Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer

Partnering and People

228 | Partnering and People It is ironic that I enjoy being by myself. As my husband, Jon, likes to say, we each like our own company, which is a good thing since we both spend a lot of time alone. Alone time has a particular quality. It reminds me of a big dog rummaging happily through familiar and unfamiliar habitats. Our old golden retriever would circle around and around, searching for just the right spot, and then flop down for a nice long daydream or a good chew on some bone that needed a little more attention. Growing up, I could do just that with my dolls: rejoin the game I had left on the floor up in my room and feast for hours on some odd combination of talking, acting, and ruminating. Alone has a certain comfort. But then we also have our still-adolescent four-year-old hound dog, and it is just as easy to speculate on her kind of alone craziness: bounding with ridiculous new energy toward anything that is calling. Coming from any direction , opportunism overtakes her and she is gone in a frenzy of excitement and pleasure. Either way, by now I know, as do the dogs, how to follow the scent and pursue the trail without knowing the end. I like all of that. But as much as I like the alone time, I spend most of my work life in dialogue . What follows is a brief look at how that practice has been informed by partners and people and by tricks of the mind. Irene Eckstrand It all started in water. I was in the shallow end of a pool at a funky spa in West Virginia , the end that mothers stand while the children splash around and try to swim. The next Thanksgiving we returned to spa, exchanging my husband’s storytelling prowess for a weekend of rest in the woods. I was in the pool again, and the same children, including Anna, were splashing around, now a little older. I think it was on the third Thanksgiving that I realized the same mom was also standing there, and so we began to talk. That is how I met Irene Eckstrand, a biologist working at the National Institutes of Health. Like our evolutionary ancestors, we too soon stepped out of the water and began taking long walks, which led to deeper conversations on the relationship of our working lives, including the beauty and rigor of art and science. As I was developing Ferocious Beauty: Genome, Irene and I met for coffee every few months. That is where I made the conceptual leaps I needed in order Partnering and People | 229 to make sense of what I was learning from the laboratories of the scientists and from our own laboratory of rehearsal. At the heart of transdomain practice is this concept: apply your ideas and thoughts from one place where you’re working, or from one group of people you know, to another. Then let the rehearsal process or the stage or the event be the mediating space. Let the spark move into a new arena and see what happens. With partnering comes the confirmation of ideas already developed, as well as challenges and interruptions. It comes with doors flinging open on new thoughts that don’t even have a house yet. It comes with a lot of wrong turns, good humor, bad taste, and messy, messy ordeals. It can be flirtatious or fatuous, stimulating or sedating, irresistible and irritating. But I persist because most often the encounter yields some strange or brilliant or first-time-ever idea, vision, or experience that moves the whole enterprise forward. Usually I retain a position to be able to stop the worst of it. Not always, in which case the misery is vast, the sleepless nights many. Most projects require a research period. When the research requires meetings , and when the early meetings are conversational, I often feel like I am going fishing. The talk can be quite passionate, but it has a whispering quality as people get to know each other. I am searching for a hook, looking for the connection that will drive the partnership. It is important to know if this is a person I can spend time with because I know what lies ahead will be demanding , confrontational, communal. Will we be able to get along, share ideas, take criticism, and learn from each other? But when it comes to ideas...