When looking back at my body of work, 28 years of choreography, sculpture, and direction, I can see how my parallel psychedelic practice was informing my creative work all along.
Despite my Eurocentric training in Ballet and American Modern and Jazz dance, I was creating a different kind of movement. I was doing extremely organic grounded movement that had not been part of my training or background. I was wrapping horizontally around other dancers on the ground as a vine. I was sinking and falling to the bottom of the ocean. I was eating other dancers in a group carnivorous ritual. I was humping the crowd like primordial soup. I was sucking on ears as an alien right of passage. I was feeling up water-filled bulbouses. I was designing sculptures for humping upside down. I was designing sculptures about self-pollinating Perfect Flowers that were basically making love to themselves. I was making steel structures for aerial balls of humans. I was designing fiberglass balls full of holes for an octopus to explore with her tentacles.
I was out there.
I didn’t even realize how out there I was. I thought my work was simply a new take on the old form. I thought I was doing what all artists were supposed to do - innovate - say something that hasn’t yet been said.
I took my work very seriously. I was a serious artist. I was an insane workaholic even. I tried to get the presenters at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to take me seriously around 2000. I received my press kit back in the mail with an accidental message. Someone had forgotten to take the post-it note off my folder that had written in pencil, “Looks like a bunch of Ravers on Ecstasy.”
I was shocked and dismayed. I was offended. It didn’t matter that literally every cast party at that time was an ecstasy party. It didn’t matter that we were taking magic mushrooms during our Tahoe retreats and were literally performing at raves. I was a theater artist - a theater-quality artist, and I had trained my entire life to do this work.
How dare they write me off as a Raver on ecstasy!
It reminds me of the time I was first dating my now husband. His mom said to him that he needed to beware of artists. They often do drugs. Again, I was super offended. It didn’t matter that the first thing I did was introduce him to all of the psychedelics I used to explore my mind.
I guess Mama, an immigrant from India, with her strong accent and apparent disconnection from current culture, somehow had me pegged…even before my husband did.
It turns out that we are all probably moving through the world on impulses and chemical influences, not fully aware of what we are doing - our egos sensing just the smallest piece of the fabric of space-time.
It turns out that psilocybin brings out the organic, connecting, primal, existential level of my art-making. I have a hunch that that is just what it does. It brings us all down to the Earth and reminds us from where we came. It lets us know that we belong here on this planet - a part of this biosphere, regardless of what and who we think we are.