I’ve been thinking about chaos for quite some time. Not just because my life has been full of it lately, but also because I’ve always been one to search for meaning behind the events that occur in my life and in the lives of those around me. As a mover, I’ve been intrigued and amazed by the body, the myriad ways available to train it to move, its ability to store our histories and then allow those same histories to be uncovered, revealed, and the fact that this body, its innate intelligence intact, is ever ready to begin healing no matter how far it has been pushed, ignored, beaten and neurologically “brainwashed.”

After being seriously injured in 1985, I was no longer able to take my body for granted. I had to rely on my kinesthetic intelligence, which I had to work very hard to excavate, to rehabilitate, re-pattern, and re-train my “dancer’s body.” Even though I may not have danced again I could not look at my body any other way—I was a dancer, a mover. My training gave meaning to my life and as time marched on, and I was injured again, my dancing changed as did my body and my life. Injury to the body, adversity in the path of life—these things meant the same thing; an elegant way of declaring “shit happens.”

Yes it does…and looking back and asking “what if?” is futile if one’s purpose is simply to flagellate oneself for choices made in the past and dwell in the mire of regret. None of that for me thank you. Yet I found myself thinking about the theory of chaos, and the idea that there is the possibility of an underlying order in apparently random events, and I thought about the phenomenon known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” and I began to wonder “what if?” in a totally new way.

Every moment is an “initial condition,” every second expands out into infinity with immeasurable possibilities. There is only the present moment. When I am completely aware, without drawing a conclusion about something, the vastness of life is overwhelming. I can access my creativity, it is boundless, but I must remain in the openness of the present moment. I must pay attention. Easy enough…HA!

What it comes down to is this: Chaos Dance Theatre is the manifestation of every experience I have had through my physical body. If you have danced with me, touched me, smiled at me, flipped me off in traffic, you have had something to do with the creation of Chaos Dance Theatre…and I am grateful.

This is the beginning of something astronomical.

Photo by Carol Petersen