Writer's Reflections
Breaking Free
During Juri Nael’s residency, a fellow student commented, “Wouldn’t you love to know what he’s writing in that notebook?” Without delay, Juri stood and gathered us into a circle—a never-ending shape, bodies with chests lifted and eyes engaged or dropping to the floor. At midweek and ready for the next challenge, we discovered his riddle. Inscribed with the ink of a blue gel pen, Juri Nael declared his musings …
Diving into the ocean depths,
Scaling towering Mountains,
Sprinting through untamed forests,
Amidst unforgivable thunderstorms,
I break free from my past.
Our subsequent iterations were born of the seeds from this poem, penned by Juri while we had expressed the letters of our name through movement. He spoke of allowing the seeds a natural growth pattern, not forcing the tiny roots but letting them reach for the earth, the sun, and the water. In other words, nurture them.
This realization hit me hard in that I had not been caring for or feeding my artistic self. As I grew to respect my practice, Juri nourished me with his words: strength, will, resistance, tension, accessible, effort, balance, emotion, control and lack thereof, pauses, provocations, feel, touch, free, and bound. He also assuaged my fears, spoken aloud on day one, of vulnerability, truth, and pain. He did this by meeting my expectations for the residency: enlightenment, validation of choices, and unity/community. He encouraged us to find freedom through our movement, but not the repetitive crutches we normally rely upon.
Juri Nael offered thought provoking questions …
How do you get away from patterns?
How much do you do and how do you let the environment move you?
How much do you move and how much are you moved?
How do you unleash the timing of the movement in order to allow expression?
The above are Juri’s posed questions and mine combined. Their importance transcends the movement that I collaborated within all week.
Speaking on advocacy, the workshop gave me further tools to encourage hard work by focused students, but also to nourish them through engaging their five senses as mine were engaged in the “gallery of hugs,” where half of us were statues allowed to respond to human touch and then to move carefully away, not adversely affecting the individual so willing to support us.
I found home again in a newly explored space with individuals who enveloped me, wrapping me and lifting me up. Rebecca Solnit said it best in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscape for Politics:
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood. (“Rebecca Solnit Quotes”)
I realized with each passing day that my choreographic aesthetics were being fully
explored as I battled the elements of light and dark, alone versus community, and tried to locate the freedom that was the breath and life of dance for me once upon a time. I will practice non-duality where we don’t speak or think but only work toward oneness (Sasson). Juri offered us exercises pertaining to this idea where you looked deep into another’s eyes or had them close their eyes as you moved them throughout the room—puppets that required great care.
My takeaways will be to answer the above questions and apply them to my choreographic, pedagogical, and personal practices. I will move away from comfortable patterns and challenge myself and those around me. I will allow the environment to move me by taking a moment to feel the sand and hear the ocean and in turn, I will become part of that environment where energies transfer. I will move others but feed myself through my own movement and collaborative efforts. I will pay attention to rhythm and tempo and desist responses to the constant underlying beat, achieving enhanced and varied expression. At the end of the day, I will channel Juri and some of the beautiful quotes he left with me …
Haruki Murakami: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional” (“Suffering is Optional”).
Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken” (“Forbes Quotes”).
I am grateful for the opportunity to be nurtured, nourished, and set free. Thank you Juri Nael!
Works Cited
“Forbes Quotes.” www.forbes.com/quotes/11441/. Accessed 26 July 2023.
Nael, Juri. Personal interview. 19 July 2023.
“Rebecca Solnit Quotes.” Goodreads. www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/15811.Rebecca_
Solnit. Accessed 26 July 2023.
Sasson, Remez. “What is Nonduality? Definition and Meaning.” Success Consciousness.
www.successconsciousness.com/blog/spirituality/what-is-nonduality/.
“Suffering is Optional.” Wilcox & Barton. 05 Sep. 2018, www.wilcoxandbarton.com/news-
resources/Suffering-Is-Optional-entry-34#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPain%20is%20inevitable
.,Kathleen%20Casey. Access 26 July 2023.