I keep coming back to Pilobolus’ summer intensive, and not only for the dance technique.

…Not that you can really separate the technique we learn and build here from everything else that makes this experience so resonant.

And that’s so much of it: so much of why I came the first time, and so much of why I keep coming back, even though my work as a professional ballet dancer looks, at first glance, like it must be a completely different animal.

I keep thinking: so much of what I’ve learned about how to be a dance artist, I’ve learned here.

Not the steps—the steps don’t make the artist (and Pilobolus’ whole approach isn’t really about “steps,” per se).

Rather, I’ve learned so much here, from the very beginning, about being vulnerable, about finding what’s there, about connecting with other people, about using my body to speak to someone’s soul. About speaking my own soul through my body.

This is never the same experience twice: every time I come, I’m a different person (you can’t cross the same stream twice, etc). But because it’s in the same place, using the same basic frameworks for connecting with each-other, for moving together, for creating together, it very vividly calls memories back to my conscious mind, and that’s like having a different kind of window into myself.

I remember what things were like; what I was like, and sometimes I think, “Wow, this is so much less scary now,” and other times I laugh at myself and go, “Welp, still bad at that.”

Here, it’s profoundly okay to be bad at things. It’s profoundly okay to screw up. In fact, some of the best stuff comes from the biggest blunders. Grace rushes in at the most unexpected moments.

Also, I always wind up crying. Usually, I make it to Wednesday, at least, but this time a moment in a piece one group made this afternoon—Monday, Day One—caught me right under the sternum.

It is a gift to be able to cry in a room full of people who were, a few hours ago, complete strangers.

And now I’m in bed, reading, reflecting, with my fan humming and blowing a cool breeze over me, and I can’t help but be so staggeringly grateful that in the midst of a rocky stretch, here is this incredible gift.

Here is this place of grounding, where—if I’m lucky—I will come for many more years, and every time I’ll have just as much to learn as the first time

It isn’t a stretch to say that Pilobolus played a huge role in my path to becoming a professional dancer: I began to learn to really trust myself and to feel my own power in Pilobolus’ masterclasses several years back [•]

• This was in the Before Times, so it honestly feels like half a lifetime ago.

It also isn’t a stretch to say that my first Pilobolus Summer Intensive cracked open my soul in a way that it desperately needed.

This season of healing in which I currently live began, in earnest, here.

That healing, too, has been central to my work. To be a dance artist, it helps to be able to be vulnerable. It helps to be able to forge a connection to other human beings—to come open-hearted to pas de deux; to come to the audience with whatever truth the role before you asks you to carry. This is as true in ballet—possibly the most artificial species of concert dance—as it is in the gym at Woodhall, where we strip off our layers of training and Just. Fucking. Move.

Part of what we do here is just learning to get out of our own way. To try to step out of self-judgment and do stuff; to move from the inside out instead of thinking about the eyes watching our outsides.

Somehow, that’s incredibly healing.

This year, I almost didn’t come: we’re still hypothetically buying a house in an historically terrible market for buyers, and although this is professional development, I didn’t know if I could justify even its very reasonable expense.

Mom offered to pay half my way, so I signed up for one week.

Another year, perhaps, I’ll do three.

But for now this week is enough. An island of deep healing in the midst of a life that’s full of both healing and struggle right now.

So I’ll be here and breathe here, and thank G-d I’ve come back again, to this touchstone place, where so much began for me.