It’s been a long time since I’ve updated my site or even told a story about my life in this space. So today I’m giving myself permission to use this space to not necessarily tell a linear story, such as my breakup or my 90 days in Europe, which I initially planned on blogging about here, but then couldn’t bring myself to do for various reasons. But instead, tell you smaller stories that may or may not build on each other, but ultimately build and have built who I am.
I think its interesting that I started this with “Heart”, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my Senior Solo show I wrote in college, which was called the “Journey of a Heartbeat”. This was an aerial show performed on a 10 foot ladder and followed my heartbeat’s journey from birth, to it stopping, then restarting and all the way through college. I’ve often thought about adding the now 20 years of my heartbeats journey since its initial inception.
Slight side story, the way I even came to this idea as a solo show was because when I was at this little arts college in England (RIP Dartington College of the Arts) I got to pitch a multimedia show to devise. The pitch, which I need to dig back through those college journals for full details, was to create a show to manipulate, monitor, and then sync the audience’s heartbeats together. The idea was to go through the gamut of human emotions and how we physiologically respond to those emotions, then manipulate with words, breath, music, rhythms and ultimately be able to get the audience’s hearts to beat as one. Kind of my ultimate “One Love” concept. For the early 2000’s that was absolutely bonkers to even conceptualize, as technology was so expensive and I had no idea if it could even be a thing. I had even thought of like stethoscopes hooked to microphones that would stay muted, till all at once the theatre filled with the sound of everyone’s heart amplified and then work to make one beat together. I mean this still does kick around in my head a lot so maybe with current tech I can try someday but alas.
Back to the main story, so I had hearts and heartbeats on my mind a lot on my return from England, which I also suffered a great deal of reverse culture shock. There was an aerial theatre class I started taking on return and the way I learned to move into shapes, made me want to create a solo show with aerial aspects to it which lead to that solo show. The ladder was used to represent a ribcage and myself as the curled up heart beating within it. To then using it to represent the birth canal, to a bassinet, to a mountain, then a social scale, then the walls I slowly built up around my heart, then the cage those walls had created for me to feel unable to be loved and to love without being hurt. Not bad for a 22 year old.
This is all to say that the thing that is deepest in my heart, the way I love to connect, the way I experience the world, and the way I love to discover the world is through storytelling. I’ve been known to be a bit of an enabler when asked if someone should do or try something I’ve often responded to myself and others, “Will it make a good story? Go for it!”.
So now I am using this space to start to connect again through my random life stories, so if you’d like to follow along, I’d love to share. I can’t promise how often I’ll write, but the important thing for right now is that I am writing. I’m sharing, I’m doing the thing that makes my heart sing: telling a story.
Danielle Cintron 