In 500 words or less, please tell us
your reasons for applying, your entire relevant professional history, an
idealized vision of your next five years of life, why you think your goals will
morph into reality, your favorite color, and your feelings about global
warming.
Welcome to the application marathon.
It's my third year out of undergrad
and I've started navigating the world both as an independent artist and a
graduate degree program hopeful. As you can imagine, this
involves spending countless hours drinking too much coffee and selling
myself through language to a panel of invisible people tasked with
deciding whether or not they wish to meet/partner with/fund me based on
my ability to woo them via writing sample.
Invariably, each application has
required a personal statement. Every personal statement has posed at least 4
black hole-esque questions (see above). And, to my simultaneous excitement and
dismay, all have included the caveat "in 500 words or less".
The first time I ran into this
puzzle, I found myself wavering between an incapacitating verbal inertia and an
eruption of words so violent the fallout threatened to bury anything of
value beneath a thick layer of idea debris.
If you're the artsy type, and
perhaps even if you aren't, my guess is that you can relate to functioning in
an environment where excess of some sort truncates beauty, meaning,
and or interest. I encounter the affliction regularly in forms ranging
from stage performance to literary analysis to conversational oversharing.
In grappling with this conundrum,
I've refrained from posting for a while, wanting to write about a something,
but determined not to waste precious words preaching about an anything.
What is pertinent to my artistic
practice?
How do these things relate to my
community (designation and definition up for debate)?
And how can I forge this discussion
without wandering off on tangents or getting caught up in the network of
thoughts occupying my headspace?
Thus, I’m challenging myself to
apply the 500 word restriction to my writing. In each post under the
<501 umbrella, I will delineate my preliminary thoughts on a topic of personal
creative interest within aforementioned word limit.
Yes, this process is highly
self-serving. If you are unequipped to handle copious ‘I statements’, run now. However,
if anecdotes, odd metaphors, and probing questions are your thing, you have
come to the right place.
Hopefully, some posts will require further
research and fleshing out. Ideally one or two will inspire you to serve up
popcorn or brownies and initiate an impassioned debate amongst friends. Should
you choose to engage in this sort of verbal volley, please share it with me.
Ultimately, my goal is to utilize these
linguistic sketches as points of departure for further conversation. For me,
this means within the field of contemporary dance, but I don’t wish to impose
limits here-
Aside from word count.
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