A Personal Statement
I am a dance artist, choreographer, wife, mother-of three daughters & educator. As a dance artist and choreographer my credentials/accomplishments speak for themselves. I created two dance houses, Between the Bones Dance and Bone House North, where I have helped people to learn to move, feel and create. I have produced just over twenty dance theater productions. My movement and creative process is based on letting go, finding range and unearthing the story that is already there. I take people out of their heads into their bodies where they learn to create and feel like the animal they once were. My work makes exquisite dancers and humans, in body and heart, along with creating evocative dance theater productions.
I am a person who must express as an occupation/human which means I have learned many forms of movement practices. I have tried many things on, some things working and a lot that does not. A dancer is always in a high state of play and everything she knows and understands needs to come together at once. We don’t have time or use for clunky steps or too much mind work. As an educator I echo that.
My life hit bottom four years ago when my daughter was poisoned and left for dead at a party. Normally I am a can-do person but this one shed the light on what I was not looking at. At the time, I did not have the personal/emotional skills to handle it. I began scaling the walls of personal growth models, only to find that I had the process to heal all along. I just did not know it yet.
My work is simple, direct, digestible like training dancers ready for the stage, it’s ready for life. I help people connect to their innate quality to move and feel, rather than adding on ideas, we are just letting go to the person that was always meant to be. Because we are art making, we set outside of ourselves what is deeply wounding or holding us back and we begin to witness it as an observer. Our wounds and arrows become the subject and we become the creators of letting them go.
As a dance artist I have learned time and time again to work with insane rules, limited resources and pressing deadlines, while somehow still coming out on the other side with something beautiful. When building a choreographic piece I know that all that participate must agree, grow and work together. We stand in each other’s strengths and carry and support weakness or we will not succeed. The piece becomes a microcosm for a well-working society. I am both playful and fierce in getting there.
This past winter/spring I put my work to the test. Not only did I do this with a group of women, I did it with a group of ten children during COVID. While many practices, forms and performances were unable to carry on, my work continued and thrived. In each process we made both a film and a live performance. At first we performed just for our beloved due to COVID life in June. We later performed for a larger audience safely. What was inherent was the stories we created were self-portraits of ourselves in this time not only as individuals but as community. The audiences and the performers wept with joy and release of grief. This is little bit about the women’s show:
“My company’s name is Bone House North. It’s namesake for what I do and it comes from a poem by Seamus Heaney, “In the coffered riches of grammar and declensions I found bān-hūs, its fire, benches, wattle and rafters, where the soul fluttered a while in the roofspace.” A bone house is you, it’s me, our bodies, a structure, a container, and here, it is also a mythical house of transformation. While the world was shutting down last year, I was just beginning a transformative dance process with ten women, seven of whom had not danced as adults. The task was to use a performance process to allow women to tell their stories, moving through old wounds, arrows that hold them back, richly delving into a movement and choreographic practice that evokes letting go and finding range. We had only one real rehearsal together before COVID happened. Suddenly, the mythical house became real. We were stuck in our homes with nothing to do but deal with ourselves. We did. These goddesses performed this work in June for their beloved. Reality and nature merged as we built our performance in meadow at Neu-Hinterland in Morrison, Colorado. These rugged princesses set free their stories both internal and physical, connecting themselves to the animal they are in movement, surrender and love. It was breathtaking to see a group of people fight so hard in the worst of times.”
I am interested in using my artistic process as a way to streamline educating, creating, connecting and healing. I have the skills and curiosity to be malleable moving in and out of leading, supporting and helping. It excites me to lead my own process as much as it does to embody, shape, shift the vision and dreams of another. I am exceptional at delivering content to any audience no matter who I am in the process.
I want to be more accessible and expansive for those who do not have the means for help or even the time to make it happen. I am really questioning the racial/economic gap of what I have been offering/taking myself over the last ten years. Now more than ever I see that this work is important and needs to be simple and available. My dream in this year ahead is to connect and create with others, making way for more people to feel, move and heal. Reaching out in new ways is how I will share that.
I am also about to start a new performance process to spread this work farther called The People’s Project. I am gathering local professional artists of all kinds (musicians, dancers, actors, etc., to create a site specific dance theater piece that culminates into a community installation of light and storytelling set for November 13-15, 2020 & February 12-14, 2021.
in love & gratitude, Mary Lynn
