Practice Makes Practice
For many years my fitness practice and creative practice have been intertwined. My home studio space is music studio, film editing suite, workout room, sometimes visual arts studio, and a cozy research space with a lovingly tended-to altar: a symbolic and poetic environment for setting intentions and focussing energy.
Currently, the tools on my altar include a handmade Oblique Strategies deck; an almost-cube of granite carved by the sea and hand-picked from the cliffs of the Bay of Skaill near Skara Brae on Scotland’s Orkney Islands; a magnificent spun glass spider from a Ukrainian artist (thanks, Etsy!): a cast iron raven carried back from Japan; and a large black crystal ball from I Don’t Recall but a symbol for the Dark Half the Year.
As above, so below
My weight training forms the center of my workouts: free weights and medicine balls, a landmine, resistance bands, plyo, barre-kickboxing, a physio ball and yoga. On alternate days I power walk or craft an outdoor cardio workout. I’ve been nursing an aching achilles tendon so I’m in a steady Feldenkrais 1 mode of stay-out-of-pain / work-around. Fitness initiates and anchors my day. My love of movement is directly connected to, and is inseparable from my voice, music, film and other arts practices. My movement practice is not a ‘support’ for my life— it is the foundation of each day.
Once my body is humming and vibrant from working out, my voice practice begins. I use a big physio ball in my vocal warmup. As I wake up my voice with breath and sound, from swooping sirens to playful yodels, I roll and bounce and slide around on the ball in the center of my studio’s six-foot-by-six-foot black Manduka mat— all before my altar: with two flames lit, one in the center of the altar and one underneath in a small Viking cauldron replicated by the amazing guys at Royal Oak Armoury.
After my voice feels as supple and flexible as my body, I play with the sonority of the current original poetics I am working with: my voice wraps around words, cajoles and bursts open vowels with long tones low and high, and slides and explodes through consonants.
After this phase of the work, I venture to the piano, to concert pitches and vocal composition, and then possibly on to recording, if that is what the current phase a project requires.
Here’s a sneaky-peeky snippet of the vocal world for After the Ball: one of three new mini-opera / new music videos I’m creating, coming in 2020 and featuring George Heathco, guitars and Chris Becker, beats.
Pledge v. Goal
I’ve recently read Twyla Tharp’s latest book, Keep it Moving. Tharp is a major artistic force in dance and a significant choreographer of the late 20th-early 21st centuries— she brings a boatload of inspiration and practical knowledge to her writing. She makes a distinction between a Pledge (to oneself and the world, really) and a Goal. A Goal can be checked off of a list: done! A Pledge may feed an array of goals and it nurtures a lifetime of work. A Pledge is a process— it the cumulative work of simply putting one foot in front of the other over long periods of time: doing the work when I don’t feel like it— even if it is the tiniest of tiny steps toward the process.
How would I express my Pledge?
At first, I thought my pledge might be: Transform Pain into Beauty or Make Beauty. I do those things and that is the ground from which my work springs.
But I think I may be even simpler than that:
inspire beauty
What’s your pledge?
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Feldenkrais is a mind-body modality focussed on awareness through movement. Learn more at The Feldenrais Center of Houston ↩
Workout videos to share as a gift to myself