From Aaron: LIFTing towards liftoff

Shedding the technodoubts that cling to my computer eyes as I uncertainly navigate the realm of promises and dreams of world wide communication that is the internet, I bite a small bullet and begin writing my thoughts, hoping that they are not lost in some backwater of non accessability. The project is the LIFT, the challenge is formidable. Strangers are not comfortable being pushed up hills. How can this be changed? How can this project serve as a larger exploration of crossing the divide between strangers? How can these interactions result in people shedding their habitual eyes and seeing a moment transformed? How can this foster my growth as a dance artist and human? How can I avoid accumulating the scum of rejection as a man trying to touch strangers in public? How can I continue to be brave, compassionate and rigorous, both on the hill lifting and in the aftermath, reflecting, working the raw grapes of my experiences into understandable wine. I want this to mean something. I want it to take hold and instigate at the very least a conversation that would not otherwise have blossomed. I want people to at least notice their patterns of interaction on the street, even if they are not able to change them. I want some acceptance of strange kindness from strange dancers.

For now it is a time of questions for me, of explorations, flexibility, drawing boards and sticking with.

Last rehearsal I had my first "success," Pushing a drunk irishman up the hill to post alley where he could continue to enjoy himself at Kell's. We shook hands and I felt a soaring in my chest. Such a small thing, but so huge, to feel his openness to me, to feel that I had boosted his already high flying day a little higher, and to feel the heap of previous rejections and recoils from my hands melt a little bit into the past. This project is not what I imagined it would be. More personal somehow, harder, grittier, thicker into the tension between art and entertainment. It is reassuring though, to see that if we just stick with it, learning from our previous experiences no matter how hard they are, then we grow, and become more clear, and find new purpose in what we are doing. Its like an experiment with far too many variables to ever be scientific, and yet for the same reason vastly interesting, surprising and spawning of long chains of theories. May you nameless ones accompany us on our journey, and may we reach the crest breathless and renewed.
aaron