Hopeful self, unemployed
We are forever hopeful. Hoping that we’ll make it. Hopeful of revolutions, the 1998 Human Rights Act and a two week old baby being pulled from earthquake carnage.
A very, very kind friend said that she was impressed with the proactiveness of The Shrinking Violets Blog. I snorted, thinking that maybe the project is actually a desperate attempt at making me employed. So ungenerous with my dancing self but it’s a little true. At the moment I have no job and so I am making one. Thank goodness for that.
What can be so hard is that even if you have projects lined up, the people who ask what you are working on, don’t seem to care about work in February 2012. They want to know what you are doing tomorrow. Even if you say, ‘Oh I’m working on my own projects/filling in applications forms/taking class/or whatever’, it doesn’t feel as if you’re going to make it. In the past week. In their eyes is an ‘Oh well, whatever keeps her entertained for now’.
I don’t mean to whine and I know that we have heard this a lot before – the ‘get a proper job’ stuff that gnaws away at the activities young professional dancers undertake. Mind you, it isn’t just taxi drivers, next-door neighbours and well meaning uncles who make parts of us feel like time wasters and turn us into hopeless wrecks. Dancers are just as bad with one another. The number of times I have asked how someone is and they have proceeded to reply with their CV of the past 6 months, is chilling. Not to mention the amount of time I have felt pressured to do the same. At the moment my blurb is a hand-wringing, ‘Oh I was in a piece in Germany over the summer [no it wasn’t in Berlin so losing points there] and I’m currently doing my MA [no it’s not in Philosophy, Performance and Culture or Cancer Therapeutics but in the broad title of Contemporary Dance so yet again, more points lost].
All I actually want to know is whether they have settled into their new home all right.
All I want to be asked is “How’s your sister’ or any other question that also asks how the you in, ‘How are you?’ is, not how the ‘work’ in, ‘How are you?’ is.
BUT at the same time, in this freefall of ‘self-unemployed’ (Thank you Janine Harrington and Lizzie Sells for introducing me to the term), I know that my hand wringing is also a lot of projection. I need to stop making excuses. There is a firm need to establish a practice and for that practice to be everyday. At the moment, I find that kind of Twyla Tharp/ Yvonne Rainer diligence impossible and I don’t know if that is me being lazy or scared. How can you want something so much but go through periods when you have no idea how to make it happen? Not have a single idea about the form that the desire takes and even if you’ll ever have that sense of arrival…
Has anyone ever had a sense of arrival?
Errr….
In my experience, moments solidify and then get uprooted and overturned. It’s as if the world is smirking and saying, ‘Oh you thought you knew…well, you don’t!’.
Then you resign yourself to pick up your pieces: be they pieces of paper which is tough but manageable, injured bodies which are debilitating or broken hearts which are…um…we all know how long it can take to even findall the pieces!
A short pause for a story:
A kid has realised in terror that he is sitting on the wrong named train; ‘This is First Great Western!’ he yells. ‘Arriva Trains Wales!! I want Arriva Train Wales. Mummy picked the wrong train!’
His mum reassures him that now he has been on lots of different type of trains but his terrified reply is, ‘How long is this going to take? HOW LONG IS THIS GOING TO TAKE?!’
Well, I haven’t got a clue.
Hopefully our dance careers will take long enough to establish for us to appreciate the journey and have made time for great friends. Of course once established, we also hope to be shaken up again.
On a personal note, I hope that my selfish need to ‘arrive’ doesn’t take such a long time coming. This would mean that even though aged 80 I hope to be rocking some crazy-ass Storm from X-Men hair, I would have also lost my teeth and all memory of events.
Look at all that hope.
