“wait, did i do that right?”

​​you tell me, friend. i don’t know what your “right and wrong” scale is.

moi? i don’t have one. especially for you. especially for movement. sometimes your choreography may look different than what i envisioned. i see that has a sign of your own brilliant awareness and your deep listening to your body. it makes me so excited for you and our partnership. it’s reassuring that i’m teaching the way i want to teach.

pourquoi? because the notion of “right” and “wrong” especially in movement does not exist. there is simply no such thing. unless you hold up an ideal. and that’s just some patriarchal bullshit.

(have you sighed with relief yet? i hope so.) 

perfectionism is something that 1) i’ve had to undo in my own relationship to myself and 2) is just so counterproductive. there’s no such thing as “perfect” unless we agree on some idealized and fictitious notion of it. and why would we do that when variation and uniqueness are literally all over the place in nature? 

my face when you ask if you did it “right”.

​i’ve been really drawn to flowers lately, especially roses, sunflowers and lavender. partly because they live in our yard; partly because there are fields of tournesols and lavandes on our frequent trips to the maternité. perhaps it’s for the obvious comparisons that Georgia O’Keeffe significantly has already made…

and ya know what? i never find myself counting the petals on a rose or comparing the pink ones to the red ones. i never say to myself, “oh, this sprig of lavender is better than that one because it has just the ‘right’ amount of stem”. instead, i sweep my fingers on a bunch and bring the tips to my nose to inhale the calming aroma. the same with sunflowers and their seeds - it takes too much energy to count them all anyway.

plus, i’m a left-handed person, so the entire concept of something being “right” and thus “correct” is simply more bullshit. language is important here. you can be “left out”. “oh, we’re having leftovers again.” i’ve been watching the Olympics, particularly enthralled with the new event of skateboarding where you’re either in “regular” (right preferred) stance or “goofy” stance (left preferred). and in some ways, i’m grateful to be “irregular” in a structure so strong in the notion of its “right-ness”. i get to go against the norm.

​but, again, in movement, there is simply no place for that kind of thinking. it’s not productive, it doesn’t help us gain confidence in our own body, and it sets up a binary that is just so damn passé. how can a movement be “wrong”? what is the scale or parameter set up for lifting your arm overhead, for example, that makes one way of doing it right and another way of doing it wrong? is it safety? is it aesthetics? is it from an anatomical perspective? is it from an efficiency perspective?

each of those perspectives come with their own rubrics, and are thus inherent upon judging. perhaps we cannot help it, judging, or needing a structure. so i’m here to remind you of the ultimate structure, and i feel a bit like a broken record, because all these words are simply another way of saying, LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. it’s the only structure we need to guide us into that knowing. this is as important a practice as the movement itself.

long story short, i will never tell you what you’re doing is right or wrong, because movement is not a moral issue. i encourage you to rid yourself of those words as much as you can in movement and in daily life. especially as well move through the world in our own unique bodies. “unique” being the key word here.

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