Core values

 A couple of weeks ago I also attended a Dancers Career Development Zoom session for independent dancers. It was based around the theme of finding direction and your personal values. It was such an excellent session, with a very safe space created for us to share our ideas and feelings. We were given a list of values to reflect on and had to place them into 3 different categories- A: very important, B: not so important and C: not very important at all. Most of the values went into the A category for me with some finding themselves in the B category. We were not given much time for this because they didn't want us to consciously decide where they should go but to go with our 'gut instinct'. Then we gradually narrowed it down to identify 5 core values. It was hard to be so selective but also great to be clear about those which stood out most clearly.

My 5 core values are:

Authenticity

Empathy

Connection

Courage

Trust 

Generosity

From this we had to pick one which stood out most at the moment and think about ways we could live more in alignment with this value. I identified

Authenticity 

I realised that this was one of the first areas I became interested in when doing my BAPP. How can we become more authentic performers? What does authentic performance mean? It did form the basis of my BA studies for sure. A blog post I did around this area can be found here. What I realise is this value is so essential to me as a performer but one that I often lose sight of. It is hard to fully understand what our authentic self is, but I feel that it is as much about recognising that our so-called 'imperfections' are what make us who we are. That we can share our weaknesses as well as our strengths and be generous to give a true essence of who we are to our audience - our real emotions and feelings. It is perhaps about trusting that we have something to say. Tyla Tharp identifies this as being one of her 5 biggest fears yet also recognises that this fear is 'An irrelevant fear' as 'We all have something to say.' (Tharp, 2006, p.22)

I considered ways I can ensure I live more in alignment with this value and came up with these solutions:

1: Talk more about authenticity as a dancer in my teaching

2: Meditate on the value each morning

3:     Remember the value when doing class or performing and remind yourself that you are individual and you want to be authentic, not a copy of someone else.

I already felt a lot more freedom in performance in the last week than I had previously by keeping this value in the forefront of my mind. 

During the zoom session I also raised the question how do we truly know what our gut instinct is? How do we know when it is simply our anxiety telling us we are not capable or undeserving of something. For example, I sometimes get a gut instinct I shouldn't do something when I really want to do it but feel that I am undeserving of it. I can only see this in retrospect. 

This is a question I have asked myself so much lately. I am really interested to know what other members of the MAPP community do to differentiate between a gut instinct and this feeling that we have when we want something so much that we have high levels of anxiety surrounding it.

Bibliography

Tharp, T. (2006) The creative habit. 2nd edn. New York: Simon and Schuster