One Key to Unlocking the 
Body jovial,
Unearthed in Moving the 
Fluid synovial
 
Bolstering one’s
Experience of 
Body’s cajole, 
To Mobilize one’s 
Beautiful Soul.

I first met Maranda Blumenthal as a fellow dancer auditioning for Contemporary Dance Theatre of Tulsa’s artistic director, Jill Priest. 
Maranda and I quickly connected through our love of movement and performance.  We both had the opportunity to have our own opportunities to choreograph for the company, as well. I remember the experience of working under her as a choreographer to be nothing but fun with a lot of puzzles to solve. As a performer, that was always interesting to me. It helped forge our friendship for the years to come.
 
The next chapter of life for me was one of challenge but I was thrilled to find myself Maranda’s housemate (her and her gigantic bunny rabbit, that my cat hardly knew what to think of). The energy of another creative in the house was invigorating and supportive. I really feel it gave me much needed fuel to not only complete my grad studies but to find reserves of strength spiritually when we talk of faith and art matters. Maranda and I would find ourselves residing in the same state again a couple years later in Tulsa; two gypsy’s that always seemed to find each other. 
 
Although I don’t remember now how long Maranda has served on The Bell House Board of Directors (I apparently didn’t keep records tidy enough in the beginnings of Bell House history), I’m keenly aware of all the support and service she has provided selflessly for many, many years. In addition to the Board of Directors, Maranda also lent her creative talents to the Exchange Choreography Festival Creative Team in countless meetings and planning sessions that has helped make the festival the “go-to event” for modern dance in Tulsa. 
 
As she and her husband, Joshua, anticipate the arrival of their second child, she has chosen now as a time for a hiatus from board activity. I’m so appreciative of her service and commitment to the arts in Tulsa and at The Bell House. Most of all, I value our friendship and wait expectantly with them to receive this next new blessing into their lives. The Bell House doors are always open in a professional capacity for returning service in the future but, more importantly, they are open unconditionally to her and her family as we share life and love and, even burdens, with them for many more years to come. 
 
Rachel Bruce Johnson

We thought we'd highlight this article on voyagedallas.com from January 2019 on Erika Record....a past Bell House presenting artist. This just gives a glimpse of what she has been doing and how she has been moving the past year.  

JANUARY 3, 2019 Art & Life with Erika Record

Today we’d like to introduce you to Erika Record.
Erika, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I’m a native Texan. I was born and raised in San Antonio, and between high school and graduate school, I slowly moved further and further north until I got to Denton. I studied Dance at Texas State University in San Marcos. After that, I attended graduate school at Texas Woman’s University and graduated with an MFA in Dance. Now I live outside of Fort Worth, and I commute to my various jobs in the DFW area. I spend most of my time as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Dance at Texas Woman’s University. When I’m not teaching at TWU, I lead yoga classes at various yoga studios in the region. When I’m not doing either of those things, I fill in the gaps with freelance photography and graphic design work.
As long as I can remember, I have always indulged in my creative side. As a child I loved coloring and singing. In my adolescent years, I explored musical instruments and played the piano, violin, and French Horn. As a teenager, I loved dancing, and dance is what eventually stuck through high school, college and my graduate studies. In my professional career, while dance is my central focus, my freelance work in photography and graphic design have been integral to my success as an artist.
The life I lead now is not the one I imagined I would have as a child. For the longest time, I wanted to have a career in medicine. But in college, I felt a shift in my life that veered me down the professional path I’m on today. The life I’ve chosen as an artist has not been an easy one, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been rewarding or worthwhile. Every day that I engage with the creative process, I more fully realize my intelligence and personal power.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My art has been evolving and expanding over the years, so lately I’ve identified myself as a creativa. Under this umbrella I create dances, engaging lessons, photographs, infographics, websites, festival environments and more. But the art that I feel the most connected to is dance. When I choreograph dances, I find inspiration in everything from people-watching to cinematography to personal relationships. My work seeks to bring the everyday to the experimental on the dance stage. I value extreme physicality and intricate gestures. I appreciate continuous, fluid movement and intimate narratives. My dances typically stretch time by contrasting complex group unison with moments of prolonged stillness. In all of my creative work, I try to tell a compelling story or create a space for people to tell their own stories. I feel my work is successful when audiences are inspired and enraptured by the stories and worlds, I share with them.
Any advice for aspiring or new artists?
My advice to artists is to broaden your skill set. Many artists already understand that they are likely entering a lower paying career, so it is wise to supplement your income with additional skills. Knowing now that I am doing all of this work in photography and graphic design in addition to my dance career, I wish I would have taken some specific classes in each of those subjects while I was still in school. I am self-taught, so learning these skills earlier could have helped me expand my freelance work more quickly in times when finances were tricky. But you know, YouTube goes a long way (and it’s free!).
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
Dance is best supported by an audience who goes to see it live! When dance is collectively supported by the community, the artists who create, perform, and produce the work can thrive. So, whether you are attending a concert featuring my personal choreography or that of someone else, you are supporting my network and, therefore, my work as well. I choreograph often for the TWU Department of Dance, so you can typically see my work in one of the department concerts produced each semester (www.twu.edu/dance). I also create dances in various festivals statewide and regionally. The best way to find out where I am presenting my latest projects is on my website, www.recordmoves.com. For people interested in my photography, find me at www.erikarecordphotography.zenfolio.com.
Contact Info:

• Website: www.recordmoves.com
• Email: erikarecord@gmail.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/erikarecord
• Facebook: facebook.com/erikarecord
• Other: www.erikarecordphotography.zenfolio.com

​Inlet Dance Theatre’s Dominic Moore-Dunsonhas continued to develop his project, The Black Card Project. EXCHANGE Choreography Festival was privileged to have Inlet, Dominic and Kevin come spend time at the festival as Featured Artists in 2017. It is great to see the work still perpetuating. 

From their FB page: “The ‘Black Card’ Project” is a live action dance-theatre cartoon that examines the narrow definition of blackness and the African-American ideal of the “Black Card”*. \
 
Follow his facebook page for updates here: 
https://www.facebook.com/blackcardproject/

I believe very strongly that I have been called to dance, but in this past year, I've been struggling with what exactly that may look like. Dance has been a very positive and often therapeutic influence in my life, but it's also been, at times, a stumbling block for me, providing a wide-open door for insecurity, body image issues, and more recently, a lot of disillusionment and broken dreams. This school year in particular I dealt with an onslaught of psychoemotional struggles, as an increased workload of dance classes brought me face-to-face with some of my deepest fears and failures.

It all started last fall, after a year’s break from modern dance classes. The first week or so of the semester went smoothly, but as time progressed, I began to notice that I was gradually becoming more and more frustrated in modern class. I’ve only been studying modern dance for four years now, so at first I just wrote the growing irritation off as a natural fluctuation of the learning process. I thought it was to be expected, given that I’ve always had trouble picking up modern combinations and finding the correct expressions of movement quality – until I could no longer seem to grasp even the most basic exercises and could hardly pay attention to my teachers over the angry thoughts constantly buzzing through my mind: “I hate this. I need to get out of here. I’d rather be anywhere else than in this class.” I found the first documentation of this struggle in a journal entry from mid-September of last year:
“I learned a lot in Modern class today! That’s good because it usually makes me angry…I also find myself less thin than I want and the sentiment is growing. I’m still scared of being back row, understudy, odd one out for the rest of my life.”

The last two sentences refer more to my balletic insecurities, which slowly made the crossover to all forms of dance as the semester progressed. I sometimes joke that when it comes to ballet, I’m a professional understudy – always good enough to be cast in the ballet works, but when it comes down to who will perform in the three nights of shows,  I’m fourth or fifth in line. Perhaps that’s a terrible thing to write, but in all honesty, that’s how ballet is. It’s fairly cut and dried – either you have what it takes to be put onstage or you’re not quite there yet, and I’m still learning. In the beginning, it was relatively easy to bottle up my frustration, but within weeks I found myself exploding onto the pages of my journal instead of coping:
“I’m upset today. I cried in Modern class, got angry in chapel, and I don’t want to do any of the fun stuff planned for this weekend. I just want to sleep and maybe not exist anymore…I can hardly control my anger in modern class any longer, and I’ve resorted to mental obscenity screaming and leaving class to punch walls and cry. I can’t explain why I feel this way when asked, and I can’t convince myself that there’s actually anything worth considering…I don’t want to think about this or anything. I don’t want to be around people. I don’t want to be conscious…”

By October, the growing negativity of my thoughts was no longer confined to dance class. I had lost interest in hanging out with my friends, fulfilling my duties as the chaplain on my floor, and spending time with my family, and struggled deeply to find anything positive to say when anyone asked how my day had been. I looked for every possible opportunity to skip class, and cringed each time I caught a glimpse of the angry, jaded woman in the mirror.

Just after Fall Break, I finally reached a tipping point. I had learned a beautiful classical ballet variation in rehearsal over the course of the semester and when finalized casting was posted, I was once again an understudy. But instead of being grateful for the learning opportunity and continuing to perfect my technique in rehearsal, I shut down. I felt that I had irrevocably failed as a dancer, that my time had run out and that I was nothing short of a disgrace to the profession. I had lost my shot at success and could see nothing of value in my future. That day I decided I didn’t want a future at all. I went back to my dorm room, cried for about an hour, and prayed that I would die before graduation.

…And all of this because of disappointments in dance class. How could something so comparatively small on the grand scale of things cause such a ground-shaking disturbance to my well-being? Looking back, I see that I had centered the core of my identity around my success in dance – success according to my limited, closed-minded definition, which involved little more than finally being chosen for a soloist part by our faculty and landing myself in a ballet company after graduation. I knew then, and still know now that I am supposed to dance, but I had settled on one picture in my mind and had come to want only that, or nothing at all. It was the realization that what I had planned for would not become a reality, that finally forced to me to take a closer look at how I defined myself.

Among my classes that semester was Advanced Choreography, the primary objective of which was to create an original dance work with five to seven dancers. The piece I had been creating focused on the definition of womanhood, and I had been experimenting with using a mirror as a prop, symbolizing the different standards women use to evaluate themselves by. As I thought through the rationale behind this artistic choice, I realized that for nearly all of my life, I had been looking to the mirror of dance (specifically ballet) to determine my worth – a mirror that presented me with a reflection that was overweight, ugly, and untalented. What I needed to view myself in was the mirror of Scripture – a mirror that tells me I am unique, valuable, and loved unconditionally and infinitely by the God of the universe. My faith has been central to who I am for a number of years now, but for some reason, in regards to dance, I had failed to let what I believed influence the way I thought about myself.

It took me a few days to come to the realization that something had to be done, but fairly quickly after, I took action. That weekend, I drove up to the camp and conference center I work at to staff a retreat, bringing along a bag full of every old pair of pointe shoes I had worn over the years. That evening, I trekked out to a fire pit in the backwoods of the property, arranged them in a circle at the center, and quite literally, set fire to what had been all of my dreams for so long. That act is very likely the angstiest thing I have ever done, but as the physical representation of all those hours of work – the actual blood, sweat, and tears – went up in smoke, I felt a profound sense of relief. In that moment, I made the choice that ballet, or even dance in general, would no longer be an excuse for me to hate myself.

I’d like to say that after that day, everything has been fine. In truth, that’s not generally how life works. There were a lot of tears shed backstage at the dance concert that semester, and I ended up seeking counseling through my school to process through mild suicidal ideation and a brief attempt at anorexia. To this day, I sometimes still find myself grieving for a lost dream, but as time passes, I see more and more sweetness to the grief. I’ve continued in dance classes, and thanks to the constant encouragement and accountability provided by my teachers and classmates, I’m beginning to genuinely enjoy both ballet and modern dance again. I know I will dance after college – I’m not sure how or when, but I’ve learned to acknowledge the fact that the deep desires of our hearts are put there for a reason even when we can’t see any chance of them becoming reality. When I have a bad class or leave rehearsal feeling inadequate, I return to who I am as a human, created in the image of God. Knowing that I am more than a name on a casting sheet has come to be the most profound and meaningful discovery I’ve made in perhaps my entire collegiate career.

​Up until now, I realize, dance has been little more than a pitfall for me. I have called it all kinds of things that it is not in my life, and now I see the truth: dance is not my identity. Dance is not going to be my career, my ultimate destiny, a pastime, my weapon, the meaning of my existence, or even a crucial part of me. Dance is something God has put in my life because He wanted to, and He is the only one, at this point, who knows truly why or how. He has to be in complete control of this gift, or it will never reach the full potential that He has planned for it in my life. Dance is important to me because (and only because) it is a way that I can connect with and serve my Creator. That, I think, is more valuable than anything else I could have learned this year.

One of the many reasons I have found over the years to love my school is its focus on “Whole Person Education, Spirit, Mind, and Body.” Every student is held to high standards as a matter of policy: ORU actually has an attendance policy requiring students to physically attend class lectures, holds chapel twice a week (mandatory for all students, faculty, and staff), and requires all undergraduates to enroll in a physical education course each semester. Not everyone at school appreciates these requirements, but as a fairly motivated collegiate with any measure of school pride and the desire to succeed, I find very little to criticize in these policies.

If anything causes a stir among ORU students, however, it’s certainly the aerobics points/Fitbit/field test system that currently constitutes our physical education program. Many students find the performance standards (rumored on the university grapevine to be as tough as some military qualification scores) to be, at the least, daunting, if not downright impossible. Here’s a short breakdown of what every ORU student is expected to achieve each semester:

• In the past, students have been expected to earn 50 “aerobics points” per week, incorporated into the grade of every PE class. Aerobics points are calculated via a complicated system involving a “target heart rate training zone” based on age and the number of 10-minute segments your heart rate stays in that zone. As a twenty-something, my heart rate training zone ranges from 120-180 beats per minute, meaning that 6 hours and 20 minutes at 120 bpm would get me 50 aerobics points, or 2 hours and 5 minutes at 180 bpm.
  
  
• Currently, the old aerobics point system is being grandfathered out, replaced with a computer program connected to the Fitbits that every incoming freshman is now required to buy. On the Fitbit program, students are required to take 10,000 steps a day, and earn a specified number of “active minutes” per week at a certain heart rate. Both of these factors are incorporated into every student’s grade.
  
  
• Every semester each student is required to run or walk a two mile (1.5 mile for first-semester freshmen) field test. For the first half of each semester, most PE classes focus exclusively on training for the field test, requiring students to run at least twice a week. According to the current standards, any time above an 8 or 9-minute mile constitutes a failing grade on the field test, and that number is factored prominently into the student’s grade for the entire class.
  
  

This is all fine and good – if you love running. As a dance student, I am still attempting to sift through the vast body of opinions on whether or not running is good cross training: Will this destroy my knee joints? Strengthen all the wrong muscles for ballet? What about the cardiovascular benefits, though? Of course, at this point I have no choice – I can run, or I can watch my beautiful college GPA go down in flames because I’m not fast enough on the track. I’ve tried walking the field test as well, which has given me little more for my trouble than more time spent in getting a bad grade and some ferocious shin splints.

​Over the years, the dance students at ORU have gotten to discover the best way to adapt to this enforced training, and learn more about movement and our bodies as we engage in non-dance physical education classes. We learn, often through trial and error, how much we ought to push ourselves in relation to our rehearsal load, when an upcoming performance is more important than one or two extra time points, and the wondrous miracle of ice packs. Personally, I’ve come to appreciate the extra gym time since it has, in a sense, forced me to take ownership of actually cross training – and the running has definitely increased my stamina. So until our program gains enough credibility to get some slack on the track when we really need it, I look on the bright side, sprinting across the gym like I’m headed for a quick change.

​Amy McIntosh
 
"Let Justice Roll Down", a 20-minute group dance work, grew out of McIntosh’s struggle with oppression, injustice, and misplaced power within our communities, along with a pivotal book written by John M. Perkins.  After having lived in Jackson, MS for five years, McIntosh moved back home to Tulsa in 2006, and soon after was given a copy of Perkins’ book, “Let Justice Roll Down.”  Perkins, a native of Mississippi, now 81, writes of his journey out of racial injustice into renewal, as he discovers his role in pioneering a new way of living in community.  Perkins has devoted his life to developing communities where reconciliation and transformation thrive, and where the walls of power are broken down.  McIntosh’s work explores power as it seeks to devastate, devour, and deteriorate the very fabric of humanity. 
 
I started this work with a solo last summer (2011), Until It’s Over, which premiered at Exchange 2011.  At the time I was predominately working with the emotion of anger.  We had just finished building a new play room upstairs in our house and with 2 boys, 5 years and one year at the time, I made use of my space upstairs to dance.  A unique corner of the room became the inspiration for the beginning of my solo as it had 3 walls forming a sort of open box that I began playing with and letting my weight fall into the walls, push off them and feel what it was like to be in this partly open, partly closed box like space, walls.  This would become important later to the next phase of my work in the group section. 

​And then I began the process of building a group work that grew out of this seed of a solo:
I began to imagine these walls I mentioned earlier, I envisioned 3 walls made by the dancers, signifying separation, disillusionment, difference, segregation, loss of connection….
 
I really wanted this first section of the group work to create an atmosphere with texture and emotion.  We began working with 2 words, OPPRESSOR and OPPRESSED.  These would become central to the entire work and shed new light on the way I danced the solo a year later when the full work came together.
 
I began reading another text by John Perkins, With Justice For All: A Strategy for Community Development. 
 
In my journal I wrote:
Jesus said who do you say I am?
Who am I to you?
Healer of my soul
The one who can make me right
The one who can help me trust again
The one who can pick me up and help me begin again, anew
The one who can turn my narrow tunnel into a new opening
The one who can make me feel like I’m just getting started, the one who can ignite a passion in me that I can barely control, that I can’t control, that I don’t want to control
The one thing I don’t want to control
 
I wrote in my journal: this piece is for my boys, may you tear down wall of oppression in your lifetime that my eyes have only begun to see.
 
A kingdom turned upside down, a powerful king that suffered and chose death on a cross.

And then I went on another online journey through the eyes of Jacob Holdt, a sojourner on a quest to live amongst the oppressed and the oppressors.  I found his journeys to be surreal and yet a curiosity as he was willing to allow himself to be in the midst of injustice often encountering danger and violence.
 
I wrote in my journal some quotes from Holdt:
“A journey into this human being behind its terrifying anger. And the more I came to understand and like this human being, the more I saw how I could myself be the cause of anger in a system from which day one forced me onto the side of the oppressor….”
 
The wolf philosophy-“The road is lonesome and to succeed one must be like a wolf: eat or be eaten, for one can only succeed at the cost or the failure of others.”
 
“Yet we can only end crippling taboo systems by trying to be completely human toward everyone-thereby risking deeper involvement and love.”

“I did not understand that sunglass-covered hatred, yet it reflected such a shocking distortion of my own perceived humanity that it forced me to ask how I could possibly be seen in such a way.  Could I myself be the cause of that anger?  Could I myself ever end up harboring such anger?”

May 15, 2015. Howard Auditorium is fairly full, and I stand backstage, surrounded by my fellow ORU dance students. I’m about to perform a choreography project I’ve helped create with my Dance for Worship class, but I’m not thinking about applause or congratulations after; this isn’t one of our end-of-semester dance concerts. The performance is for those attending Amy McIntosh’s funeral service.

The first time I met Amy was at my high school studio – she taught the creative movement class that my younger sister attended for a year or two. I never had much interaction with her during those days, but I remember hearing with excitement the news that ORU was starting a dance major and she would be leaving to help bring that project to fruition. Fast forward four years, and I’m stepping into the Howard studio on campus for the first time, a terrified college freshman testing out the seemingly impossible feat of obtaining two separate four-year degrees in only six.

Amy was the first person to tell me my dream was achievable, and was, doubtlessly, one of the single greatest factors that made it so. I expected to be berated for divided loyalty or laughed out of one degree program or the other, but instead, she sat down with me and talked through each of my anxieties one by one. At first, I was in shock. Here I was with the audacity to tell her I wanted to do something in addition to dance, and she was genuinely excited! It almost seemed that she was more in favor of my crazy plan than I was: I remember her eyes lighting up, and how excitedly she told me that anything could be possible, and she would do everything she could to help me succeed within both majors. I’m not sure why this surprised me so much, or why I expected that I would be told to pick between the two degrees, but the more I worked with her, the more I realized that her outlook on life was decidedly different.

Amy didn’t compartmentalize life. She didn’t believe in the age-old mantra “leave it all at the studio door,” at least not in the conventional sense. She encouraged the ORU dancers to allow our work to be informed and nourished by each aspect of our lives – family and dorm situations, personal emotional struggles and victories – and for me, the experiences of nursing school. She always held us to a high standard of professionalism, but we would spend significant segments of rehearsals simply talking about the spiritual and intellectual meaning behind her pieces, and how the concepts that we were focusing on could apply or relate to our own lives. One semester, she decided to bring her husband and children to rehearsal, allowing them access to the part of her life spent with us and giving us the opportunity to see into the family that she loved so much. I will never forget that – the intense devotion that led Amy to blend the two worlds that any other teacher would have left separate without so much as a second thought. She told us that it would be cheating every part of her life to not allow each area to interact with the others, and she constantly encouraged us to do the same. That holistic, connected mindset was how she lived every moment of her life: each time I found myself in her office, terrified over some potential roadblock to graduation, she reassured me that this was God’s plan for my life and He was able to bring it to fruition, that I could and would be a dancer and a nurse. Because of her mentorship in those early years, I held on to that dream – and in just over a year, I’ll graduate from Oral Roberts University with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and a Bachelor of Arts in Dance Performance. I hold her fully responsible.

During my third year in the Dance Program at ORU, Amy was diagnosed with lung cancer. From October to April, she continued to pour heart and soul into all of her students, who had, at this point, become more like her adoptive children. When she was too ill to come into the studio, she would skype in from home, still pushing us in the authoritative but gentle tone we had come to know so well; to jump higher, reach further, risk more. Our hearts broke during those months, but Amy would have none of that. I remember the instructions she gave us just days before she passed: at her memorial service we were all to wear pink and put flowers in our hair. She wanted her home-going to be a joyful event, and in some ways it truly was.

In the days following Amy’s death on Good Friday of 2015, my class worked to put together a tribute for Amy, composed of excerpts from her choreography. We shed a few tears backstage that day at her memorial service, but what I remember most was the performance itself. As we stepped onto the stage that day, a sensation I could only label as joy flooded the auditorium. I’ve been to a few funerals in my two decades of life, but none even remotely resembled this. We danced, rejoicing for Amy’s release from suffering, celebrating her reunion with the Creator she had loved so much throughout her life. As we left the stage at the end of those few brief minutes, I knew that was exactly what she had wanted.
​
To this day I consider myself blessed to have been able to be a part of that moment. A week after the service, we were still getting comments from attendees about how meaningful and healing the performance had been. To be honest, however, it wasn’t that surprising. That gentle, all-inclusive, worshipful presence was – and still is – the heart of Amy’s legacy.