day in the life (written by Lucy Rupert)
day in the life
The best days begin the morning after a busy day when the body is too exhausted to be self-aware and the exhaustion feels hard-earned in a very satisfying way.
Most days begin with a mental journey, like putting your body through the x-ray machine at the airport. Parts of you go in the bin that travels on the conveyer belt through the machine, the rest of you walks hesitantly through the stand-alone arch. You wait to hear the beeping and then take stock: what caused the alarm? It might seem like it’s your foot but your pelvis is actually cause the source of the alarm. The root of the pain.
Feet unfurl and uncurl by the time you get to the bottom of the stairs. You make coffee and feed the feral cats and then check the agenda. What is happening today? Are you in charge of directing yourself all day, organizing your training, yourself, your plans? Or are you reporting to someone else? (It’s so much better, you think, reporting to someone else, when they tell you how to warm up, what images and ideas to explore today, what parts of the body to move and when.)
You drink your coffee while you alternate between reading a book on the philosophy of science and playing a round of Fishdom on your iPad until the family gets up.
Once you are all up and ready and gone out the door you walk. It is the only sure-fire treatment for your anxiety. You walk about 6-7k then come home to take ballet class in the kitchen or Gaga technique class in the basement. On days when you have nowhere to go it is both ballet and Gaga. You do your weight-training and Pilates and answer/write emails. You spend a lot of time distracting yourself from worrying about the empty stretches of time in your agenda. You revel in emails requesting or confirming specific times and dates.
You wonder why you haven’t “gotten further” in your career. What does that even mean? You remind yourself that you are almost 49, you’ve been doing this since you were 21. Something must be working.
You scroll through grants and applications and proposals open for your submission and jot notes and dreams down in a spiral notebook.
You worry about your kid, you worry about your husband. You worry about bills, and debt and balanced budgets.
You leave for rehearsal (if it’s a rehearsal day). You read some more science/philosophy or listen to music that makes you feel tall as you ride the subway.
For those 4 hours of concentrated rehearsal, you don’t think about tall/thin, money/family, old/young.
You are immersed in a concentrated -- but not chattery — embodied world, you solves puzzles, find connections, images, ideas, science, feeling, sensation, You develop strategies – core strength, release, tension, blind faith – to create a somewhat predictable amount of success in executing the movement, in vivifying the ideas and life you are trying to dance.
You listen to music that makes you feel badass on the way home. You feel kind of badass on the way home because you are almost 49 and still kicking it pretty hard in this dance thing,
Then you tell yourself to pay attention to what you are doing. When you get ahead of yourself, that is always when you fall and get hurt. You don’t run for the train or the traffic light. It’s not superstition, just common sense. Another train will come, the light will change from red to green again.
You have a snack before dinner and a glass of wine after dinner because you feel you deserved it. On non-rehearsal days you don’t think you deserve either treat which makes you want the wine and snacks even more. Then you chastise yourself for slipping into bad thinking and body habits that you had at the age of 21 or 22. How many years before you recover, can you recover?
It always feels like there’s a million things to do after dinner, but you are mostly too tired to do any of it. You long for performance days when this time of night is the ramp up, the blustery fever and tremor and prep for the stage, the gutting terror post-show, lying on the floor of the dressing room, hyperventilating.
This is a new kind of anxiety that has emerged since you have had a kid: a paralyzing fear of people, of interacting with people after a performance. After pregnancy you have also developed flying anxiety. Hormones? Sense of mortality. Or.....(the abyss)?
As you slide towards bedtime you tell your kid you love him and hug him way more times than he wants to deal with. (You tell your husband only once because you have known him much longer and you know once is all he can handle). You drift off to sleep with a book on your lap ...or rather you wake up because the book you were reading fell out of your hand and onto the floor when you dropped off 3 seconds ago. You turn out the light and sleep.
You wake up at 3, convinced that you don’t know how to do this anymore, thinking you should have gone into academia or science or.... But you also can’t imagine this body living a life that isn’t investigating and interpreting the world through movement, rhythm, music, imagery.
Is it enough though? Is it a good enough contribution to try very hard to be vulnerable and open as an artist, hoping you may crack others open a little? Maybe their eyes get wider to the view of all things being interconnected and all things being worthy of a place here....?
You eventually fall back to sleep around 5, headphones in ears, drifted off to a TV show you’ve watched so many times before – like that favourite book your parents would read to you when you had insomnia as a child. You just listen, you don’t look at the pictures, because you feel it all stitched into the atoms in your bones and blood.
When you sleep, you rarely dream of dancing. In most dreams you are staving off tidal waves, rising water, storm clouds made of black feathers. You are carrying snakes, running from bears, falling off boardwalks into an abyss of dark water.
These are the dreams that have come along with you since your first days of insomnia at the age of 5 or 6. These are the moments and sensations you hope your body can communicate when you perform. So, through kinetics and viscera, you can whisper to all in the room:
“It’s OK, I feel that way too sometimes. You and I are in this together.”
June 6, 2022
Comments