Yesterday marked a two-month-long worth of a journey with the Harlequinn.
It was, for the lack of a better expression, what it was. I realise I sound like a therapist-- being on the fence about things, being merely descriptive due to the inability to pass a defensible judgment-- but to be really honest, I don't really know what I felt about the whole thing. The one thing I knew was that I was glad that it was over. Not that it was a grueling or a painful experience, people in the past have said that joining Suntec was such a vicious endeavour, but now that I have walked in their footsteps, I think they totally blew things out of proportions. Not to say that it was not tiring either, but I guess I was lucky enough to have never reached an impasse during crunch time in those many weeks. Things worked themselves out, albeit rather slowly in the last weeks since we all were losing steam, and we managed to iron things out just in time.
I am happy with all the performances that I did. Right from the get-go, I knew I would gain nothing from the experience other than the memories of having gone through all that. It was a memory-making exercise. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I did not have the testosterone to want more than what I did. We were different, and that was all there was.
With a face caked monstrosity I stood there on stage feeling absolutely nothing. I cracked a smile here and there just in case the camera caught my face, I didn't want to have a smack-arse face. Nonetheless it really made me question, specifically, why I invested so much time and effort and energy in dance. I danced because I knew how to do it, I knew where to do it, and I didn't mind doing it. A good-enough, solid, matter-of-fact and honest answer. But as to the question of the opportunity cost of the it, I don't think I have such a straight forward answer.
So I chanced upon this talk by Brene Brown on TED, and she spoke about The Power of Vulnerability. Before I clicked on the video, I told my self I would close the window the second she started to speak like Chicken Soup for the Broken Soul. She didn't. She was a researcher, and she spent one good decade of her life delving into different types of persons: those who have a sense of connection and those who haven't, and then she analysed the behaviour of those who do. And she said:
The other thing that they have in common was this: they fully embrace vulnerability. They believed what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating (like they did in the Shame interviewing). They just talked about it being necessary. They talk about the willingness to say "I love you" first. The willingness to do something where there's no guarantee.
It piqued my interest somewhat because I was once struck by a quote posted on facebook: Sad people are beautiful people. A bizarre statement, and I totally agree with it. So when I heard her say all these things, I wanted to know what her take would be. And after ploughing through the data, she made the observation that:
We numb vulnerability. ... It was funny when I set something out on Twitter and Facebook that said "How would you define vulnerability?", "What makes you feel vulnerable?" Within an hour and a half I got a hundred and fifty responses. Because I wanted to know what's out there: "Having to ask my husband for help when I'm sick and we're newly married", "Initiating sex with my husband", "Initiating sex with my wife", "Being turned down asking someone out", "Waiting for the doctor to call back", "Getting laid off", "Laying off people". This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is that we numb vulnerability. ...The problem is, and I learnt this from the research, that we cannot selectively numb emotions. You can't say "Here's the bad stuff!"-- here's vulnerability, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm gonna get a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don't want to feel these. ... You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other aspect of emotions. We can't selectively numb emotions. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and we feel vulnerable, and we take a couple of beers and banana nut muffin. And it becomes a dangerous cycle.One of the things that we have to think about is how and why we numb. And it doesn't just have to be about addiction.
As she said, the aim of research is to control and predict-- she predicted right. This is really what I think has happened to me, in dance, and in life in general. The reason why I think I'm losing reason for passion is that I have numbed myself, voluntarily or otherwise. And I can only think of two reasons why I have done so-- one: is that my body is so so fatigued that it shoved me to the point of not caring, and two: is the fear of vulnerability. I have held opinion about others that they loved their passion more than it loved them, and I think I just don't want it to happen to me.
I know what is going to come in the future for me, and perhaps I am desensitising me to prepare my self to bid good bye to dance before it does to me-- slowly climbing out of the hole that I've toiled digging for the past five years. Perhaps there is no reason for such great investing in dance, and the realisation of that absence should mark a turning point. I can dance still, but I could and should do so in moderation (although I'm skeptical whether such thing exists), and "moderation" is definitely not the word to describe what I'm doing at the moment. This is, ironically, true to Merce Cunnigham's words:
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and may be hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.
I did, but perhaps I don't have to.
