© 2019 UC Regents, all rights reserved. Photo by Leandro Glory Damasco Jr. This weekend I had the honor and the pleasure of working with Savannah Van Leuvan, a first year graduate lighting designer with New Slate 2019. My piece was called "Qualitative Dispute" and this picture captures the final moment of my dance. One of my main passions in life is dance, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to focus and grow in what I love to do. The piece initially starts off in a stark, isolated world where everyone is very robotic with their movements and eventually, the viewer begins to see moments of different people breaking off from the conformity within the group. I remember Savannah and I were brainstorming about how the piece was going to end, and at that time, I had not choreographed the end of the piece. My piece was mainly about feeling isolated in a vast world and the feeling of the need to compete with others to get to the "top". I realized that ...
This week, these photos reminded me that although we can try to forcefully create something beautiful, sometimes it just happens on its own. This served as a good reminder at a perfect time for me with New Slate coming up. As I tried to refine my piece for New Slate, I sometimes found myself frustrated with trying to run the dance over and over again until it was "perfect." I felt nervous for most of the week about my piece -- always feeling like I needed more time and more rehearsals. These photos served as perfectly timed reminders for me that sometimes just laying back and letting something work itself out creates something beautiful. I've been so stressed the last week that I found myself stressing over every little thing. I was overthinking everything, including finding a "good" photo for this blog. As I power-walked through graduate housing on my way to take a Laban Movement Analysis quiz, I actually walked right past the wall with the reflections of light on it. After a few steps past it, I ran back to snap a quick photo. I was searching so hard for the perfect photo that I almost missed a great opportunity. This photo makes me feel good though; it is bright and beautiful, and its simplicity is actually quite satisfying to look at. Maybe if I relax a bit this week, I will find the beauty in things that I would otherwise miss or simply rush past. Seeing everyone's projects in lighting class makes me appreciate things I never noticed before. The sky, the reflection of natural light onto a wall, the subtle mystery of fog: they are all things I've seen before in my life but I never noticed them. This class has taught me to not necessarily look harder but just to open my eyes to the possibilities that light brings to the world.
A truly wonderful post - I completely agree that while we need to research and work hard, we also need to let go, meditate, free our mind and let things come
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