I lead a second life as a professional dancer. If I'm not studying, I'm dancing. I train with a local college's dance department 5 days a week.

The Spring 2021 semester is already a busy one in my dance life. I recently helped choreograph a dance concert, then performed it at The Dali Museum as part of the Van Gogh Alive exhibit. I did all this in 6 days.

The Dali Museum is a gem of Tampa Bay. It permanently houses a 2400 piece collection of Salvador Dali art and memorabilia.

This semester, The Dali is also hosting an immersive exhibit on Vincent Van Gogh, named Van Gogh Alive. The exhibition displays 3000 Van Gogh pieces digitally, projected throughout a large hall, and set to music. It's like IMAX for art, played on 2 dozen screens.

The exhibition is permanently housed in Vienna, Austria, and the technology was orchestrated in Australia. Since it's all digital, the show can be in multiple cities at once. Its current stay in Tampa Bay is the show's first time in America. Tickets have been sold out for three months, so I expect Van Gogh Alive will get a tour of the United States after it finishes at The Dali.

You should go if Van Gogh Alive visits your city. Tickets are cheap, as long as you can get one. All the pieces are digital copies, but the technicians have done expert work to make them real. The results are so high-resolution that you'll have to remind yourself these are representations. You may come to prefer the digitals over the originals.

Van Gogh Alive projects the pieces onto screens much larger than the original frames. It allows you to appreciate details you can't notice in a single painting engulfed by a crowd.

You won't see any pixelation or visual artifacts in Van Gogh Alive either. The show does animate a few of the painted objects, like windmills & trains, but the animations are as natural as still life.

You'll have to remind yourself the originals aren't animated, and you might wish they were.

Two myth-busting facts I learned about Van Gogh in the process of creating our show:

We had to create this concert in Charette mode. Meaning, the project was on an absurdly tight deadline from the start.

You'll probably never see the word "Charette" again outside of this post, so let me explain. Here's the evolution of the word:

The point is everything goes as fast as a chariot. It's the Medieval French equivalent of our "Crunch Time" idiom.

Doing a Charette project is designed to be a mental overload. It's an attempt to tap immediately into the best ideas by leaving no time for bad ideas.

Charette mode uses the same logic as those students who procrastinate on a project until exam week then cram everything.

Some people do their best work when the margin for error is zero. Charrette will work great for them.

There's a popular misconception that all artists do everything in Charette mode. The stereotype is that artists are mentally unstable due to constant stress from deadlines and waiting for random inspiration.

Thankfully that isn't how art works, or at least the performing arts. I'veve been a professional dancer for 5 years now & this (optional, planned) project was my first performance on a panic-inducing deadline.

Like any other career, the major projects in dance take months of planning, then months of creating, then weeks of revision and practice before going public.

But sometimes you can learn something by intentionally disrupting your own habits.

The project did feel like non-stop studying during exam week.

In two days, we choreographed for 12 hours. After every 3rd hour, we performed our current drafts for critique. It's not a method for the anxious, shy, or introverted.

I've become immune to stage-fright, yet the Charette process still frazzled my nerves. If you ever decide to do a Charette project, expect stress to manifest in your unconscious body.

There were 2 nights during the week when I had vivid anxiety dreams in which I was trying to find the right music for my real-life pieces but couldn't find them. A fellow choreographer had the same anxiety dreams.

If you ever do a Charette project, you need to make a recovery plan before it starts. It's vital to give yourself some rest after each session, and planning is the only way to get any rest under a tight deadline.

You need time to disengage yourself from work, and if you don't have a plan to relax, the project will take over your life until the project ends. That's how burnout happens.

A Charette project will test your recovery habits as much as your work habits. And that's a good thing. This show taught me that recovery is just another part of performance.

It's good to cause an artificial problem for the sake of knowing how to deal with them when they arise organically.

Working in Charette mode forces you to confront an evolving situation without panic. It teaches you to "call audibles": sense a new problem and solve it in literal seconds. And that is a valuable survival skill in any context, but especially in performing arts & competitive sports.

When it's showtime, there's always some surprise that wasn't in the plan. No matter how much you practice, you can't plan for every variable. Surprises at showtime give us only two options: either panic or solve it.

Those are the moments when the success of the project hangs in the balance. Success depends on solving the problem in seconds. Panic causes disaster. Decisions like this aren't going away.

No matter how smart we are, how meticulous the plan or how advanced our technology, we are finite beings with little knowledge. Reality usually surprises us, and sometimes the surprise creates a problem. We either deal with the problem in the moment, or the problem causes failure.

Reality has a habit of throwing us surprises with deadlines of only a few seconds. Either panic or solve it. Performing artists & athletes have to solve split-second problems every day. Humans survive on split-second solutions. Calling audibles is a virtue for survival.

Charette performances train you to attack rather than panic. It's not pleasant, but you won't die.

In accordance with the "panic or problem solve" theme, the Dali Museum's cameras and livestream died 2 minutes before show start, so I had to improvise & record it myself.

The good news is we got to preserve the show, and you can watch it below! The bad news is there's no production value. We look like we're in a middle school auditorium.

But all the content, music, and background video we created in a weekend is still there!