How does it function in my dancing practice? Why am I devoted to formalism? What is my relationship to formalism? Is it pyschological? Artistic? Socially conditioned?

I'm attempting here to further specify my research questions. Though they're organized as questions, I can read them as probing/probable answers to the question(s) that came before 

What is devotion?

December 2017: This reserach certainly touches on personal questions I have about my own methods and modes of working artistically. My efforts to separate the artistic from the scholarly often come after-the-fact, in hindsight, upon reflection. This course has been a practice in noticing those tendancies and this exposition is a practice in untangling them. 

Why am I afraid to work on my own? Outside of any known systems, formats? 

Question for myself? 

Do I cling to formalism as an external mould to grow onto?

Again, the judgment in this question tells me something about the questioner (myself) more than the interogated (myself). 

April 2018: The first part of this questions makes sense to me, but I believe the second part is a misunderstanding of myself and how I'm working. It seems very clear now that I'm working very much within an existing system (Cunningham) as a way of giving myself structure and external limitations, and afraid of being totally on my own. 

I both desire external structure and value my ability to make choices (agency) within it !

Perhaps this overlap of personal psychological inquiry and questioning of artistic identity might be best answered in a more personal environment. 

Where does desire/devotion come from? 

Why does it matter?


May 2019: Of course, no one is ever really alone. This work has been about trying to understand where devotion comes from, and to understand it is in it's nature always relational.