All's Blog

Time Out of Mind

Posted May 5, 2008 - 7:57pm by CRS Staff
From The Sound & the Fury.
Photo of by Joan Marcus.

My job as curator of performances at CRS demands that I try to see the outside work of artists in the CRS community as well identify new (to me, to us) artists and companies that we would like to work with and present in the future. My job as Director of CRS, with only part-time staff help 2-3 days a week, demand that I be here running the Center almost all the time. It's a difficult juggling act, and I probably don't see nearly enough performances as a result. On the other hand, it forces me to be ever so selective. Gone are the days when I must see a show simply because someone I know is in it. Now, I try to target work that will hopefully be extraordinary, inspiring, and, at least sometimes, relevant to what we are doing here.

Last Saturday I managed to get to two very good shows, each of which dealt very explicitly with the perception of time. Each even involved an old friend of mine, so I hit a home run. The first work, which I urge you to drop whatever you are doing to go see, is section one of The Sound & the Fury by William Faulkner as staged by Elevator Repair Service at New York Theatre Workshop. The second concert, part of the First Weekends dance series at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), I'll try to review soon.

If you haven't read The Sound & the Fury, section one records through stream of consciousness, the perceptions of memories of a mentally handicapped boy/man, Benjamin Compson, from the age of 3 through 33 as he grows up in a very troubled family in the American South in the beginning of the 20th Century. Benjamin remains an innocent. He cannot talk, cannot understand much. It makes for difficult reading. It was assigned to me as summer reading prior to Advance Placement English my senior year of high school for what I am sure was intended to be shock therapy. I was wary. But my super-talented friend Tory Vazquez, with whom I had the pleasure of performing with many years ago in the American premiere of Fassbinder's Blood on the Cat's Neck, is not only an actor in the company but is also the Producing Director. All of Tory's own plays have been brilliant, heartfelt and honest, so I hoped for the best..and was rewarded.Read more

How My Healing Touch Story Began

Posted April 28, 2008 - 4:27pm by CRS Staff

How my healing touch story began:
You may wonder how I got started on my path of helping people heal. I’m sure it started when I was a kid in a small Idaho town in the ‘40’s. Mom got me a dog and cat and since I was an only child, I spent lots of time petting them. I also crossed the street several times a day to pet Mike, the neighbor’s dog. On my paper route, I stopped to pet customers’ dogs. Some of them -- along with my own Cinder Block and Mike -- started following me around town. Once I counted eight dogs following me on my bike as I delivered papers on two long streets. I felt like the piped piper of Hamlin except that I played no music. I was learning the language of loving, healing touch!Read more

All You Need Is Love

Posted April 22, 2008 - 3:18pm by CRS Staff

Love is all you need. Right? Well...yes and no. Love is not really something you need because love is not something you lack. You are an expression of love. Love is all there is. It would be more accurate to see that all you need is a correct understanding and acceptance of love and of yourself.

Wikipedia describes numerous different qualities attributed to love, or different kinds of love: amorous love, familial love, religious love are the three big ones. People speak of loving certain foods, activities, pleasures, etc. People talk of being in love, falling out of love, making love, being love stricken, love sick.

Pretty much any spiritual teaching, and certainly A Course of Miracles which we teach here, refers to love a lot, and it is necessary to understand what is meant by that to avoid being confused and getting off on the wrong track. Many people starting out on a spiritual path think they experience spiritual love or spiritual healing when they FEEL full of happiness, a buoyant feeling they associate with love. Feeling really UP is not, in and of itself, spiritual love. Nor is healing the same as feeling good. Spiritual love is not actually a feeling at all. Feeling UP is just the inverse of feeling DOWN. It's just another channel on the mental TV, another moment on the emotional roller coaster. Anything that can change, like our thoughts or feelings, anything that we can observe, is not who we are, and it is not love. Love is timeless, changeless, and so are You.Read more

Elephant Painting --Amazing but Is it art?

Posted April 8, 2008 - 8:56pm by CRS Staff

This video has been heavily passed around recently so a lot of you may have already seen it, but I want to post it here anyway because it really is one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen...and I have my own little anecdote to tell about it.

In the spring of 1998 I was working at NYU and taking a class in multimedia design on Saturday mornings in the library. I would get out around noon and race to Dance Space for Barbara Fraser's modern class. One day outside the library I saw a woman who also regularly took Barbara's class, and she offered me a ride. It was a short way, but she had a car there or was getting picked up or something.Read more

From Out of the Ashes?

Posted April 3, 2008 - 2:16pm by CRS Staff

Firebird and Prince Ivan, who has captured a single feather from the bird [From the now-defunct Russian Sunbirds site]Last week The Village Voice let it be known that, after 41 years, it was firing Deborah Jowitt as staff writer but would continue to commission articles from her on a freelance basis. I can't help wondering if we should take Ms. Jowitt's firing/demotion as a wake-up call rather than simply reflexively attacking The Village Voice to protect our turf. Maybe the Voice feels there is less demand from their readers for dance coverage. Maybe they feel dance is less relevant or interesting now. I know I do.

There are certainly a number of choreographers whom we Iove and whom we continue to support and with whom we want to work in the future, but I'm hard-pressed to name many whose work is world-changing in the way that Duncan, Graham, Ballanchine, Cunningham et al were or who will be unquestionably remembered and revered a hundred years from now. We can't attribute that solely to the economic climate.Read more