My teaching is a simple one: when you feel no hope, move with your humanity. If you have done all the manifestation spells, built up your power, built a creative practice, embodied peace and then still felt no relief—this six-part series is for you.
If you’re feeling pretty hopeless, that’s the sign of readiness. If things haven’t worked out, that’s the opening. If you’ve considered giving up the fight, whether it’s in rage, terror, self-pity or catastrophic grief, I invite you to be still for a moment. And then let that be the beginning of a creative journey to understand who you really are.
As I detailed in the introduction, Choreonavigating Crisis, this course has emerged from my life-long, intergenerational practices as a musician, dancer, self-defense artist, fortune teller and embodied technologist. I have also refined this work through decades of study, including a PhD in what I call impact-driven dance: ancient dances my people have carried that allow us to meet life’s consequence instead of drowning in it.
My message of art in peril is also, I believe, the only thing I can really offer up from the enormous, diverse Roma and Sinti world that I belong to and not betray my own people as so many have done before. Our arts are famous for their resilience in the face of thousands of years of slavery, genocide, displacement, theft and erasure spanning continents, and I report that knowledge in my Tuesday letters from Gypsy Fires.
As we come to know each other better I can share that I have certainly lived hopelessness. The unconditional surrender it takes to continue tradition in the face of impossible circumstances is a stern, unforgiving teacher. I’ve come back from the abyss to help those that are ready to explore it, find what’s there, come back and show us what was found. This series is not intended as a replacement for any form of crisis support or intervention that you may need. As we’ll cover in the last course in this series, Kumpanija, there is a time to seek help, and I encourage you to get help if you need it and to help others when you can.
My offering here is one of artistic self-inquiry that allows us to open to the truth of who we all are. I promise you, if you are willing to simply let go—even just for a moment—on the other side is something more beautiful than you could ever imagine. And we’re all waiting to receive it.
Let’s begin.
Reading Occupation
Whenever I give a reading, I can usually tell how occupied someone is by how far back they remember. Did they remember what happened yesterday, or has their attention already been directed elsewhere? Did they remember what happened last season, last year or last decade, and did they notice what was changed and by whom? Did their parents remember what happened, and did they have the knowledge, time and ability to teach the next generation? What did their forbears forget, and what did they want their descendants to know, if anything? When reading history, do they know where at least some of their people were and what they did? Or were they taught in school or at a public monument to go back in time and memorize only certain people, places and events? Do they remember that we move as nature itself, or, as a Palestinian friend and colleague said to me last month, are they just a number?
