Lessons from Kay Clark: Seeking Answers to Today’s Questions in RDT’s Archive (Part 3)
PART 3: ON LIFE
By: Kara Komarnitsky
Kay’s moments of frankness and frustration feel familiar to my own thoughts when I have struggled to feel like it is all worth it. As artists, we pour all our energy and self into what we do but we can never predict where that effort will go, and rarely does it come back to us in the way that we expected or hoped.
Awoke feeling frustrated, bitchy, and crabby about real or intuited or completely imagined dance people’s attitude. What situations are happening? What situations are the result of the mind turning over and over in its own residual garbage?
A dance company is too small a situation, too small a part of the world to have your sanity depend on it. The world is too counter to it. Lack of education, lack of money is defeating. It is wonderful with it is flourishing, mutual support, exhilaration. But you can’t beat your head against the wall for unavoidable circumstances. And it isn’t worth deteriorations into the petty. You must be flamboyant and gay.
Don’t expect something called management to be any more rational than something called artistic. Analyze for yourself. Prioritize and evaluate. “Expectations” are things like contributions – they may have track-records, they may have percentages and graphs – they may not happen.
Pettiness demeans any nobility about the work. Gossip demeans the work and begins to make pettiness multiply. Leadership works at principles not at demands. It works to create an environment to grow people positively and standards for people to measure themselves against. It tries to lance boils that are festering. It tries to set an example to inspire to guard against pettiness.
Today RDT is an established company that almost every dancer and dance teacher in the Salt Lake Valley can somehow trace their artistic lineage back to, either through a class they took or a performance they saw. It is easy to forget that when RDT was formed, it was a risk, an unknown, a daring attempt to start something that had never been done before. It took many years of experimentation, struggle, and determination before the company made a living wage, presented a regular season of performances, and offered a strong educational program. Kay writes, “This work I have done is extremely scary. No guidelines. No precedents. For me as an artist. For me as a group leader. There has been the isolation from related role models – though there haven’t been true examples to relate to anyway I suppose. The loneliness of making your own way. The loneliness of independence.” And yet she found so many ways to keep solving problems, challenging norms, and developing systems that have seen RDT through almost 60 years of meaningful and innovative dancing.
The old mind constructed a dream to prevent me from waking up. It was elaborate, a “scientific experiment” to keep me thinking, at a subconscious level, that I was doing to right thing to stay asleep.
The richness of this dream has made me realize anew the everpresence of the minds imaginative power. How we all dream. That dream is sometimes overused as a term and that quite literally it’s something that happens while asleep to even stupid people and possible even animals.
Dream, imagination is the root of art: of telling stories, of dancing, of making plays, of singing. We all have the need.
Dancing and singing came before language, story-telling, play-crafting.
Dreams come before that.
I am grateful for Kay’s notes today to put my own challenges into perspective. It has always been and always will be a challenge to be an artist, but there are many who have come before me and laid the groundwork for dreaming big and pushing the boundaries. I am grateful for RDT’s archive of insights, resources, and dances that continue to feed my questions, interests, and creative visions. RDT’s history shows that there is a pathway through difficulty and encourages artists to keep taking risks. One of Kay’s lines keeps coming back to me as a lighthearted reminder to keep going: “The art world is full of strange people. The dance world is even weirder … It is not boring, however, when you need security and sameness you can move to Murray.”
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