Good evening, reader, dearest! I do apologize, yet again, for the recent lack of content on the blog. Life has been pretty chaotic lately - I've started voice lessons again, am learning piano (it's harder than I thought), and have been assigned literal mountains of homework for my AP class. Needless to say, there's been a lot to accomplish. It's all been a wonderful blur of fun, but it's left little time for me to sit down at my white Chromebook, a mug of tea in hand, to write. And you know how much I love to sit down at my white Chromebook, a mug of tea in hand, to write. Today, my school district had a snow day, providing me with a perfect opportunity to put pen to paper (or I suppose, more fittingly, my fingers to the keyboard). I'm immensely grateful for days like these. Sometimes, it's necessary to abandon checklists and simply have 12 hours to ourselves. We always have so much to do. I'll admit, I'm a huge fan of ignoring these things from time to time. It's good for the soul. I have a lurking suspicion that my AP teacher doesn't agree.
So, on this fine, wintry morning, I slept in. A workout came next, followed by a shower, and a movie or two. I drank a lot of tea, did a whole lot of nothing, practiced piano, and then decided I'd better get on this blog post. The computer was turned on. Blogger.com was typed into my browser. I clicked on the button to create a new post. And then I sat there for a solid forty-five minutes thinking about what I wanted to say. It can be rather difficult to fathom ideas for content, especially during the months of January, February, and March, which I find to be (on the whole) dreadfully dull. It feels like the joys and adventures of life are put on hold during the remainder of the winter season -- perhaps we are waiting out the cold, grey weather? Or maybe it's just that, despite the workload, we haven't really learned anything exciting lately? Or, I thought to myself, I was simply dramatizing some writer's block. Yes. That'd be it. I turned off the computer. I did some yoga, I had my 11th cup of tea, and I thought. Thinking, thinking, thinking, and then some more thinking. And some thinking on top of that.
Then, it came to me - I should write about the creative writing-dance collaboration at my school! It was the most obvious thing in the world to write about, and yet, it took me ages to come up with. This is, of course, the essence of writer's block. You want to write, and the words are hovering on the tip of your tongue, but you can't seem to spit them out. It's not a fun experience. At all.
Allow me to backtrack slightly for those of you new to The Avocado and Me. As a creative writing major, I currently attend an arts high school, where we do a whole lot of... well... art. Shocking, I know. The individual majors typically stay true to their distinctive medium. The writers write, the visual artists do some visual arts stuff, the orchestra majors play in an orchestra (or so I'd assume). This is to be expected. We're there, at that school, to pursue our majors. That's why we auditioned. That's why we stay. But simultaneously, it is important to remember that art is art. It can be partitioned into different categories -- the kind involving piant brushes, the kind with cellos, the kind with set design or film -- yet it is still art. Still an expression of the human experience, still creativity put into one of the five senses, still (arguably) magical. Art is art. Artists are artists. And sometimes, it can be extraordinarily fun to defy the labels we've put on our arts and abilities. Case in point - occasionally, the creative writers become dancers, too. And the dancers? Well, they write.
This was the logic behind the March creative writing-dance collaboration I was so lucky to be a part of. Personally, I do not identify as a dancer. Can I tap dance? Absolutely. But can I do anything related to ballet or hip hop? Um... no. Not at the moment. Because of this, I was a bit daunted when our creative writing teacher announced the collab. Creative writers and dancers seemed like two extremely divergent groups of people, and a project that would involve both of them sounded improbable, if not fanciful. Of course, there were exceptions. One fabulous writer in my class named Dakota is a stellar dancer, as are a few others, but... well, you know. It sounded odd. I wasn't sure it was going to work. In fact, I was almost convinced it wouldn't.
How very wrong I was.
Day One of the Collaboration, which had morphed into a proper noun in my head (it was
that important), came all too soon. My fellow writers and I walked timidly (with the exception of Dakota and a few other brave souls) into the dance studio, and I felt immediately out of place. All of those mirrors. All of those insanely flexible people. All of the lingering confusion -- how on Earth was this project going to work? What were we meant to do? Was I expected to wear a leotard? We began with a warm-up, and then some team-building exercises. While I felt this part of the project lingered on for a bit too long, it was actually
fun, not mortifying.
The dancers, some of which I'd never seen let alone talked to, were genuinely lovely people. We went through movement and exercise with them. They wrote a bit with us. Things were still slightly awkward, but they were undoubtedly getting better; there was laughter. Laughter is, in my experience, always a good sign. At the conclusion of the second or third day, we finally began to understand what we were expected to do -- we would be put in a group of writers and dancers, and decide on a topic or theme that we all resonated with. Something deep, something relevant to each member of the collaboration, something... art.
Art means connection. Art means human experience. Art is what we would convey in a culminating performance, through the convergence of pen and pas de bourrée. We had barely met these people, barely gotten to know our writers and dancers, but we immediately began to open up to each other. Vulnerability and honesty were key to this project. We were spilling insecurities, fears, and stories onto giant poster boards. We opened our hearts and minds to each other. It had begun. And it was rather beautiful.
I was put in a group with a writer I had never really developed a friendship or relationship with (hi, Angel!). This meant that I didn't know exactly what to expect of her writing, memorization abilities, or performance style -- I was nervous. But, yet again, my hesitancy and worries were proven unnecessary. Angel was positively brilliant, and I couldn't have asked for a better partner. We composed something we were satisfied with, and beyond that, we did it together. Our dancers, Gwen, Diego, Maddie, and Kasey, extracted emotion from our piece and choreographed movement to convey our ideas. They were nothing short of stunning. We ordered costumes, rehearsed obsessively, bought make-up, and put on a show we were proud of. 'Our Voices, Our Stories,' it was called. Ten or so pieces, all merged together, united meets unique. Clarise and Ace wrote about immigration and what it means to be an American -- it was show-stopping. There were pieces centered around relationships, overcoming obstacles, living life to its fullest. Hannah skipped her lunch break for weeks on end to ensure that her piece would be a full integration of dance and spoken word. In the end, it was impossible to decipher the writers from the dancers. Mundo danced on crunches, and Kaylen pushed through a bad cold to read their writing. My group wrote self-deprecating words on our arms (think
not enough or
insignificant) in eyeliner, smearing them off during our presentation, providing a visual representation of learning to love oneself. We had props, we cut music, we figured out lighting. We
did it. Something I was insanely stressed out about morphed into something gorgeous. Heck, there were even tears after our second (and final) performance. Tears because it was over. Tears because it meant something.
This show was about opening up to each other. It was about trust, about being able to rely on others to do their part and create something. We shed our titles of writer and dancer, joining hands as artists. It's scary, at least for me, to lose a label. Labels, categories, groups -- these are how we identify ourselves, how we discover where we fit in. But when you do decide to let go of them, even for something as seemingly simple as a high school production? That's a freeing thing. 'Our Voices, Our Stories' left me with new friendships, a greater bond with my peers, and a certain sense of relief. Relief because we'd poured everything we had into this project. Relief because we'd said what needed to be said, and relief because opening up to other human beings is terrifying, but so rewarding. The show also left me with eyeliner words on my arms. Six showers and tons of rubbing alcohol later, LOSER is still very clearly written on my right forearm. Oh well. It'll come off eventually.
Thank you for tuning in today, everyone. Remember, art is art, artists are artists, love is love, and humans? Well, they're humans.
"Allow yourself to be a flawed and simultaneously worthy being. The ultimate oxymoron." - Angel, Diego, Maddie, Kasey, Maya, and Gwen
With gratitude,
Maya
Photo by Krys Alex on Unsplash,
Photo by WestBoundary Photography chris gill on Unsplash,
Photo by David Pennington on Unsplash, Photo by Maya,
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash,
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash,
Photo by Matteo Paganelli on Unsplash,
Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash
The dancers, some of which I'd never seen let alone talked to, were genuinely lovely people. We went through movement and exercise with them. They wrote a bit with us. Things were still slightly awkward, but they were undoubtedly getting better; there was laughter. Laughter is, in my experience, always a good sign. At the conclusion of the second or third day, we finally began to understand what we were expected to do -- we would be put in a group of writers and dancers, and decide on a topic or theme that we all resonated with. Something deep, something relevant to each member of the collaboration, something... art.
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