Throughout our lives, we wait. We await the call out of scribbled Starbucks names, pronounced incorrectly. We wait endlessly for trains, joining together to complain all the while at their delay and irregularity. We wish our time away in anticipation of the end of a course, the start of a holiday, or a birthday celebration. We long for Friday, from the disproportionately early moments of Monday. A ticking clock of anticipation and forward thought. ‘It will be better when’… ‘Once this year is over…'
What are you waiting for? Are you hungry? Are you waiting for an email, a telephone call, a shadow in your doorway? These are your personal clocks. How long will you wait?
As I type, I am sitting in a dressing area enclosure in Texas waiting for the next show to commence. I am in full costume and stage make up. I have billowing false eyelashes affixed to my own. I have deep shades of red carefully painted on to my lips, and deep flicks of coal eyeliner sketched upon my eyelids. I am waiting. Waiting for the jingle of the 'Circo Vazquez' circus show opening music to commence. I have been waiting since the last show of this evening finished, and much longer in truth.
People from
varying countries, backgrounds and ages have reached out to me recently with their stories. It has amazed me not only that anyone has read this blog at all
(always a wonderful surprise to me) but that readers have felt that anything I
am doing has connected to their own lives. For this, I am very grateful.
In truth, I believe it is most important to find something you are in love with, and not waste a
moment in spending as much time as possible with it, or in pursuit of it. No matter what, this is what is vital. I am in no way qualified to tell anyone else how to lead their lives, or how to find the motivation within themselves that
is so intrinsic to finding what makes them happy. But I
can share some of one story, as I have done previously within these imaginary paper
walls of blogging, to try to offer some structure for new ideas to be formed.
I spent my years from birth leading to
adulthood experimenting with every art form possible, in attempts to try to
find my own path. I painted, sketched, and drew with everything from pencils
through to sticks and mud. I assembled sculptures. I decorated anything I could
find. I designed fashion, attempted to sew, and took photos of my friends
in trees, studios and railway tunnels in varying creations. I filled
sketchbooks, covered canvasses, painted designs on to fences, wrote poetry, and
made haphazard structures out plywood offcuts from which to draw their shadows
in the sunlight. I eventually undertook two art A-levels amongst my other
studies trying to work out what art form truly fitted into my hands. Despite my
love for it all, I increasingly felt the guilt of an artistic imposter. I
somehow felt like a lost generation artist, as I guiltily emulating artwork of
times before rather than creating anything truly my own.
One ordinary day, one of my very most
soulful and important friends took me along to a ballet class whilst we were in
our first year of Art College. I joined her, to keep her company predominantly. Then,
in Bath city arts hall, something stirred. I discovered what was to become
every paintbrush stroke, every clay sculpture, every photograph and every
drawing I had ever experimented with. I found the materials of who I was born to
be. In that room, something happened that no words I could ever type could ever
explain. All I knew, as I walked away was that whatever it was that I had just
experienced was to be my life. This I knew.
But I was 20
years old and I had never experienced a moment of technical dance in my entire
life! I was inflexible. I was awkwardly untrained. I was living in Bath,
enrolled at a prestigious art college. ‘It’s too late’ was all that echoed
around me. But a seedling had been irreversibly planted.
So I returned to my hometown. And blindly invested
every scrap of my soul and physical ability into working as hard as I humanly
could to try to find my way back to the euphoric moments of my own Narnia that I
had so inadvertently stumbled across. I rented cold church halls in exchange
for cleaning them, just to have space to practice. I dug out doorways of
village halls when the snowstorms came, unable to allow a day to pass where I
wasn’t practicing. I painstakingly stretched at every opportunity. I practiced
in the fields behind my house. I travelled between 3 differing counties
attending dance schools anywhere I could Google search. I enrolled in
children’s ballet classes - at the great amusement of everyone there - just to
establish the basics that I had not yet experienced. I studied jazz technique
from YouTube videos. I examined show DVD’s and observed classes. And
finally, in the spring of 2010 I managed to convince a panel at a full time dance
college to take me, on the premise that my hard work would continue. The phone
call of acceptance was one of the most exhausting moments of it all. I
physically collapsed with the relief, slumping in the corridor of the offices I
was cleaning at the time to pay for my training.
Two intensive years of more than full time
training later, I leapt out of my training academy into the arms of my first
dancing contract in colourful, wonderful Morocco - the birthplace of the Liberty’s
blogging journey.
Because it isn’t about the closing moment
of making a dream come alive. It’s about the travelling path of every stage of
it. Every truth, lesson and reality lies in the groundwork, not the finish
line. It is the truthful journey that is there to embrace, rather than the
completion point. Along with every splayed paintbrush, blurrily developed
photograph, uneven clay pot and worn down ballet shoe marking each step
of the way.
Sometimes it’s the never-ending wait for
the end of a long day. Sometimes it is for the gentle acknowledgment that we have
been waiting for the right thing. Sometimes we shall wait patiently.
Sometimes we cannot wait a moment longer. Everyone knows what it is to wait for
something. And I pray and hope that every human has the opportunity to want
something more than can ever, ever be described. To want something so badly that it
fills every pore of your body, every idea in your head, and every vein and bone
of your infrastructure. It is this that
is what is most important! The job role of Liberty’s Centre for Arts &
Wellness will be to guide those who come to it’s doors to make their own
individual choices for whom, what and how they seek.
I am no braver, wiser, or more
astrologically fortunate than the next person. I just decided not to wait a
moment longer, once I knew what I wanted to seek out during my time here.
It is our individual choice how we respond
to the clocks and pauses of our lives. For every human heart and clock there is
a journey to be found. Make yours your own.
Ready, set…
Helen Victoria.
X.