Gentle Readers,

 Although last week's post sure seemed "endy," I have more to report about my ongoing mission to change my life in 90 days. I have been thinking about a new project for an upcoming round of work-in-progress showings using children's sequential dances like the Hokey Pokey. The Hokey Pokey is the only formal dance I'm familiar with, but I think there's some room for creative interpretation in "you turn yourself around," and "you shake it all about."

 A while back I was researching a major east coast ballet company and looked into their educational programs. I read a section on their approach to teaching children age-appropriate dance forms from other cultures. What blew my mind about this was I had previously considered "age-appropriate (children's) dance" and "cultural dance" specific categories that could be applied exclusively, but of course, that's looking at dance from my own priveleged perspective in the normative cultural discourse. Other cultures practice dance forms and of course they have their own criteria for "age-appropriate."

 This is something I've been thinking about. It seems to me that I approach dance from a perspective of inquiry, asking "what does it mean?" while practicing a dance phrase. But there's a wider, wilder world I'm only beginning to glimpse where dancing, dancing with your whole heart, creates new meanings, new statements. That are true, not descriptive. Not that there's anything wrong with approaching dance as description. I think the takeaway from my last few weeks of work are to work with my whole heart and follow the stuff that comes up, instead of plotting a course about where I want to end up. Not that there's anything wrong with knowing where you want to end up.

 A lady I was talking to about dance once said she admired the positions that ballet dancers can do, and I was thinking she meant "poses," like a contortionist. That got me thinking about the ways to watch dance, whether it's wrong to watch with a critical eye and a checklist like a judge, instead of trying to enjoy the story, but who am I to judge, since I want people to come watch my attempts to tell stories. I'm too much of a beginner to know whether "crowd-pleasing" dance actually misses something. The alternative to a generous definition of "entertaining," however, is how Lester Bangs imaginatively characterized Lou Reed's view of his album of industrial noise, Metal Machine Music: the most unlistenable, and therefore greatest, piece of recorded music ever.

 This is baffling stuff, but that's what this blog is for, my friends.