Doing Research for the Memoir

On a rainy afternoon last week, when I finally felt free enough of the pressures of work and body care etc., I put on a sweatshirt, stuck a flashlight and pen in my pocket and stuffed a canvas bag full of a dozen large manila envelopes (containing last year's financial records and some medical and insurance records going back as much as 10 years). This bag I slung over my shoulder so I could use my other shoulder to hoist the folded massage table that had been sitting in a corner of the loft far too long. Both of these we're going down to the storage cage in the basement garage. And, I told myself, I was finally going to take the time to clear out and rearrange all the stuff that had accumulated there since I moved into this place 13 years ago.

Deep in my brain, I had a secret hope (and dread) that I might find some old records that would shed some light on my memory retrieval process--hope that I might find some programs of dance concerts long forgotten, and/or the transcripts of the psychic therapy sessions I had done in the 1980s--and also dread that I might discover I had thrown all that history away in my moves, or worse, that I had kept so much of it it would send me into another bout of paralyzing overwhelm and confusion.

I had already pushed my capacity for doing research into my old dance career by spending all the afternoons of a recent visit to see friends and shows in New York City burrowing into the archives of the Dance Research department of the Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. I'd huddled over grainy videos of my concerts from the late 70s and early 80s, concerts of my early choreography and of my dancing in the work of other choreographers. In the 10 or more hours of video viewing, I had only managed to see about a third of what the library held.

When I returned home, I had followed that up by boxing up all my stored videos here at home and shipping them off to be converted into digital format so I could sort through them at a more leisurely pace, and also so I could share the watching with Nick or other friends. And I’d written off to Drew to let him know that I had found tapes of the work we had done during the years we were together, informed him I had invested in transfer process, and made a date with him to view our work together a few months hence when I would be able to visit him and his husband at their home in the Catskills.

This digging into my dancing past was not what I had originally set out to do in beginning to write a memoir. I had been motivated by my dear friend and writing teacher Sarah, to start writing stories at the intersection of my personal life and my current professional life as a teacher of somatic therapies (primarily the Trager Approach to Movement Education, but also my integration of principles and practices from Ashtanga and Kundalini Yoga, Gyrotonics, Continuum, and more recently Tantra, Sacred Intimacy and Surrogate Partner Therapy.

As I'd gathered and rendered stories from my relationships, stories that felt like powerful moments of change or growth in my development of self, and then begun to weave them together with moments in the healing work that has now dominated my professional life, I found myself more and more perplexed by how to organize all this so that a reader could follow it, let alone be insprired enough to keep reading. It was a jumble of themes and events, a recounting of places and activities and, most movingly for me, a chronicling of the transforming power of intimate relationships.

Eventually, I confronted the need to get the memories of my life events out of the jungle of tangled thoughts--a tangle of present concerns, judgments and hopes that obscured the important truths from recent and far distant past--and put down in words a timeline of the events, locations, people and feelings that could serve as my guide. That led me to questions about when I actually lived with whom, and how that overlapped with what I was choreographing and with whom I was dancing. Those questions sent me to the Library of Performing Arts,

and then to the shelves of old videos, videos I could no longer play due to aging equipment. And now to the dark and dusty basement storage.

The first tasks included replacing the light bulbs so I could see what I was doing. Then removing all the heavy stuff up front (massage tables, croquet set, rolling table) to be able to see into the back shelves. A little climbing around, and some shoving stuff aside, revealed two boxes full of papers I had forgotten I had. One of them was marked "Roger's papers: Dance Career, Diaries, Readings - 1973-1988." The second was marked "Trager: client records, committees - 1985-1999." I pulled the first one off the shelf and set it by the elevator. The second I left for another day, perhaps in the fall or sometime years from now, when I will feel ready to confront all of that.

The memoir stories that emerged from the dusty bins focus on my early adulthood--dancing, choreographing, expanding my consciousness, years full of sex and love and loss and shedding my naiveté; years full of growth, exploration and expansion; years of maturing, ripening, embodying the life I intended to live.