The Gravity of Regret

Sometimes emotions sneak up when I least expect them, and when they do they throw me off balance. I stumble inside, and inevitably the emotions show up on my face. My kids tell me I’m a terrible liar.

Daniel Charon, former dancer with Doug Varone dancers, is in town teaching master classes at University of Colorado for two weeks. Modern dance has a group of early founders, all of whom developed their own movement language. Each artist informed and shaped the art form. I did the “Jose Limon thing,” and so did Daniel, so his movement phrases were gratifying for my body to learn and execute.

Daniel lives in New York City and is planning on getting his MFA in dance. I brought up names from the past – to see if he knew teachers/artists with whom I studied and whose work I performed there back in the ‘80’s – Clay Taliaferro, Ruth Currier… But, suddenly, time stood still. I was having a “sliding doors” moment. Why hadn’t I gotten my MFA in dance? I could be teaching at a university! I was good at choreography – I could have bodies to work with and be paid for doing it. What had prevented me from making a career of it? Why had I given up modern dance to pursue musical theater? Who was I kidding? I can’t even sing! I did it because I thought going commercial would make me more money, which would justify to my parents that it had been worth paying for me to get a dance degree. I was under society’s spell: money = value.

I always tell myself I have no regrets, but while I was standing there talking to this wonderful artist, I felt like throwing myself on the ground and having a tantrum. I don’t spend a lot of time in the land of regret, so as I moved into the first set of dance exercises (which, thankfully and ironically, were on the floor), I let regret eat at me for a while. After all, our shadow feelings will reemerge if we don’t give them some attention. Regret feels icky like jealousy, but not nearly as intense. (The last time I was jealous I turned into a fire-breathing dragon and nearly seared all the trees in my backyard!) If jealousy had a visual it would be the Biblical gnashing of teeth or eating wild animals raw, blood dripping through teeth. In light of that, I could handle regret.

Gravity is part of the dynamic that creates what movement will follow next. If the arm is swinging down, we see how far it will swing back up… we use the weight to create the next “organic” move. Modern dancers were using that term way before the farmers! So, choreography grows not out of a defined vocabulary but out of momentum and conflict between forces, such as coming into contact with another body. Regret feels like too much gravity sucking at my heart. I had to come up for air.

There was a reason I didn’t follow that path. It’s easy to forget the how and why we chose a particular road, because memory is fickle and reality is an illusion. Back then I was tired of dancing, and I quit altogether. I focused, instead, on raising two beautiful daughters I wanted more than anything in the world, and during what little free time I found, I wrote. When I returned to dance in 2005, it was like meeting an old lover and realizing that we were meant to meet again. I have been head over heels ever since. Had Terpsichore and I married all those years ago it may have ended badly.

Sometimes we do things because it makes sense, and sometimes we follow our gut and it makes sense later. Our ego voice (if you haven’t met mine, I’ll tell you now her name is Nasty) tends to want to judge… all the time, as if she has nothing better to do. Nasty judges the way I talk to my children, the food I eat, the way I wash the dishes and the choices I’ve made. The key is to ask her to go back to her dark corner and then step right back into the moment, into the blessing of BEING, because this is where joy is living without illusion and complication of too much thinking.