On Pirouettes and Joyful Trouble.

Stephen Colbert was recently asked by Stephen Sondheim to join the cast of Company. Here is what Colbert had to say about it his decision to do it:

"I tell a lot of young performers, 'Go get in trouble. Go commit yourself to something you're not sure you can do,'" he says. "And I followed my own advice. It was something I desperately wanted to do — not as a career — but an invitation I knew I couldn't refuse and yet had no sense of whether or not I could do it. And that is trouble — but it was all so joyful."

This year has been a lot of that for me ... I have gotten into joyful trouble trying to do things I am not sure I can do on the small (giant?) stage of adult dance.

After my modern dance intensive last week, I realized I had some definite challenges with my turns. It was not as though I knew how to do them and didn't do them well. With a pirouette, for example, I truly did not have a single cooperative bone or muscle or tendon in my body. I would start the turn and completely lose my shit.

So I set an intention to learn them. Yesterday, I was lucky to have Ka-Ron Brown Lehman all to myself for an hour plus. We worked on my not-so-great releve passe situation and then moved onto turns. For awhile, it was a big old mess. But by the end, I had figured out the essential flow of it, some muscle memory that I could return to.

Thanks Ka-Ron and all my other wonderful teachers (Heather, Susan, Julie, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Heather, etc.) for helping me get into joyful trouble on such a regular basis.