New BLOG - new journey

I've moved friends - please come join me and support my new blogging/website adventures at:

http://dancewithashley.org/

I'm excited to talk and dance with you.

Rediscover your record player

Vinyl is hip again. We have a white Lady Gaga record to prove it. Sean likes to tell people he was hip before hip was hip and he has the record collection to boast without worry. We used to store part of the record collection in our old house on a church pew in the dining room and then on the floor where Aurora made her presence known by crawling over the top of the collection (much to her father’s dismay). Sean would often have the speakers facing out the window, which allowed us to garden while listening but made fixing a skip in the record very frustrating. How many times can you listen to one line from Captin and Tennille without wanting to thwack your own head with the shovel? Not many. 

We have one of those machines that converts your vinyl to digital files, which has greatly enhanced my music selection for modern classes. Across the floor Tom Jones? Yes. It’s also given us a little piece of mind as our records feel the wear of tear of years of use. We moved this spring and struggled to find a working record player in our collection of old broken ones. We relied on the laptop for our daily dose of music and entertainment, but come Christmastime, we realized that the only way we could play the one-time-a-year record collection was to find a working record player.

Once the machine was running, the “office” became the dancing room, with mom, dad, Aurora and Saul crooning and cruising to John Denver, Bing Crosby, and Joan Baez. The kids would dance and crawl from one room to another and back again as the crinkly, skippy sounds of these old records encouraged their prancing and laughing. Aurora would watch as Sean gently placed the needle down on the record, mesmerized by the gentle spinning and the sound coming from seemingly nowhere.

Gratefully (and wistfully) the holidays have passed but the record player continues its role as a permanent fixture in our daily lives. We have rediscovered our Mary Poppins record, with narration and singing from the original musical that proves yet again to be timeless. It’s easy to imagine my little son and daughter as the mischievous, but well-intentioned kids in the story and even sometimes in my fantasies, myself as Mary and Sean as Bert. My children are also earning an early education in drunk cowboy songs and Aurora has been known to request some old country for her dancing pleasure.

Have you ever watched a child delight in the work and sound of a record player? Have you ever danced with them to its both clean and scratchy sound? Have you ever let them hold the record in their own hands and whispered, “Gentle love, gentle.”  

It’s easy to dock the iPod, press play on the CD player, or stream the radio from your laptop, but there is something special about fuzz you can’t edit out of a fragile record. My CD collection is a testament to my addiction to sound in multiple forms, but I’m grateful for my hip man incorporating vinyl into our every day. My children will always know what a record is and how to play one, but more importantly, how to enjoy that record. 

Why I Take My Kids to the Opera

The kids are getting sick. Amazingly, my two kids are breathing clearly and happily rolling around on their wood chip-crusted floors, but our little animal singers in Opera Theatre of Weston’s Noye’s Fludde are not so fortunate. The 24 animals who are destined to repopulate the earth have dwindled to 20 as the flu spreads in their tiny onstage ark. One of Noah’s three sons has left his wife a widow as these young singers work to save their family from the great flood. Apparently God has no pity even for flu-stricken amateur singers. 

I have been working as the choreographer for Benjamin Britton’s Noye’s Fludde since shortly after Christmas and although we have been plagued by snowstorms and sickness, our simple production rings true with honest performances from musicians, singers, and dancers, beautiful costumes, a Vermont-made ark, and glorious lights. We are currently in the middle of a run of school performances where children from around the region come to see quality opera performed by professionals who fly in from all over and local kids who miss a crazy amount of school to be part of some theater magic. 

I have been scrambling these past couple of mornings doing minor staging revisions to partner animals with new mates to perform their pre-board animal dances. Every morning is a surprise - Who will we have today? Yet the kids have stepped up by easily adjusting to last-minute changes and bringing their youthful positivity to the stage with them. I’ve also had good company as either Ror or Saul have joined me for every performance.

Aurora, who is 2, slowly plodded down to the theater’s basement with me to re-stage the animals entrance yet again at 8:30 this morning. She watched with her toddler awe as elementary, middle, and high school students decked in a rainbow of fabric shuffled around to make space for each other. Her awe grew even greater when they donned masks they had created with the help of our goddess of a costumer, Robina D’Arcy Fox. There was something happening that she didn’t quite understand but desperately wanted to be part of. 

We visited with Angela, our musical director/problem-solver extraordinaire, who introduced Aurora to the instruments in the orchestra (I had a little motherly pride when she, unprompted, called the viola a violin) before finding some seats in the back corner of the theater, tucked next to local elementary school students. 

I take my children to performances in part because it is such a gift to watch the show the way they see it. I have seen Noye’s Fludde many times now in rehearsal and performance. I have heard the music while doing outreach, my own choreography, and teaching. My brain has numbed some to the effects of the music, but as I feel my child tense at the beginning of the performance, her eyes scanning the theater for the location of the sound, I am reminded what it feels like to give yourself over to the power of performance. I see her fingers point with excitement as the child-animals skitter and stampede by her and for the first time notice the rainbow effect our lighting designer David has made with the lights when she whispers, “A rainbow!” The floor waters, made with billowing sheets of hand-dyed fabric become an actual flood as she says, “I see the water! I see the water!” and the handbells that grace the final moments of the production soften me as mimics the motion of playing them in her own tiny hands. The children next to us steal glances at her big enthusiasm only after noticing their own moments of magic in the production.

Benjamin Britton supposedly wrote the following about Noye’s Fludde’s premiere:

“We were very happy with the way it came off... and weren’t those kids good? There’s nothing much more moving than when children are really good, is there?”

Nothing except, perhaps, watching kids be moved.

To be a teenager...

The girls are singing with Ne-Yo in the back of the bus - “Give me everything tonight” - riding their post-competition high as we drive home in the dark Vermont afternoon sunset. My heart aches to indeed give them everything because in this moment of young play the possibilities seem endless for these teenagers. They are riding easy after the pressures of performing in front of their peers and judges, evaluating their movements, group cohesion, and facials. The pressure of the first competition of the season for this high school dance team has fallen away and left them with open hearts ready to just be with each other.

These moments feel all too rare with many of my high schoolers. Sometimes I enter practice unsure of what I will be walking into. Although I often feel close to my teenage years, the work of being a teenager is intensely more challenging for many of these kids than I remember from my own well-supported adolescence.

What does it mean to ask for excellence from kids who are fighting an uphill-battle to just show up? There are sick days, both physical and psychological, days where no one shows up to give you a ride, days where you wonder if you can pass your classes to keep participating in a sport, days where your romantic relationships seem to eat you alive, days where you don’t know who your friends are, and days where it’s hard to put one foot in front of another let alone get into that shoulder stand.

Yet here I am at the front of the room every practice asking my kids to take it to the next level, shouting orders and bouncing around in cowgirl boots. They are used to my brushing off excuses, telling them to dig deeper, or rolling my eyes as I take in the latest version of “but, but, but!” I know that these kids can dance as deeply as they feel. I know they can and must find something in themselves that they didn’t know they had. They are capable of more than they may realize and our work is to uncover that in the midst of all this seemingly overwhelming drama that is living. I know the time I have with these kids is precious for all of us and we can’t let it be anything less than awe-inspiring even if it breaks us down a little bit in the process.

I was dancing in the bleachers with one of my students today when she turned to me and said, “Ashley, you’re just like a teenager.” I smiled and said, “I hope I seem like a mature teenager,” but I was grateful that for a moment that she saw this silly dancing as part of being the work of being a teenager. Here we are, riding the bus back to Springfield, to our every day lives after experiencing something that demanded heart and courage, and these kids are belting out every pop song this incredibly gracious bus driver is indulging them in. My heart breaks for a moment when I sense how much they feel by just being and I’m grateful they are willing to share.

It feels important that we take time to share and enjoy each other. I’m grateful for all the kindness radiating through this chilly school bus. Thanks kids. 

Teaching with babes

I spent 18 months teaching with small humans growing on the inside. I found myself practicing and teaching many a shoulder stand, six step, and pirouette while dealing with a shifting sense of center. I mostly found this to be a liberating experience, which eased the physical stresses of pregnancy and allowed me to stay mentally joyful while pursuing my movement addictions. However, there was a great ecstatic rush post-partum that came from the freedom of moving without this little being pushing up against my organs.

That feeling was short-lived.

I have spent many more months teaching with small humans strapped to me growing on the outside. Instead of allowing my body to be the perfect baby carrier that it is, I have depended on front packs, backpacks, car seats, floors, and the loving hands of fellow teachers and students. Saul and Aurora have been to many an opera rehearsal, dance team practice, and salsa class all while bouncing along to the rhythms we are pursuing in attempt to make, get, and share dance in all its forms. I feel fortunate that dance and music are seemingly intrinsic loves of little humans.

Teaching with babes has its stresses. I have had many nursing sessions and diaper changes in cold parking lots. Nap time on route is key. Shoulder stands are a little harder with the Bjorn. However, the biggest challenge is learning to balance the needs of students, your infant, and your own self acting as teacher/mother.

Perhaps we as a society make this challenge more difficult than it needs to be and I believe part of why I teach with babies strapped to my chest or beside me happily observing in their car seat is to normalize babes in these settings. The reality is that many of my best classes have happened with Aurora and Saul on board. Elementary school kids see an opportunity to lead by example and high schoolers show me their more nurturing sides. Many a teacher has called the babes baby-therapy and mind you, my little munchkins are not perfect, quiet little babes but vocal creatures with their own desires. My children have also grown to know that mom shares her attention with many people and are relatively good keepers of their own space.

I am currently in rehearsals for the Opera Theatre of Weston's production of Noye's Fludde and the above picture is of me, Saul, and a few students on our Outreach Tour visiting kids school and helping prep students for their visits to the opera. I had many adventures on this tour including a car battery dying in reception-free Townsend and a day of traveling through an almost flood in the Manchester area, but the best adventure was watching kids respond so positively to the power of music and movement while inviting young Saul in on their journeys. Dancing in schools is serious business mixed with serious play and I am grateful that we can learn to make space for our most impressionable in these important learning environments.