Welcome Back

It's been nearly a year since the last time I posted here. I have no excuses, not really, but I have been hard at work learning Tai Chi Chuan, with my sifu Tom Chan, who says he will make me a sifu by the end of the year. Oddly enough I have learned quite a bit that would be relevant here, and as soon as I figure out how to describe that I'll let you know.

Another thing. A few months ago my wife Kathleen and I went to see an old friend's dance company do a show at The Theater for the New City. We were pleasantly, enormously, surprised at how far Laura Ward's work had come. While I always admired her quirky inventiveness, disturbing playfulness, her sense of surprise, as well as a number of other qualities, her most recent piece, called "Whistle Me Higher" was not only on par with the best dance performances I've ever witnessed, it was an amazingly ambitious collision of mythos centered around the experience of Las Vegas. Not only is the city the great cliche gambling and entertainment capital, but it is not far from sacred native American and nulcear weapons testing sites. All of this comes out in the show, with sparks flying where they strike each other like flint on steel. Petite dancers in glittering patriotic garb grin manically to throbbing electronica, winding at times with lounge and parade tune overtones. There are occasionally theatrical breaks where a woman and man in breakout suits sweep away piles of fallen dollar bills amid fallen dancers, who get carted away in wheelbarrows. The two exchange poetic and philosophic dialog, sometimes strewn with scraps of clinical hypnotic scripts, suggesting, of course, a culture of the entranced, in which any verbal exchange wavers between directive and guesswork.

I had lunch with Laura not long afterward, and asked her how she managed the whole thing, from conceptualization, to composition, choreography, music selection, costumes, set design, you name it. What I found out was that Laura has developed an incredible prediliction for a kind of project management that you just don't see in people trained by professional organizations. It sounded similar to the way Charles Mingus described leading his band, where the core themes and spirit of the work was embodied by the participants (an amazing collection of performers, I need to mention), who worked out the details through their own impetus.

It's hard to imagine how something like this could be translated to the ordinary job world (even Laura works a day job, or rather day jobs), but it's a much different process than the task list and Gantt chart way of doing things, and it's got me thinking that there has to be a compromise, at least, or so many ways to organize and lead from inception to completion, if only we studied the way we actually did things, tracked the intinsic path of our minds and bodies, and designed a methodology around that. I would want to learn project management from Laura, rather than the PMI, even if they do get Colin Powell as a keynote speaker.