The community outreach classes (Experience The Arts in collaboration with the City of Bellevue) have been amazing. These are free lectures and dance classes (Reading Dance and Introduction to Modern Dance) created to bring new viewers to this art from. I start each lecture by confessing my greatest wish...that everyone would love this art as much as I do. This creates a few smiles...and more blank stares. But eventually I am able to get everyone on my side. I swear I should have sold real estate. I would have made a killing.

The Reading Dance lectures are almost more beneficial for me than for the viewers. Being forced to quantify WHY I put these phrases in this particular or in accordance with the overall arcing purpose of the work AND THEN expressing this to people who know very little about dance has proven to be an exciting challenge. One can't get too philosophical or repetitive. And one can't bullshit either. I have caught myself doing a little of both, but I somehow get there in the end. One recurring theme that seems to pop up in my work, that I only recently discovered, is the theme of hope. I am a serial optimist. Maybe that's why I can never get any funding.

The dance classes are some of the most rewarding I teach. People show up in jeans and high heels or with their babies, but by the end of class they are utilizing sustainment and force and rise and fall and it's absolutely glorious. I tell them how special they are...that they are no different from the prima ballerinas of the world, or the Barishnikov's (sp)...that those people only had the fortunate opportunity to hone their craft. I tell them that their love of dance is exactly the same...special, rare and amazing.