It seems that no matter what the scale of the project I am working on, there is never enough. This can be found in terms of time, equipment, budget or any manner of things. It does not matter what the show is, it seems, at some point it runs into this logistical wall, “oh if only we had one more . . .”
Beauty and the Beast is running into a problem of not enough equipment. The show is very large and while The Barter has a very nice lighting inventory there just is not quite enough for this show. There is more than enough to do a great job with the lighting and that is of course what I intend to do, but several things that I see very clearly in terms of how the show and certain numbers should work is just not possible.
It has been great working on this project and in many ways I see this as helping me return to writing in this space. I have been sitting on something of an artistic plateau. It has felt for some time that my work was holding still at a consistent quality and level of work. This is all fine and good as the product was quite high, but I became increasingly unsatisfied with myself because I felt I was not growing or forcing myself to stretch artistically. After a while that led to a decrease in my writing here.
With this project I can feel some of whatever it was sticking me in place begin to loosen. For one thing it is a children’s show and I find those always delightful to work on as there is a degree of freedom in them that I really enjoy. In addition to that, the show is very much not an “idea piece.” For me this is good and a stretch as I tend to intellectualize most projects and have my work live in the realm of ideas more than the viscerality of the work.
It is interesting that I have this restraint given the amount of dance work I do but so it is. With Beauty and the Beast I have really embraced the emotional world and the musicality of the piece. This may sound obvious given that it is a musical love story, but for one so cerebral and interested in minimalism as I am it is a big step.
A lot of this has been due to really embracing the power of love as a transformational device. That is the central idea in Beauty and the Beast and I have been looking at my own life and where I have seen that manifest. And it is true, the power of love can move mountains. It can transform someone so profoundly that aspects of self once considered fundamental to one’s way of being become mutable and new.
I have a new love in my life and even with the newness of this it has changed me in powerful and profound ways. Or more to the point it has given me an opportunity to grow more into the person I have been striving towards for the last several years. This transformation in my personal life is now finding its way into my artistic and professional life. Being open to love and to what it can give you is a powerful and terrifying thing. It requires the strong to be vulnerable and the vulnerable to be strong.
Embracing the power of love has opened up new ways of Being as well as new ways of thinking about this and other projects. It is a new world, and one I am happy to step into.
