A Dance of Life

 I’m a bit on an ancestral mutt; the epitome of the American melting pot; a little bit of this, a little bit of that.  Unlike some people I know (like hubby who has a neat and tidy little ancestry pie: 5/8 Finnish, 1/4 Swedish and 1/8 French) my pie looks something like this:

It doesn’t look TOO bad until you know what it means.  That big gray part is the percentage that is of unknown origins (nearly 25%) and despite having 451 ancestors born in England, I’m only 15% English (both of my Grandfathers’ lines go back to Colonial Massachusetts) but my 14 German ancestors account for just over 25% of where I come from.

And while German is my biggest piece, my Lithuanian piece is exactly 25% because my Gran’ma was 100% Lithuanian (though even her own daughter didn’t know this until a few years back).  Her father arrived in Philadelphia from Lithuania at the age of 21 and both of her mother’s parents were also born in Lithuania, emigrating as a young couple and having 13 children (the first during their journey).

Like my own children, I had 4 great-grandparents still living when I was born, two of which were my Lithuanian links (pictured at right are my two Lithuanian great-grandparents, my Gran’ma and Grandpa and my mommy).  Growing up, we were very aware of our Lithuanian heritage and while we knew our daddy’s maternal grandmother was German, we didn’t know much more about how our pie is made up until we began our own research (my sister finds most of the people and I assemble the “pie”).

When it came time to create my senior choreography piece in college, I came across a Lithuanian painter/composer (M.K. Čiurlionis, we actually got to visit his house/museum during our visit to Vilnius).  Truthfully I don’t know how I found him or why I was looking, but his music spoke to me and his pictures were astounding and his works became the basis for my piece.

I took not only the music and art as inspiration, but I researched the culture and my heritage.  I used the phrase “Be proud of who you are and where your roots are grounded” (which I’m not sure whether I made up or if it is a Lithaunian proverb).  I looked up the national costumes and the traditional dances and I integrated these elements into my choreography and final presentation.  I even went to a bookstore and looked up the language and named the piece “Šeima Pagerbimas” which loosely translates to “Family tribute” and the individual sections the Lithuanian translations of “Gathering, Joy, Confide and Appreciate”.

I dedicated the piece to m Gran’ma, keeping in mind the Lithuanian proverb “The person who gives is a person who has.”  She came to the stage performance and it was the only time she ever made it to Florida to see me dance during my college years.

This piece has had special meaning in my life for many reasons.  It was the first complete piece I choreographed that was 100% my own with advanced level dancers.  I took it from idea to concept to completion and presented it on stage.  And while my choreography has certainly evolved and matured and developed, I believe this piece stands on its own still and is still something I can be proud of.

I pulled out this video of this piece to show my girls last week.  And it prompted me to teach part of the choreography to my students on the last day of the summer camp I was teaching for (though it was a hot mess due to Doodle having to go with me and his screaming the whole time).

And ironically, after revisiting this piece that means so much to me, the woman who inspired the piece left my world a few days later.  Timing is everything sometimes.

(unfortunately the video I have from the stage performance of this piece was obliterated by the movers when we returned to Florida but maybe someday I will reconnect with someone who has it…)