My Journey - Part 1

My journey began a long time ago - probably back when I was taking theater arts classes at high school - probably when I had a few minor roles in school plays... It wasn't how things were supposed to happen to me as I remember. I was supposed to go off out west to study archaeology - my other passion at the time. I had already volunteered in high school on an archaeology dig and continued helping out at the Cataraqui Archaeological Research Foundation in Kingston, Ontario once a week on volunteer nights.

I remember the dismay and concern of my father who was very generously paying my entire way through college. We had a lengthy man-to-man talk after I had come back home after my first year of college where told him I had auditioned and been accepted to both the theater program and dance program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Instead of focusing on digs and memorizing timelines of pre-historic human development, I had spent the entire year working on a university play about the Nuremburg trials after the fall of Nazi Germany called The Investigation by Peter Weiss. Ironically the director and guest teacher that year was Peter Elliot Weiss - no relation! I also was enrolled in acting classes each term as an elective class, and was auditing a dance class.

Every time I went to my Archaeology lectures, they seemed dismally like hard science. I wondered how a bunch of science nerds could reconstruct past lifestyles and cultures if they lacked the creativity and cultural understanding of an artist. Perhaps looking back, I was unfairly judgemental, but I suppose I used that to fuel my new found passion. I told my father in no uncertain terms that I wanted to study to be dancer - and so perhaps it was then that my journey truly began with its first big step...

On the left dancing at Simon Fraser University, and on the right some 20 years later.

My Journey - The Prologue

My journey is a personal story about an aspect of my life. To write a life story or biography about everything in my life would be far to voluminous - as it would be for anyone. It is always necessary to edit out many things from a biography. Some parts of our lives are ones we're happier to forget or would be hurtful to others if written about. Other parts are not important to us. And, still other parts would take us off on a tangent, and would be best left for another story at another time. My journey is more of a short story of a particular theme that is important to me and who I am as a person. In this story, I've chosen to focus on the artistic expression of the human body through movement, and my relation to this theme. It is a journey through physical training, performance, and greater enlightenment. With any kind of training whether physical, mental, or spiritual, my journey is an incomplete one. As long as I live, and perhaps after, I will always be in a state of movement on a path towards greater self-improvement or enlightenment without end. Such is the case with this writing. There are always more details I could provide, more people I could mention, more anecdotes, or more pictures or video clips. But, my journey is my earnest attempt to capture something that could be lost from memory if it is not written. It is the story of my journey into the world of dance, and  later tai chi chuan and yoga. I don't pretend when I write this that I am any great cultural hero - for most certainly there are more talented people than I who probably deserve a biography more than me. Apart from writing so that I don't forget my memories, I write because I have an interesting story to tell - one that I enjoy sharing - and one I hope you will enjoy reading. As I motivate myself to pursue my dreams, let me motivate you the gentle reader with the knowledge that in your life it is just fine to reshape your dreams as your circumstances change in your journey through life.