Forcing hands: Decisions, decisions, decisions

Obviously I haven't blogged in months, probably years. I'm not sure I'm starting now, but I wanted to put into words some thoughts.

After three years in Cambodia, I moved to Seoul, South Korea, last week. It was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made, and going through with it cost me more courage than I knew I had. I left behind a house, a moto, good work, a very strong community, and one of the loves of my life, for nothing certain whatsoever -- just the promise of becoming a better artist, a better choreographer, a better person.

The impact of the decision is still shaking the ground beneath my feet -- and how could it not? But I've started to understand something.

Humans don't like change. The less we change, the better. It's a fundamental aspect of our egos, formed from a very, very young age. Change is uncertain, not changing is safe. As long as we don't have to change, most of us don't. We like playing by rules we know.

I could have stayed in Cambodia. It would have been more than easy. But I didn't, because I knew I needed to be challenged. I needed to shake things up. I needed to change the game. If I am going to build my life into what I want, I can't just stay and let life live itself.

No one is an island. We are all connected to each other, in ways we can't even begin to comprehend. And once we actually make a decision -- once we shake things up -- we force the hand of the people and the world around us. People like to hold onto their cards, but if we play a card, they have to as well.

I'm not entirely sure what it means, but I know that in making this decision, I've forced the game to move. The game of my life, the game of the lives around me. How everyone else plays is not up to me, what cards they play is not up to me.

But sometimes we need to do this. We need to storm back into the room of our lives and turn over all the tables, throw the drinks, shoot off some fireworks, send everything flying. And then we can build our new game, with our new rules. And that's when we grow, that's when we learn, that's when we find ourselves in places we could never have dreamed of.

Make decisions.

And then, even if your knees are shaking and your knees are weak, go through with it.

That's being alive. That's making the choice to live, and not just survive. However much it hurts sometimes, I'll make it every time.

Love just gets in the way: Sometimes truth isn't true

About four years ago, I was talking to someone in France and telling him all about my plans for life (which no doubt resemble nothing of what I currently think about it). He was very enthusiastic and supportive, but near the end of the conversation, he said something I haven't been able to shake since.

He said, I had the passion and the drive to do everything, but he could see one thing that would stop me: falling in love, and having my heart broken.

In the years since, this has somehow become Truth for me. Love gets in the way, love derails dreams. Just don't fall in love, and you're fine.

It's a view that falls nicely into the Modern World, Modern Woman that's gotten all over everything. Whoever you are, if you are not succeeding or going forward with your career at every moment, then you are going backwards. While it's not all feminists saying so, the connotations of the "you don't need a man" sometimes careen into "you shouldn't need anyone."

There is nothing wrong with succeeding or going forward with your career. But life is more than work. There are angles and corners that need attention too.

I've had to rewrite each sentence here more than once because I keep second-guessing myself and thinking, well that's not a bad thing, but the fact of the matter is, whether or not I should have or not, I fell in love. And ever since, that guy from France has been chattering in my ear, full of dire warnings and fear, and I'm getting totally sick of it.

So I'm letting it go. I don't want that Truth anymore. Life is never a set of rules, a follow-this-and-you'll-get-this, and I'm pretty sure that love doesn't derail dreams, it is the stuff of dreams. I will always be me, and always go forward with what I love and what I want from life.

I was about to launch into a big, rational argument for why this is okay and why I'll still be -- but you know what, never mind.

I'm just going to say this: Truth is not always true, life is very big, and love is an amazing thing.

And leave it at that.

"Oh, that'd be great for them": Things people don't need to say

When I was putting together the funds and logistics for the Tari festival in November, I heard something fairly often from my western friends:

"Wow, that'll be a great opportunity for your dancers!"

I get why people might say such a thing. I imagine that if the same situation had been taking place in New York with American dancers, I'd probably hear, "What a great opportunity for you!" instead. But from my perspective, it was a strange thing to hear: the three dancers I was working with were already very accomplished, well-traveled performers who have been dancing and performing professionally for multiple years. The "great opportunity" in my mind was for me, and I was just happy they'd agreed to be part of the project. 

You can of course argue that it's a great opportunity for everyone involved and I'd be likely to agree with you, but what I mean to call attention to here is the difference in how some people viewed it and talked about it. It's one of those cultural stereotypes we tend to carry with us, and worth it to point out. Because the dancers are Cambodian, people tend to assume they don't have great opportunities like that. While that's sometimes true, it's also just as often not true. 

It's one of the reasons that, when setting up my Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign, I tried really hard not to mention or at least not make a big deal out of the dancers' nationalities, instead focusing on the cross-genre creative process aspect. The project wasn't about getting Cambodian dancers to Malaysia, it was about putting together a production from a cool starting concept. 

The trip to Malaysia broadened all of our horizons, and we all learned and grew from it, me no more or less than them. 

It might be semantics, but worth having a think about. 

Introducing The Book of Noah

What in the world is The Book of Noah?

Well, if you believe wikipedia, it's a "non-extant Old Testament pseudepigraphal work, attributed to Noah. It is quoted in several places in another pseudepigraphal work, 1 Enoch, as well as mentioned in another, Jubilees. There have also been fragments...in the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Thanks, Wikipedia. 

The Book of Noah I want to introduce you to is not a pseudo-anything. It is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel, which is now widely available in ebook form. It takes place both in the near future and five hundred years from now, telling the parallel stories of U.S. Attorney General Chris Cordwainer during World War III, and Noah, the young High Priest-in-training of the Church of Noah, when the “war to end all wars” and its aftermath have radically transformed the country. 

It started out as a story. For most of our preteen to teenage years, my sister Hilary and I used to tell stories every single night for hours at a time. We took our favorite public personas and invented new lives for them, added in characters, built entire worlds of our own making. There were many fabulous stories along the way, but this particular one was told across the end of 2006 and through the first half of 2007. 

Sometime in fall 2008, I was spending a weekend in Bronxville, NY, with Hilary -- she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence College and I was a freshman at Columbia University. I happened to think back on that story and realized that, seen from a certain light, it could be a post-modern Christ story. 

Right about that time, the main character of the future storyline, Noah, marched into my head and introduced himself. 

So I started sketching out his story, and when Hilary asked what I was working on, I told her, and the rest of the weekend went to pot as we hammered out storylines, character sketches, and major plot points. I went away and wrote a 50-60 page detailed outline, which Hilary did her magic on and turned into a proper draft. We sent it back and forth furiously, editing and cross-commenting and trying to find the neutral ground between our significantly different philosophical viewpoints, something that very much came into play in the story. 

When we finally thought we had something, some two years later (spring 2011), we gave it to our dad to read, with great pride. He came back with some kind but very thorough critique. Disappointed, we shelved the project for a few months. But we were unwilling to let it go; it meant too much to both of us, in many ways a personal manifesto for dealing with a crazy, uncertain world. So that fall, we came back to it and dealt with the critiques, reshaping and restructuring the story. It went through several more rounds of edits, until it approached the version you can buy today on Smashwords.com. 

We did think about approaching publishers, but after the nightmarish scenarios Hilary went through trying to get her (amazingly fantastic) historical fiction novels published -- seven months to just hear if the publisher would read it, backlog, editors loving it but never following up, etc - we decided to just go ahead and release it ourselves through the Smashwords platform.

Today's date - Election Day, November 4, 2014, was chosen very deliberately. I think you'll understand when you read it.

So without further ado, let me present The Book of Noah, by Hilary and Gillian Rhodes.

Now available for purchase at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/487258 .

Buy, read, share, love, and be inspired!!!!

Did anyone else notice that?: Watching kids' movies

The other day I watched How To Train Your Dragon 2. I’d watched and enjoyed the first one and thought it would be a fun little diversion for the evening.

It started out promising and fun. But sometime in the middle, right about when the villain was introduced, I got a little uneasy. He was your pretty stereotypical villain, nothing much new – he did his thing through intimidation and an iron fist, he wasn’t all that smart, he couldn’t be reasoned with. Your basic villain trope, in other words.

But as the movie continued, I got more and more uncomfortable. The climax of the story made me cringe, even though it was standard issue – the villain can’t be redeemed, the hero vanquishes him, etc. By the ending monologue, I was even angry.

Have you figured it out yet?

The villain was the only dark-skinned person in the midst of fair-skinned vikings. He was dreadlocked and scarred. And he fit, to a T, the ugliest archetype we have in the West for the “Terrorists.”

When I went to the internet to find out if anyone else had noticed this, I found some very interesting things. The first was that hardly any, if any at all, of the critics, mentioned it. Not even the fact that he was the only dark-skinned person. Crickets. They all loved the movie and its “emotional resonance” (are you kidding me? A kids’ movie where the father DIES in the middle of it is great because of its “emotional resonance”???).

All right. Instead I googled “How to train your dragon 2 racist,” and discovered a few fringe tumblr pages. And then I made the mistake of looking in the comments.

According to most people, Drago Bludvist is eastern European, and therefore he is Caucasian, and therefore the movie is not racist. In fact, the entire discussion seemed to be centered around whether or not he was supposed to be black. Nobody was talking about the terrorist parallel. 

I can’t be the only one to see this, or be disturbed by it, right? The rhetoric isn’t new, by any means – it is, in fact, to cop an idea from my brilliant sister, straight from the Crusades. The “Other” is unreasonable and terrible; nothing they do is redeemable. “They” use intimidation and force, “We” use reason and peace-making tactics. It is only in defense that we fight, and of course “We” will win.

The ending monologue sums up this archetype in all its terrifying bigotry: “Those who attacked us, are relentless and crazy, but those who stopped them, oh, even more so! We may be small in numbers, but we stand for something bigger than anything the world can pin against us. We are the voice of peace, and bit by bit, we will change this world.”

Do you see it? It sounds great, doesn’t it? The hero wins, the villain is gone. We are the peacekeepers, we stand for something bigger (“City on a hill,” anyone?). It is the Manifest Destiny rhetoric in its very essence. Imperialism is A-OK because we are the ones who stand for something. 

Am I overreacting? I don’t know. I doubt the filmmakers did this on purpose, but what’s really disturbing about it to me is how ingrained this rhetoric is that it’s turning up so undisguised in a kids’ movie.

More than that, I found that the choice to make Drago Bludvist whatever he was supposed to be, black, Arab, eastern-European, but in any case very clearly darker than all the others, and portray him in the way they did, was far too easy and made the movie seem, to me, like downright propaganda for justifying the next Crusade.

So I have to ask not, am I overreacting, but do we really want our kids growing up on this stuff? And does it have to be so ingrained that hardly anybody bats an eyelash at how blatantly racist it is? 

There's got to be another way. I'm convinced of it. Just because this is the way it's always be done doesn't mean it's the way it needs to be. 

The glitz, glamour, and flourescent lights

Cambodia is poor, you say?

It is. This is true. But there are also people here who are rich, filthy rich, with Lexus cars and slick iPhones (often more than one), throwing down hundreds on bottles of whiskey at ritzy nightclubs. I don't know where they get their money. Corruption money? Business? I couldn't tell you.

I'm not entirely sure if the glitz and glamour people -- such as the stars who come through CTN - are filthy rich. I do know they are all dripping with fancy electronics, stylists and entourages following them around with the latest (mostly Korean) fashions, carefully painted faces. The image is everything.

The world of glitz and glamour in Cambodia (and of course it's not exclusive to here, it's just where I've experienced it) lives apart. It has its own places, attitudes, fashions, crowds. I kind of flit in and out of it, with my job at CTN and the people I've met. Case in point -- this past weekend, I was asked to perform at the launch party for the 100th issue of Ladies Magazine, apparently the number one lifestyle magazine around.

The event took place in the "Fashion TV Lounge," in Naga World, the only casino. The Casino itself is glitzy, but the lounge is even sleeker, all mirrors and colored lights, TV screens and modern white tables. A host of girls in Little Black Dresses ferrying  bottles of vodka around. This:

Walking in, there was a stop for the paparazzi, flashing lights, the backdrop with all the sponsor names (and mine, for that matter -- the gig was free, the publicity was my payment). People arrived fashionably late (an hour and a half or so), boys in bedazzled blazers with no shirt underneath and enough hair gel to hold up the leaning tower of Pisa, girls in sky-high heels and fancy dresses, everyone walking in with their eyes swiveling to see who's there.

Honestly? The whole charade leaves me a little cold. It has for awhile, at CTN, watching the stars strut in and primp and fuss, then go lip-sync or, sometimes even worse, actually "sing." The dance groups do the same thing, the boys spending far more time on their outfits and makeup than warming up or, probably, rehearsing.

I think it's because I can't help but feeling that the whole thing is just a cover, a pretend world of silver and gold. It's like this: when it was time to warm up, I was led past the gilded toilet doors to the staff only door, and inside, it looks like this:

Here, the illusion is shattered. The lights are harsh, the tile stark. The girls limp and mutter about their feet as they go off for more alcohol. As they step through the door with now-full shot glasses, they change. They smile. Nobody knows their feet hurt.

Like me. I didn't really want to be there. I was tired, a little sick, extraordinarily stiff due to the return to ballet after a summer off, and chiefly concerned with returning home to finish my book. But I am a professional. So I did my makeup, stretched my aching muscles, and then stepped onstage and danced like there was no tomorrow. No one knew the difference.

I think that's what I mean about the glitz and the glamour leaving me cold, because as far as I can tell, it's a world meant to cover and hide blemishes, where image is all important, and if it cracks for one minute, you're lost. I don't mind playing dress up, playing in the spotlight, sure. But I want to know what's beyond the mirrors and pancake makeup, what matters at the end of the day if all the prettiness and money vanishes.

Who are you, when you leave the glitz behind, and step into the flourescent lights.

Out of budget: Working with Cambodian dancers

Disclaimer: The following is reflective of my reality and does not necessarily apply to all Cambodian contemporary dancers.

I've noticed something recently. Actually, I noticed it at the end of last year, but have only been able to articulate it recently.

When I was in Malaysia for the festival, I was talking with the choreographer of the Korean group and asking him how he got started. He said that he had just gathered a group of friends to start training every day, and then found a producer along the way to hunt for gigs, and now whenever they perform, he pays the dancers. Otherwise, he doesn't. He said, "why don't you do that in Cambodia?"

The thing is, according to my experience, such a thing would be completely impossible in Cambodia, as I have yet to meet a dancer who will voluntarily go through training/rehearsals without a firm guarantee of a performance or payment. They might agree to something in theory -- such as my dancers did in the fall before our performance in October -- but in reality their commitment to such a thing is very minimal and I always felt like I spent more energy getting dancers into the studio than actually creating.

Don't get me wrong: as an artist, I absolutely agree that art should be valued and that the idea that artists love what they do so there's no need to pay them is both disturbing and dangerous.

However, I also believe that being an artist also includes a practice of training and self-development, a practice of questioning oneself and abilities. You can't just slap the title of "Dancer" on yourself and leave it at that -- there is always more to learn, always room to improve. The second I decide that I'm a good choreographer and that's that, I stop learning -- and I stop being an artist.

It feels to me as though the Cambodian contemporary dancers have looked out to other countries and seen artists being paid, and as such are demanding the same (which is perfectly legitimate by the way), but have missed the other side of the coin -- the endless hours of doing things for free, or paying to do them, to become better artists and dancers.

For example: my dance partner and student, Dara, recently told me that he would not join the festival in Malaysia in November (a very big festival with lots of groups and fantastic exposure) for less than $200. I had already offered 50-100 and all expenses paid.  His reasoning was that it was his second time. There was no thought in his head -- at least, as far as I can tell -- about what he might gain from the festival. Only the money. Regardless of the fact that 99% of the dancers in Sibu -- and probably that again for the next one in November -- have several years worth of training on him.

Yes, I'm angry about it -- I'm trying desperately to be reasonable about it, and questioning if I'm the one being ridiculous here. But Dara was really the last dancer here I really wanted to work with, and I'm out of options.  I am a young choreographer -- it's going to be a while before people pay me enough so I can pay dancers at the rates Dara is asking. The dancers here are out of my budget, and the disinterest in experience and professional development is the chief factor in making me want to leave. Even Cambodian Living Arts, which remains one of the coolest organizations I've ever worked for, recently nixed an idea for a second choreographic development workshop because of the "lack of hard skills" offered in the workshop goals.

Yes -- I want to leave. There is nobody left I can afford to work with, and I know that there are many other places full of dancers who are hungry to learn, hungry to gain experience, and willing to board a train without seeing the destination. Those are the people I want to find -- not the people who simply hold out their hands and say, "Okay, but how much are you paying?"

I'm not getting on a plane tomorrow. But my focus has shifted, and over the course of the next six months or more, I will be looking to move onto a place where I can grow as an artist, surrounded by other people with the same vision. At this point, I don't see it in Phnom Penh.