Berlin was wonderful! A very interesting city: all the energy/creativity of NYC but with a more relaxed, less competitive attitude. It seems like nobody cares what you look like, or where you are from. There were a lot of different professional classes to take, and performances to see. Everyone said that it was unfortuneate that I chose to visit when most people were on holiday, but I found more than enough to keep me busy for the week. It makes me wonder what it is like during the rest of the year. :) One surprise was the technical level of the dancers in the classes I took. I was expecting to be quite lost (new styles, new teachers, new city), but in fact I found myself leading much of the time. This made me think about what Andrea said: "the word technique has come from our training and that's your base line, grounding as it were, but from that we need to let go... and explore something else." Up until now I have been striving to do very technical abstract work - "dancey dance" as it were. It was the primary focus at NCSA (my alma mater), and afterwards I spent two more years studying Cunningham technique in NYC. And while I worked on all sorts of little projects around NYC, there was nothing much to stretch my idea of what dance can be. The dance community in NYC is large enough to contain several sub-groupings, of which I was only attached to one small part. But even so, it is safe to say that most modern dance in the states is far more "classical" in form than most dance found in Europe. For example: Who uses a dramaturge in the US? Now that I've had the chance to see a bit more, I'm discovering all sorts of different qualities/abilities that are necessary to create and perform quality dance. A different point of view concerning what is a "good dancer". Of course it is immensely gratifying to do big expansive dancey phrases; the same wonderful feeling as when you really connect with somebody doing contact improv. But I'm starting to think that there is a large field that I have no idea how to access within myself. That I need to start looking in another direction. Find a more intelligent way to approach movement. Right now I can say that I truly inhabit each movement while dancing, but that I don't always realize exactly what I am expressing within the movement. I would like to have more awareness of the little details. Understand how to control the emotional context that I present to the world. Maybe I need to do more investigation on my own? Work more deeply on the comments I get from Birute? Or maybe it simply comes down to "performance experience". I don't know. When I return, it will be very interesting to investigate the NYC dance scene from this different point of view. I know already that I won't come back to the same things I did before. We'll see what happens.