After 25 years of making dances depicting the human condition, relationships and the comically absurd, this year allowed me to look back and honor the dancers, the dances, and the archives of Adams Company Dance through the ages. What a gift to have been able to do the work I have been doing for all these years! I surely could’ve given up many times when the going got rough. I recently told a former student, who just started her own company, that the key to success is tenacity. It’s not all about talent or luck in this field, but it is about how well you can stick to it when the odds are against you. Balancing it all has been a challenge, but passion always trumps — oh dear, there’s that word… Talk about challenges we faced this year, and one can only imagine what is to come with this guy in office. Ughh!
Through trials and tribulations on both a personal and global scale, I marched through 2016, with a bit of a ball and chain feeling I was dragging around. However, I know I was not the only one. My steadfast and stalwart rehearsal studio, ” The DANY,” closed their doors from the weight and pressure of the economy. Oh no! Thank God for trials though, as that is the stuff of creativity and art — but c’mon — enough already, 2016! I chose to celebrate my dancers, however. They are the committed ones that came through the muck and mire of their own personal trials, and like the phoenix rising from the ashes, they helped navigate through, using their ultra-talented gifts to fuel our choreographic endeavors. I owe everything to them! Take a look here at their beauty in motion!
So looking back at the tenacious doings of 2016, I will remember fondly my Jin Shin Jyutsu Self-Help class for dancers at Greenwich Academy’s dance department, in Greenwich, CT; a fun podacst called “Quest Hands,” with one f my former dancers, Robert Halley, who started his own business; a summer into fall rehearsal schedule with James A. Pierce, III, working on our new dance “Sentimento Spirituale”;” our archival video shoot at Gelsey Kirkland Theater and our near-debacle, where we lost, then found all the video footage; our “Behind the Lens,” screening at the Bryant Park Hotel: our 25th anniversary celebration event; and lastly, the spiritually uplifting performance of James A. Pierce, III, in his new solo on the bill of Aries in Flight, at the West Park Presbyterian Church in NYC, where two performances that day allowed for a divine experience!
Most fondly, I will remember the dancers who showed up this year and performed in and attended our events — a reunion of my saints — who marched in some way, for some part, through these dance fields for the past twenty-five years, all who contributed to the essence of ACD; and, just like the postmen — through rain, sleet, snow, and hail — they delivered, no matter the weather… and that’s tenacity!
