Theresa Andersson says that early in her performance career she couldn't sing and play a tambourine at the same time. Talk about coming a long way!
Bob Edwards
"Tell me about the video you made in your kitchen (two years ago)."
Andersson
"Oh, yeah. I made a video of the song Na-Na-Na in my kitchen because it was really difficult and exhausting to try to explain to someone what I do... it's hard to understand unless you can see it. So I put a simple video camera on my kitchen table and I stood in the corner with my set-up and I just did it. I put it up on iTunes purely so I could send it out to promoters and gigs and stuff like that. And then somehow it worked... a lot of people saw it... I didn't have to explain any more."
Bob Edwards
"How did you come up with this?"
Andersson
"It kind of started out of necessity. I was invited to tour Scandinavia... and I couldn't afford to bring a band, so I got my first loop pedal, because my main instrument is not guitar - To sit and play and sing with a guitar... I just thought it would be boring. It just wasn't my strength. I wanted to be able to incorporate more violin and more singing. So that's when I got my first looping pedal. -- I went over there and had a ball. I guess I discovered a lot about myself as a musician. Once I got it down, it just became part of my body. The combination of using all these electronics... it is a little bit like a dance."
Or maybe a lot:
Kurt Anderson"Do things ever go wrong?"
Andersson
"Oh, yes! All the time."
Kurt Anderson
"Then why do a live mix each time? I think I'd be tempted to lock some in."
Andersson
"Now, where's the sport in that?!"
Oh my. Oh my.
Let's count just a few of the things to love in this story:
1. Necessity mothers invention. She is invited to return home to show her gifts. Apparent lack leads, not to dismay (Oh no, I can't do this because I don't have what is the norm), but to creative-problem solving based on serving her strengths. Is this the way of wisdom or what?
2. Natural blossoming follows. She discovers that she enjoys her somewhat unusual solution and expands it to create her own unique form. Expansion requires embodying. Awkwardness and accident transform themselves into a barefoot dance. Embodiment, that most feminine act: Body=Matter=Mater/Mother.
3. Continued pattern of expansion: a tight corner opens into the whole wide world. Once again, working with the simple means she has at hand, a low-tech demo (where words won't do the trick) in her kitchen's corner reaches a broad audience of viewers, and her career possibilities grow in ways she couldn't anticipate. Hestia would applaud the hearth metaphor here.
4. She embraces risk, playfully making welcome each unpredictable occurrence and "accident." This is the definition of aliveness. An artful discipline of giving each moment its due, because each one is a birth and birth is sacred
5. And when she takes the stage, is that a Celebration! or what?!
How shall we raise the Yin? Like this is how.