Ever have one of those hours, days, weeks when the world seems to be coming to an end...well, at least your world...but then it doesn't?
I had one of those last week. I was working on an audition video for Heidi Latsky. I just needed a phrase or two of choreography that would allow her to see how my body moves. I cleared out the living room, leaving a makeshift studio (with all of my furniture piled at one end). I moved around the space. I turned on some music. I just needed to condense my dance ability into a fifteen second video--no big deal.
Except that for a perfectionist/artist, that is a huge deal--damn near impossible deal, actually. I was an hour in, hot and bloated (for other reasons), and I only had about eight counts of movement. Then I made the mistake of recording myself and watching it. Within ten seconds of recording, I was piled under an avalanche of horrible high school dance audition memories--not to mention thirty-four years of frustration with my own body, the way it moves and the way it doesn't move. I might as well have been onstage before the judges of So You Think You Can Dance with all of them grimacing and shaking their heads.
I felt untrained, unprepared, and like a complete idiot for even thinking I could do something like this.
I sat down on the couch, now wedged in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. I felt as discombobulated as the room looked. This was only the tip of the iceberg currently threatening the buoyancy of my self confidence. I was already feeling like I'd made a huge mistake becoming a therapeutic riding instructor when I'm really interested in physical therapy--the night before I had to teach, I'd decided I hated my job and I've only been at it for a couple months. And somewhere within the same week, I decided I'd adopted the wrong dog, that she was too nervous and not friendly and needed more space. The end was in sight.
Nothing made sense. So I went to bed. I really did. I took a three or four hour nap. I woke up hungry, called Dragon Boy's Mama and Little Gen, and went out for sushi, leaving the living room in disarray.
Back in the 'studio' the next day, I reminded myself that I was making an audition tape for a woman who wants to work with different bodies. I also told myself that I needed to do it, at my current ability level, and get it over with, or I would assuredly be committed when I stumbled out of my apartment a week later, malnourished, naked, and mumbling something about Baryshnikov.
Over the next day or so, I finished some semblance of choreography that I could stand, sent off the recording, and put the couch back in place. Life had to go on...
And it did. A week went by and I heard nothing. I started to console myself, saying I'd done the best I could (though myself never quite believes that).
Then, this morning I woke up to an email from Heidi. The subject read: "working with you." There was one sentence inside: "I would love to so please call me when you can so we can organize this..."
OneArmGirl
