The Art of Winter: Notes on a New Dance for Philadelphia Performance

I have felt depressed for the last few days. There seems to be no single reason. It's a bit like a skipping record: the needle just keeps looping. I get caught up in my thoughts, which always seems to be a mistake. My mind tends to be more critical than my heart. My intuition gets muffled. Thank God for dancing! It takes me out of my head and into my body.

My mood seems to cycle over a period of months. I find myself getting depressed, which is to say that I start to see the negative more than the positive. There are two sides to everything: good and bad luck are a matter of interpretation. I hover on the positive side for awhile, then slither down to the negative for a few days, a week, however long it takes to break the spell. I know it when it's happening, but it does not give me the power to snap the cord. I get pulled down nevertheless, and then recover.

This is how I feel about winter, too. Though I am writing through a mild depression in the summertime, I still associate winter with sadness. The cold makes me burrow up inside. It takes ten extra minutes to go anyplace because of all the gear. (This is even more true with Maya in tow!) Less people are outside dropping careless hellos, looking about them, sitting outside to pass the time. They drift, instead, from storefront to metro station to home. Everyone slips to his destination. Winter comes whether I want it to or not.

I am, actually, more sensitive to heat than to cold. This is why I like autumn so much. The air is crisp, the leaves dry, the sun low. There is a vibrancy about that ever-present wind, too, dashing against your pantslegs, rolling coffee cups down the sidewalk, bristling in the trees. But winter becomes serious, brooding, even before I know what I'm about, before I am ready for thick coats, before my eyes have adjusted.

Holidays add to the gloom. I love my family and I want to see them, but it all means time away from the studio. I wish I had taken up the guitar so that I could just bring it with me. Is it workaholism if you're an artist? I can work forever and never make any money, so does that count?

I decided to make a dance about winter last February. Sitting in the car one morning while Maya napped in back, I looked around at the quality of light: pale, making silhouettes of branches--a lonely light. I did not decide to make a dance about depression, although it seems to be one of the layers of this project. It is intertwined for me.

We began work on January Dances (working title) in early July. It begins with three dancers huddled together on the ground, like people sharing a bed. They roll slowly from the top of a rise to the bottom. This is an image I commonly associate with winter: people cuddling together in a bed, limbs twisting and folding into each other like sheets, until one body appears continuous with another. The following section, which we have just begun, is about snow being gusted up into the air. But, it reminds me of people having trouble getting out of bed, ending up slumped back where they started. This feels like the right way to begin, the way I begin an ordinary day in January. I wonder what will happen next.