“In order to be who you are as a human being, you need to be willing to upset people,” she says. Of course, not everyone takes kindly to her exercises, which repeatedly flip the bird at convention. And her books are training manuals that make people more willing to leap. “You have to force yourself into a situation that is slightly uncomfortable, because when you come out the other side it is the most freeing thing imaginable.”įrom that well sprung Smith’s obsession with the precise moment a person decides to do something they are hesitant to do - like jump off a dock into numb-cold water. Eventually Pitcher convinced his wife to try ecstatic heel-shaking beside a busy street. That exercise eventually became the documentary short The Winter of the Dance, a study of “shedding predictability” and returning to a child-like state. Jeff Pitcher, a California native, was unprepared for the dark days that last nearly half the year, and in a moment of stir-crazed desperation, he and a friend put on headphones, walked out into the snow and started wildly dancing on the side of the road to music no one else could hear. On his advice, Smith entered the Ontario College of Art and Design as a mature student a few years after dropping out of high school, a place where she was given “the permission to do whatever.” The second was her husband, an experimental musician who moved into her small farmhouse in the town of Flesherton, Ontario (pop. Her first muse on the road to success and inhibition came in the form of a teacher who reminded her that she found solace in art.

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