Entry 3: Hydrangea

I've been thinking about hydrangeas.

What looks like one flower is actually many smaller flowers gathered together, each contributing to the larger shape.

That feels like July.

This month in the Making The Artivist® Apprentice Program, we spent a lot of time thinking about narrative. Transformation. Journey. Uncovering. Resistance. Memory. Cyclical. Call to Action. We covered the studio floor with these different story arcs, asked the apprentices to define them and pick the ones that felt closest to the solo they're making.

Many of them chose more than one.

At first, I thought: pick one.

Then I became curious.

Maybe the inability to choose wasn't indecision. Maybe their dances were already more complicated than the structures we'd given them. A solo could be about transformation and memory. Resistance could lead to a call to action. A journey might uncover something along the way.

The question became less about choosing the correct arc and more about understanding how all these smaller structures might gather around the thing that mattered most:

their voice.

Field Note: The beauty is in the gathering.

I will admit, though, that sometimes I wanted more imagination from them.

Less of the first idea.

Less of the cliché.

Less of what we already know something is supposed to look like.

Go deeper.

That became one of the threads running through the month, especially when the apprentices shared about a minute and a half of their developing solos for feedback.

A minute and a half isn't much.

But it's enough.

Enough to notice where something might be opening. Enough to see an image that deserves to stay longer. Enough to ask why a choice was made. Enough to wonder what might happen if the artist stopped explaining the idea and let the body complicate it.

With India, I mentioned Avatar: The Last Airbender, and something sparked. I could almost see another imaginative door open. Sometimes a reference doesn't give you an answer. It gives you permission to enter your own idea differently.

With Angeline, I keep seeing drag.

I don't know if she's completely there with me yet. But I think she's slowly coming around to the possibility. And maybe part of facilitating is knowing when you see a door in someone's work but resisting the urge to push them through it. You can point toward it. You can say, What about over there?

But they still have to decide whether to walk through.

With Erica, I keep wanting the audience to become implicated somehow. Give us a task. Make us do something. If the work is asking questions of systems, identity, or how we live together, what changes when the audience can't remain comfortably outside of it?

And Kadarie.

I'm in love.

There is something about the way he's approaching his work that makes me want to see more. Not just more of this solo. More of him as an artist. I find myself imagining him dancing in one of my works, maybe Black Apologia, or creating a solo dance film with him.

That's an interesting shift for me too.

At some point, you're no longer only looking at an apprentice.

You're looking at another artist.

Maybe that's another kind of transition.

July felt full of transitions.

We were moving from talking about ideas toward asking those ideas to live more fully in movement. From having a concept toward composing an experience. From knowing what a solo is "about" toward figuring out how that solo moves through the world.

And perhaps that's why the story arcs stayed with me.

I've been deep in fundraising for Chicago House Kobe through the 3Arts Projects campaign, and I've been reminded again and again that a story needs somewhere for someone to enter.

You can have a beautiful idea.

You can have all the facts.

You can explain why something matters.

But what makes someone stay?

What makes someone care enough to keep reading, watching, listening—or even give?

Often, it's the story.

A beginning that gives us somewhere to enter. A question that creates tension. Something at stake. A shift we want to witness. Not because every story needs to follow the same formula, but because an arc gives our attention somewhere to travel.

I think choreography asks something similar.

What are you asking us to follow?

What changes because we have spent these eight or twelve minutes with you?

What should we understand, feel, question, or carry differently at the end that we couldn't at the beginning?

And what I find beautiful is that many of the apprentices couldn't answer those questions with only one arc.

Their solos are layered because they are layered.

Maybe a work about memory is also about resistance.

Maybe transformation requires uncovering.

Maybe the journey circles back to its beginning, except the person returning isn't quite the same person who left.

Maybe the call to action doesn't arrive at the end at all. Maybe it has been underneath everything from the beginning.

A hydrangea doesn't become beautiful because every small flower disappears into the larger one.

The beauty is the gathering.

Each small bloom remains visible.

Together, they make another form.

Rahila and I have also been thinking about how to expand what the apprentices encounter beyond our studio. We reached out to the Harris Theater about the possibility of connecting the cohort with Hervé Koubi when the company comes to Chicago. I keep imagining what it might mean for these young artists to encounter an all-male-identified company moving through contemporary dance, urban street dance, capoeira, and martial arts with that much physicality and energy.

Not because I want them to make work like Hervé Koubi.

I want them to see more possibilities for what a dance can be.

Maybe imagination needs examples too.

Maybe sometimes we repeat what we've already seen because we haven't seen enough yet.

That thought has stayed with me.

It makes me think about the class I wish I'd had as a young artist. And, increasingly, the kind of composition and career-preparation class I want to teach now: a space where making the dance and learning how to talk about the dance aren't separate things. Where we study composition, narrative, budgets, artist statements, grants, audiences, careers, and all the strange practical things that surround a life in art.

Because none of these things really exist alone.

Neither do the apprentices' solos.

Neither do we.

Maybe July wasn't about finding the one perfect structure.

Maybe it was about gathering.

Gathering references.

Gathering feedback.

Gathering movement.

Gathering questions.

Gathering the different versions of ourselves that want to speak.

And then asking how all those smaller blooms might gather into a form without losing the voice of the artist at its center.

Maybe that's the work right now.

Not becoming one thing.

Becoming more distinctly yourself among the many things you already are.