• I help people fully inhabit their bodies and guide teachers to do the same • Get access to exclusive videos, articles and teachings from Domini Anne
Crop it Like it's Hot
|
Crop it like it’s Hot Last week we went to see my daughter’s musical theater showcase before their troupe goes on tour to Albania. I continue to be wildly impressed by the teacher who runs this program. The scale alone is enough to make me want to lie down. Multiple age groups, massive ranges in talent … and somehow every student gets their moment. Which is important. The kids worked hard, the parents paid. Everybody wants to see their person shine. Driving Louisiana home afterwards I found myself saying something that felt harsher out loud than it had in my head: Kieri needs to edit. My family pushed back immediately and they weren’t wrong. Everybody worked hard. Everybody deserves their moment. But I kept thinking that audiences have limits. At some point, more morphs from feeling generous to feeling inconsiderate. And later that night I realized I wasn’t actually thinking about theater anymore. For the last two weeks I’ve been back at my laptop after a gauntlet of teaching and art projects, quietly working my second job: tech support for Domini Anne. ( i.e. Editing video content for classes ) Which sounds simple until you remember that teaching movement on-demand means cleaning audio, fixing transcripts, generating captions, exporting giant files, compressing them, moving crop boxes around by three inches so people can actually see where my foot went, and and occasionally watching yourself explain foot mechanics for an hour and wondering whether this is what hearing your own voicemail sounds like for actors. There’s also something deeply humbling about editing your own classes. You start noticing things. That the story that killed in the room drags on camera. That the angle where you felt strongest somehow makes the movement harder to understand. That your favorite moment might not actually belong in the final version. And occasionally you delete files you absolutely should not have deleted and learn—again—that emptying the trash is not the same thing as finishing the project. I lost some things these past couple weeks: A class I loved. Some hours of work. A little dignity. And also some attachment. Because after enough rounds of watching yourself back, cutting, reframing, re-exporting and trying again, eventually something shifts. You stop asking: Do I look good? And start asking: Can they follow this? Will this help? Or am I asking them to admire every onion I chopped? Anyway, I’m finally done. The backlog is caught up. The Galileo library has been updated. And I uploaded something I’m especially excited to finally share: Jedi Spine Tricks — the class I taught at Lightning in a Bottle this year with an improvised live soundscape by Hanif Wondir. It’s a 75-minute movement experiment in spinal mobility, proprioception, nervous system weirdness, breath, self-massage, eye exercises, and expanding the conversation you’re having with your body. Less: perform this shape. More: what happens if you pay attention differently? Click the image to join us on the Woogie stage And if you just want Hanif’s soundtrack to use as your own movement background: We edit ourselves every day. Choosing our words (and when to say them). Choosing the appropriate outfit for the occasion. Choosing whether to merge lanes or stay behind the slow driver and keep traffic moving. Choosing whether to interrupt. Choosing whether this story actually needs to be told. I don’t know, maybe editing is just another version of growing up. Realizing that not every thought needs to be spoken, not every project needs to survive, not every camera angle is your friend, and not every good thing improves because there’s more of it. Maybe editing is less about removal than hospitality. Leaving enough room for someone else to arrive. In any case… The classes are uploaded. The captions work. The files (mostly) survived. And I finally get to stop watching myself talk for a little while. Hope you enjoy Jedi Spine Tricks. Domini Anne Was this email forwarded to you? |
Domini Anne
• I help people fully inhabit their bodies and guide teachers to do the same • Get access to exclusive videos, articles and teachings from Domini Anne
Years ago I read a story by Tom Robbins that apparently lodged itself somewhere deep in my nervous system. A woman sits down at a bar and orders asparagus. The man beside her keeps inching closer and she wants absolutely nothing to do with him. Halfway through dinner he leans over and says: "You and I have something very intimate in common that you don't know yet." Suspicious already. "Tomorrow morning our urine will smell exactly the same." Which brings me to an important point: The rubber...
There’s a particular kind of compliment that bypasses vanity entirely and lands somewhere much deeper. Not because it flatters you…but because it names something you’ve quietly recognized in yourself for a very long time. In a recent review of From Molecule to Movement — the short film Hanif and I created for the Shulgin Foundation about Sasha Shulgin, MDMA, and the strange, beautiful collision between chemistry, therapy, culture, and consciousness - I was described as a “ Movement and Design...
Read time: ~4 minutes Musing: astronauts, somanauts, and inner space Listen: Sasha Shulgin, 1983 Join: April 25 retreat + May 2 exhibit Over the past couple of weeks, something subtle has been moving through my world. A kind of shared pause. A collective exhale. For a brief moment, many of us found ourselves captivated by the language of orbit—liftoff, a release from the pressure of the known atmosphere. The Artemis program became more than a mission, it became a metaphor. For exploration....