any age.  So that’s pretty open!  Teaching the class this Spring was an incredibly exciting balancing act of allowing adult beginner bodies to venture into new territory, keep the energy and flow high enough for children to stay engaged in modern dance technique that is true to the form, minus the extraneous physicality to keep the students working safely.  I am compelled to engage the brain as much as the body, and with different developmental capacities, there was a new challenge to find out how to do this.  Teaching MultiGen Framers was like a dream– challenging in all of the best ways, and rewarding in all of the best ways.

image_34cc80edac69df4de48658ebf057535cSomething that did come up as I was teaching, was that due to the need to keep things moving along at a certain pace to keep the children connected to the work, I found myself wanting to spend more time than I could with the adults to help them journey into their bodies in a new way.  So… the Sunday Adult Workshops were born.  As someone who has always had an alternative somatic practice alongside my dance training, and desire to grow my spiritual self and investigate mindfulness, I wanted to offer this as a complete artistic experience for adults.  I believe in cultivating a creative practice alongside your dance classes because dance is more than exercise.  It is a means of connection between body, mind, and soul.  We must develop all three to be the artists that we are.

So these four workshops (take one, two, three or all four) involve a gentle, deep, and slow pace to experience two different somatic practices, modern dance technique, creative writing that will connect mind with body, and a beginning choreography class.    I hope you’ll join us!  This is also a great entry point into joining the MultiGen Framers in the Fall.

Register Here.  Sunday Adult Workshops are funded in part by the Houston Arts Alliance, capacity building initiatives.

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Why I Practice Yoga

by Lydia Uncategorized

or, how the creative process is much like my yoga practice

Making art is hard. Every time I finish a piece it’s like putting myself under florescent lights without my makeup. For an hour.  In public.  And (unfortunately?) the most compelling work comes from the most vulnerable and complicated places.  So if I’m making something great, it’s even harder to share it.  It’s like that PediEegg scraping off the dead layers to reveal softer, rawer skin, and then letting people see the shavings just sitting there next to my foot.  But hopefully prettier.

I used to hate yoga.  HATE it.  I’m pretty sure that is mostly because it is so blasted hard.  I was discouraged by how much of a mind game it was when I was there to do something physical.  It turned out that I needed to quiet my inner monologue (dialogue?).  I have a very strong inner critic.

Making dance is 98% process and 2% performance. It’s just so fleeting.  I often hear my colleagues talk about “post performance blues.”  And it’s so very real.  We are shoved into the studio by a desperate need to create something, we put forth unedited ideas while our inner critic steps in making us feel inadequate and ill-equipped.   We hone, question, ask people to tear holes into the work, and move through a cycle that often looks like this:

relief that thing in us is now out of us in some sort of physical form,

burst of energy from the thrill of doing what we love the most,

speculation of the work,

vulnerability in asking for help with the work,

confidence,

doubt,

confidence, doubt, pleasure, doubt,

rejection of the work,

breakthrough,

START OVER (any number of times),

appreciation for the work,

utter fear,

performance/opening/premier etc.

We spend most of our lives in this process, in its exquisite pain, and then we birth it.  That lasts sometimes only a few hours.  And then it’s over.  Over.  Over.

If I’m being honest, and if I were to let my inner critic run wild, my yoga practice mirrors my creative practice.  My instructors consistently remind me that I can let it go.  It is my choice.  Class will always end in an hour, I will always get to return to shavasana, roll to my side in fetal position and reawaken to the day.  I always get to celebrate the journey I took on my yoga mat.  The difference is, I don’t have to wait months or years for a cycle of renewal and expression to complete itself.

Artists, I know how hard it is.  It can be so dark.  Find something in your life that has temporal definition. Something utterly hard that can come to an end after a short time.  We need victories more frequent than the completion of a piece of art.

Keep going.

L