Listening in Darkness: A Conversation with Andrew Nemr

On Tuesday, February 23rd Goldenwood hosted Tap Dancer and 2020 inaugural Goldenwood Resident Andrew Nemr for an evening of conversation as we explored the ways the Spirit works in darkness, reviving this world with love. 

Andrew says, “As an artist, I actually don’t believe that I create anything, I believe that I unveil it.  I’m continually on a search for what’s already there…”  So what happens when darkness comes?  Through a year of incredible disruption and transitions that included professional, personal, relational, and geographical changes, hear how Andrew developed a heightened attentiveness to the voice of God, bringing life out of darkness.  

Complete Audio with Q&A:

Complete Transcript with Q&A:

Amilee Watkins: Hello, good evening and welcome everyone. We’re so glad that you’re here tonight, and if you wouldn’t mind, we’d love to see your faces as we get going here and be able to welcome everyone into the room. My name is Amilee Watkins and I’m one of the co-founders of Goldenwood. Goldenwood exists to cultivate a new vision for work. Our vision is to see work revived by love. And this vision comes from a place of knowing that we were designed by God, who is love, to work—to cultivate and to steward this world through the work of our hands. And important to that design is to be able to hear His voice of love calling to us, and to respond to His love as we serve this world through the work of our hands. And our world is certainly in need of love right now. We’ve all been through a year of disruption, of heartache, of brokenness, of pain, where the darkness seems really evident, and where the cracks are showing all around. It’s certainly felt dark. And we need more than ever to hear the voice of God calling out to us in the darkness, to respond in faith and not in fear. So in the darkness, how do we listen?

We’re really grateful to have you here tonight to explore this; we think it’s a really timely and important conversation. And we’re thrilled to have Andrew Nemr, sharing with us in a vulnerable way, in an open and honest way, his story of the last year. So, tonight we’ll have a chance for some conversation with Andrew, we’ll have a brief performance from him which we’re thrilled about, and we’ll have time for Q&A. We’d love if you can, anytime throughout the conversation, please feel free to send your questions to me in the chat. And we’ll have time at the end for some discussion…

So, now briefly I’d like to introduce our guest tonight, Andrew Nemr. Mentored by Gregory Hines, Andrew Nemr is considered one of the most diverse tap dance artists today. An international performer, choreographer, educator, and speaker, Andrew’s work explores tap dance as a vehicle for storytelling and community. He has played with Grammy Award winning musicians across multiple genres, founded and directed the tap dance company Cats Paying Dues, and co-founded the Tap Legacy Foundation, along with Gregory Hines. The New York Times has called him a “masterly tapper” and his work has been recognized with a TED Fellowship, as well as several other awards throughout his career. An avid public speaker, Nemr uses the story of his journey and the craft of tap dance to speak about identity, community, faith, embodiment, and love.

And engaging in conversation with Andrew tonight will be David Kim, the CEO and co-founder of Goldenwood. Over the past several decades David has trained, consulted, and counseled hundreds of leaders and organizations in developing a robust, meaningful integration of faith and work. His past experiences as Vice President of Faith and Work at Redeemer City to City, Executive Director of the Center for Faith and Work and Director of the Gotham Fellowship at Redeemer, and as Editor of the NIV Faith & Work Bible have given him a breadth of exposure to the challenges of integrating faith and work. David continues to pioneer effective means by which individuals and organizations can grow towards a dynamic live spirituality.

We’re so glad that you’re here tonight, as we learn to listen in darkness.

[Video Clip Begins]

(We hear the sound of tap dancing.) “Although I started early, none of my history pointed to tap dancing being my eventual profession.

And none of the labels that I had growing up pointed to it either. My parents are from Beirut, Lebanon—not a hotbed of tap dancing.

The entire question, I think, is about identity. Because once you answer that, then all other things flow from that.”

“To know Andrew is to get a sense of an incredibly loving and empathetic guy”

“You know he has such a modest way of inspiring people to lift themselves to a higher level and craft.”

“Because I asked him, ‘Do you want to change the world?’ and he said ‘yeah, I would like to do that.’”

“If you have a story, that story has to be told. Otherwise it just boils down to like, ‘Hey, I’m Andrew and I’m a tap dancer,’ and that’s kind of it, and that’s fundamentally meaningless.”

[Video Clip Ends]

David Kim: Well, that was quite an introduction. Andrew is going to talk a little bit more about the video you just saw a clip of at the end of our time but I thought it was a great way of being able to understand the breadth of who we’re talking to tonight. I’ve known Andrew for a long time and it’s such a pleasure to be able to do this conversation with you. And you know, in this time, no one wants to spend any more time watching the screen than they need to, but I hope tonight is an opportunity to have a balcony moment—one of those moments where actually, despite the fact that we’re probably in the same room that we spend 90% of our waking time in, it feels like the environment disappears, because what is being heard is resonating not just with who we know Andrew to be, but something resonates within us. I think this is what Andrew captures so well, that when he speaks it’s not just him revealing himself to us but it really connects to who we are and aids our own inability sometimes to use words and language to communicate and understand how we’re doing. So we’re really grateful to have this conversation with Andrew, and we hope that this time will allow you to understand maybe some of the challenges of this past year. That’s some of our hope as we begin our conversation, thinking about this past year and some of the challenges, disruptions and difficulties that life has brought to us, that in the hearing of these things we’re going to understand where the voice of God can really break in and begin to change the perception of the things that were enduring.

So with that let me just say, welcome Andrew, good to see you again!

Andrew Nemr: Likewise, David, thank you for having me.

David: Our pleasure. For so many of us this past year has been pretty awful. And we just wanted to get your take on this past year and what it’s been like for you. I know there have been so many transitions that you’ve been going through. So give us a little sense of what this past year has been like for you.

Andrew: Oh gosh. I guess the footnoted version is, shifts in every aspect—of relationship, family, personal, friends, work, geography—as well as challenges just in terms of provision, and kind of the way as a performing artist you have an expectation of an industry functioning in a certain way, and that was completely, completely disrupted.

David: Yeah, I mean, so much of what you do is embodied, right? And so what’s the impact as a dancer, what is not being able to be with people like?

Andrew: It’s very bizarre, you know, a number of my friends and I have talked about this. Being a dancer and not being able to train. Not being able to practice the craft in a way that would prepare you for whatever is going to happen next in terms of a live performance environment, and trying to find ways to maintain that while also rethinking your entire model of what this craft could be put in the service of, either during the disruption or for a time after.

David: Was there a time when you felt like, “Hey I’m not gonna be able to keep this up given the world being what it is?” You can’t perform, there are no places you can go and it’s hard to teach people when you’re not physically with them, and so when you think about what you’ve spent so much of your life trying to hone, and then this pandemic hits, what were your thoughts around your craft?

Andrew: So I watched a movie when I was young, called Days of Thunder. It was a Tom Cruise film about NASCAR racing. And there’s a lesson in that film that stuck with me. He said, if you’re driving into a pileup, a crash that happens, and they’re going really, really fast. You don’t look at the cars that are crashing, you look at the space that’s available. And so as the pandemic was coming to light and restrictions were happening, I was actually running an organization in Vancouver, and we had to transition. It was an Academy, they had an annual festival, all live in-person education and programming, and we had to transition all of that to online. So, in order to be encouraged about that transition, the focus for me had to be on the space. It had to be on the possibility of continuing to do what we do in the midst of a situation that nobody had really anticipated or experienced before. And thankfully I’ve been doing distance learning online for about five years. So, the online teaching thing wasn’t so new for me. It was almost like I’d been a little bit prepared to be able to say, “Oh yeah, this is possible and so as long as it doesn’t last… I don’t know how anybody’s going to react to it, but at least I know it’s a thing that can happen.”

David: I remember one of our conversations, where one question I think a lot of us can relate to arose, the question of, “Should I be doing what I’m doing?” Meaning you start to think of all the ways that you could be pivoting during this time, whether because of pressure or because here’s now an opportunity to almost remake yourself in a different way. So talk to me about that process for you.

Andrew: So my personal disruption that happened about five or six months before COVID hit was a severe moment of burnout. I had thought that I was doing everything that I was supposed to be doing and kind of pouring myself out for it. And the result was being completely spent. And so November, December, January, February were kind of me trying to piece back together what had been broken. And then the pandemic hit. And so then it’s like, okay, whatever you were trying to piece back together, the context [within which that burnout happened] has not completely changed if the context [you’re referencing for what “wholeness” looks like] is the world or the industry or your work. And I think one of the things that has really stuck with me is trying to hold true to the context that I’m in, whether I’m living in the kingdom of God or some other kingdom.

David: We’re going to have to unpack that a little bit more. But let me just stay a little bit more on the work aspect because you’ve worked on this for your entire life, in terms of tap, and to think about having to pivot away from that. I mean you’re one of the few, fortunate artists—you’ve been able to focus on your craft for a long time, and to be hitting a point in your career where you were thinking of perhaps almost a different career trajectory; talk to us about that process of thinking should I give up, or not quite give up completely, but really begin to move in a separate direction altogether.

Andrew: I think there was a question that came to my mind that said, if I’m continually trying to pursue this craft as my sole way of provision—this is my job, I go into the market, I offer this product and then the market says whether I have value or not—if I keep doing that and that’s continually a challenge, maybe there’s an easier way. And if that means looking at a completely different industry, if I have the skill set for it, why not? The question of time and commitment and “can I still hold on to the craft of tap dancing if I’m putting 50-60 hours a week somewhere else” becomes the big question mark. And so the question of, well, is pursuing provision the primary pursuit? Both of those questions came to bear as we were having the conversations about it.

David: I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to: you have a certain passion and yet, obviously there are real practical needs you have to meet, and when do you begin to give up on “your passion”, in order to meet the practical needs that you have? And I want to certainly get to that, but I also want to kind of paint a little bit of a picture. I know what the past year has been like for you, and that was one piece of it – the work, and really wrestling through how you continue to pursue dance but also make it viable so that you can have a livelihood. And then there’s another piece. For most of us, you know, it’s work and relationships—whether that’s family or significant others or friends. So tell us a little bit about some of the transitions and challenges of the past year with respect to relationships that you might want to share.

Andrew: Oh man. So, yeah…this is, this is the hard place. Last year, I was in Vancouver BC, it was the first time that I had been living away from home, away from my parents, and I’m their only child. I was living in a communal house. And I was in a very serious personal relationship, serious enough that we had talked about a date on the calendar, and I had shared that with a small circle of friends. And it seemed that all three areas—my living environment, the people that were my closest neighbors literally, this very serious personal relationship, and my relationship with my folks—all came to a head on the same day. Three weeks of very intense work, I had one day off before my season would begin, and on that day it just seemed that those relationships weren’t functioning well. And left me with a big question mark; there was nothing for me to hold on to. I think I realized in that day that, not to say that it’s not right but almost like I was holding on to each one of those spaces, as a point of reference to who I was or whether I was doing the right thing or engaged in the right activities…In the midst of burning out it also felt like I was completely alone. And, I think we had a conversation in the midst of that time period. And you walked me through one of those envisioning exercises, if I were to ask the Father, Jesus or the Holy Spirit are they here now? What is their response to this situation? And at the time my relationship with the Father and Son were okay, they were there, but the Spirit was grieved, and it was, it was heart wrenching.

David: I think when you go through circumstances like that, when things that you often take comfort in or security or a sense of identity from, and when those things are removed, all these fears start flooding in your heart and your mind. As you were going through that time, what fears did you, were you face to face with again?

Andrew: I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel like I had a place. A lot of a lot of my work is place-based, and over years and years and years, I’ve trained myself to identify particular characteristics with places. So if I walk into a certain studio on a certain day, I know I’m teaching. If I walk into a different studio on a different day, it’s practice time. And I realized in this time that I didn’t have a place. There wasn’t a place to go that I could feel safe in dealing with all the stuff that was coming up and coming out. I think that was, that was a big one.

And I think there was a big question of, if I thought I was doing everything right and that was wrong, what’s right? And as much as I try and kind of run away from my perfectionist tendencies, they still come up and it’s like, “there’s right and there’s wrong.” That framework still lives in me, right alongside of “there’s life and there’s death, you can choose one path, or the other.” And I think in this time, there was just a lot of, “Okay, well, I thought I was making all the right choices, now what? Where do I go to reset the framework?” I think those are the two big ones.

David: Let me just try to get a sense of, enter into the space of your life. So, you’re experiencing some extreme burnout from the work that you were doing, relationally there is that sense of loneliness and, as you said, the security of those relationships no longer being present. And then, I know you also moved from Vancouver, so you’re relocating now. Your entire environment–and you said place is so important to you–your environment now has changed as well. So to be dealing with any one of those and then obviously on top of that everything that’s happening with COVID and the disruptions of COVID, I think this helps us kind of get a sense of your life this past year or so. Into that context, what does the word, the phrase “listening to God” mean to you?

Andrew: It means lying down on the floor, closing my eyes, putting my feet up on a chair so that they don’t have the tendency to move, and asking God what he wants to tell me.

David: Did you find you were hearing things when you were listening? I know for different people the act of listening to God is a very different experience, and so for you, how did you listen? And when you felt you were able to listen, what did you hear?

Andrew: The first thing that happened for me was hearing through one or two friends, so it wasn’t a direct voice. It wasn’t until I started attending Trellis actually that the practice of laying down on the floor, putting the feet up, closing the eyes, and really hearing a direct voice started to happen on a very regular basis. And I’m an ugly crier, like when I cry and I’m overwhelmed, it’s intense. And I found myself doing that almost two, three times a week. And very, very specific things.

The first time that I called out to God as Father happened in one of those moments, and it wasn’t something that, it was like the word came from someplace else than my mind. And in that moment—it’s kind of one of those things where, at least for me, that happened and then the world shifted a little. Because as much as I feel like I have a pretty healthy inner child and a very joyful demeanor and I get to dance for a living—there’s not a lot that keeps that disposition far from me—I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve ever had that kind of revelation such that every day it’s like I’m waking up as a kid, because I have a Dad. And I had a really good dad, so I have a pretty easy jump from my earthly father to my heavenly one. And if my heavenly one is more loving and more perfect and more generous than my earthly one, I’m going to live in overwhelm for the rest of my days. So it was those kinds of things that were happening for me, more so than some of the things that I would normally want to ask for like, “Do I do this or do this? Should I go over here or go…?” And it was like “No, I am your Father,” Okay, I’m gonna sit with that for a second, because that changes a lot of other things.

David: And remember you were saying in some of those real moments of disappointment, you felt it was hard to dream. And, you know here you are, you’re one of our dreamers in our Dream Pod. So how did that transition happen? Because I think for a lot of people, we almost have PTSD thinking things just go from bad to worse, and I think a lot of people can relate to this feeling of, “Let’s just not be hopeful then. It’s easier to just have pretty low expectations of life and, life is what it is. Let’s just kind of get on with it.” But how did you transition from perhaps a state more like that to one where you were able to be hopeful and to begin to dream?

Andrew: I had to let go of the outcomes. The idea of receiving a dream, and then me asking, “Alright well, is this gonna work? Because I really don’t want to even start unless I know this is gonna work.” And asking, “Is this gonna work?” comes with a particular expectation of what “it working” looks like from me. And I think what began to shift in me is to say, “The things that come to me, I’m responsible for the doing, not what happens with them.” And that allowed a lot of freedom: “Okay, well, I’ll write this up [my dream] and then we’ll see. If it stops at writing it up, great, if it stops at sharing it with two people, great. If it stops at, you know, an entire event happening, that’s great.”

David: And was that ability then to let go connected with your ability to call God “Father”?

Andrew: Yeah! Yeah. Because the only the only way I could let go of the outcomes is to be able to trust the person who gave me the dream in the first place. He’s not saying, at least for me it’s like, he’s not saying, “I’m giving you this, so that you can go and do it and then I’m going to see how well you do it.” It’s, “I’m giving you this, so that you can do it.” Or, not even that. “I’m giving you this so we can do it.” So, every project becomes in partnership. Because half the stuff that I end up doing, there’s no way this stuff would work if I would be doing it alone. Right, they’re way beyond my capacity, they’re way beyond what I think my scope of influence actually is. And so, yeah, it has to be in partnership at that point.

David: And how did you manage your risk, because in a manner of speaking, we do these risk calculations in our head and that’s why we decide, “Okay, well, better not to hope at all because the potential loss is greater.” And all of a sudden now you’re saying “Okay, well I see God now as Father and I’m able to hope, because I know He’s the one who’s going to do this with me.” So how do you then still account for the risk and the potential loss and the disappointment. Where does that fit into the way you’ve been hearing?

Andrew: I don’t know, I…

David: That’s fair enough.

Andrew: I really don’t know. I feel like everything that I remember from what Jesus says about provision—which is where a lot of my [sense of] risk [arises], the potential lack thereof—is always saying, “Don’t worry about it. If you look at the birds or you look at the lilies in the field… Don’t even worry.” They’re not working hard, they’re just going about what they’re made to do, which for flowers is take in sunshine and take in some rain and grow. And that boggles my mind. Every time I would read that, it would boggle my mind because as a freelancer, you’re continually trying to build the business in which your craft will be facilitated in the market. And so it’s like a doubly-creative endeavor. I’ve probably spent more time working on my website than working on some shows. But if that’s what Jesus says, then the question is, “Okay, what’s the context in which that’s true?” Because it’s definitely not true in my day-to-day if I look at my work, and I look at my budget and the balance sheet and the things that I use to read what potentially could be happening. But it is true in the context of living in God’s effective will, as his son or daughter or child. So then my work changes to trying to figure out what it’s like to live in His effective will. And I think, more than anything that’s what I’ve been trying to learn how to do in the past few months.

David: And as you’ve been asking those questions of God, “What is it for me to live in your will?” what are you hearing? And can you talk to me about particular moments where you are kind of going one way or your brain was taking on a downward spiral and the voice of God comes in and helps you understand how His will is something so different from what we often conceive our lives to be?

Andrew: Yeah, I think there are two examples. One is, in one of the most amazing kind of conversations that I’ve had the pleasure of being in, God reconciled the relationship that I have with my parents. And it was a long conversation that went on for like two days… Over the past year I’ve discovered Dallas Willard, and so there’s a lot of his thinking in the way that I find myself thinking now. And one of the things that he talks about is God’s unwillingness to cross our will; that He respects the human creation so much that He won’t impose his will on ours. At least that’s not His mode. And so that means for a relationship to reconcile God is doing something in both people for their wills to desire that reconciliation and for the shift in dispositions to happen such that that reconciliation can happen. So above and beyond apologies or forgiveness or whatever lingering from an offense, an actual true reconciliation comes from seeing in the midst of that conversation, bearing witness to see God work in another person. And so that was a huge moment for me.

And then that kind of started a series of other things that He did, one which was, to make sure I didn’t sign a lease to live alone so that I could find a house which was an answer to prayer for me, my mom, and my dad—three separate people praying separately, and one thing answers three sets of prayers. And that wouldn’t have happened without the reconciliation that happened a couple months ago.

So, you start to live like a kid which is “I’m scared” or “I’m worried” or “I don’t know,” and you keep hearing, “It’s okay, it’s okay. But I got you.” I have a little sticky at the top of my laptop that says, “God’s love is greater.” And I have to put an addendum that says, it’s greater than any darkness or anything that I’ve felt like I’ve befallen, and also any height that I’ve experienced. The darkness side, I think for me at least, is the place that I go, right, it’s like, hopefully God can help me in this time. But in my life I’ve experienced a lot of highs. And for me to realize that God’s love is greater than those?! It did something to how I approach the darkness. Because it’s almost like, His love isn’t to get me to the highs that I’ve experienced; it’s greater than the whole thing. So it’s a completely different category than anything that I’d be able to experience on this side of heaven, maybe?

David: So how has this shift for you, and being able to hear God guiding you—both in the affirmations of His love for you but even in these very specific ways like with regard to your lease—how has that affected you, from where you’ve been that we started our conversation with, and where you are now and as you see yourself moving into the future?

Andrew: Yeah, I feel like the experience of from a year and a half, like September / October 2019, through last year, it feels very close, but it also feels like a different world. And, yeah, it’s hard to explain, because it’s like, I don’t carry the weight of it. And maybe that’s the best explanation. What would be considered emotional trauma doesn’t have a place in my body. And that’s fairly miraculous given all the research and all this stuff around the fact that the body remembers more things than the mind does sometimes. But yeah, it’s not there.

David: And what would you attribute that to?

Andrew: That’s a miracle. My body is highly sensitive. And I can still remember what some things were like, but I don’t feel it. I very distinctly remember the conversation that kind of set things off with all the relational shifts back in September (2019), I remember our conversation, I remember a few other conversations I had in the midst of that unraveling. And I can see myself in the pain that I was going through, but I don’t feel it. And that’s a miracle. There’s no other way that I can explain it.

David: Yeah, it’s almost like, well, God really knit you together; He knows you and knows the impact that would have for you to hold that somehow in your physical body; just another evidence of how much he knows you as a parent would know a child.

Andrew: And I think to a degree, that’s why the things that He was telling me were so overwhelming. It’s like my body was responding to the fact that He loved me so much, the fact that He was my father, the fact that everything would be okay. And just before this call, I was thinking about, I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of the kingdom of God and living in God’s effective will or outside of it. And just thinking through the idea started to get me emotional (laughs) like, okay, so that’s my radar now.

David: I think a lot of people don’t have that level of, I guess, self-awareness, both of your emotions as well as of your own body I think, as you’ve demonstrated or at least the way you talk about it yourself. And it reminds me of something you said earlier about the “ugly crying” you would do a couple of times a week, I imagine that must be such an important part of keeping [the pain] from getting lodged in. I mean the ability to hear God speak to you in such a way that then you were able to respond like a child, and not have all the barriers up—all the ways that we try to stay strong or at least to numb ourselves, the ways that we as adults typically learn to cope. But the ability to come into the presence of God—and in the presence of God we’re all children again, right, no matter where we are—and respond in-kind [as a child], and have that be this kind of amazing, liberating experience; I think a lot of us for various reasons don’t get a chance to experience that often.

Andrew: Yeah, it was a huge blessing—the framework of Trellis, and the ability to have audiobooks so it feels like you’re listening—you know, not a reading exercise, just I’m in my day and this is what I’m immersing myself in. Part of my journey over the past year was going through informal counseling with a dear friend. And one of the things that came up over and over and over again, is how specifically my training as a tap dancer has affected the way that I operate in general. Everything from starting to work, having a job, when I was seven years old, to the repetitive training that’s part of tap dancing, and also the immediate feedback that comes: I hit the floor, I hear a sound. Okay that worked. Or I hit the floor, I didn’t get a sound, that’s not what I wanted. Okay, that didn’t work. And how different some of that is to actual real life and the experience of life with other people. In unpacking that for me I think there was a space that became available to be in relationship with God different than in my dancing, which had been a place that I would run to quite often.

David: Well, there’s so much there I’d love to respond to, but I want to keep an eye on the time. One of the projects that you worked on, which was part of the film that we showed earlier was a documentary that was made about you and your work and really around the theme of identity. And Andrew was Goldenwood’s first, our inaugural Resident because we wanted to support and promote this video which we felt really wrestled through the nuances and the challenges of trying to find and discover yourself, especially in a world that often tries to label you in certain ways. And so we were excited to be able to try to support and promote this and, do you want to tell us a little bit about the documentary as well as the work that you’re doing now?

Andrew: Sure. The documentary short is a 24-minute film, it is produced by Windrider Productions, and it goes through a very large chunk of my life from my parents’ journey coming out of Lebanon, to being born in Canada, raised in the States, being grafted into the tradition of tap dance, but really for this idea of trying to figure out who I am, and hopefully, providing a vehicle for others to begin to engage in that question in a way that’s not direct. You get to see me go through it, and then maybe that opens up a space for questions that might come up in any viewer. So, we’re in the process of finding places to host it as a screening. And we have a number of supplemental pieces: Mako Fujimura does a theological reflection based on the film, and there are a couple of Q and A’s….

[momentary technical difficulties for Andrew]

David: That documentary that he’s referring to goes through these kinds of questions I think that are coming up in our society around how do we understand our own sense of identity when people often look at who we are from superficial measures and in some ways, try to impose on us a certain sense of identity. I think Andrew and his journey has been really enlightening or illuminating to think about how we wrestle through the way that our own identity sometimes, or our own sense of identity, clashes sometimes with the expectations that our society tends to put upon us. So, if you haven’t seen the documentary I really would recommend that you see it. [Scroll down to view the trailer for Identity: The Andrew Nemr Story]

And I think, Amilee put the link here in the chat… You can request to host a screening. I think their preferred way of releasing this is to allow people to gather in groups to see it so that they can discuss these issues that come up in the film.

Andrew is back I hope that means he can join the conversation. There you are!

Andrew: Sorry about that.

David: I did my best to stall until you got back. [laughs] So anything else to talk about in terms of projects before we get the privilege of seeing some of your craft?

Andrew: No. If people go to my website, they can see all the work.

Ah, David you did some nice tap dancing here. (laughs)

David: I did, (laughs) I did some fancy footwork here. At least I did promote your documentary and we pointed people to the webpage so that they could request to host a screening so that’s what I did.

Andrew: Awesome. So, shall we dance a little bit?

David: Yeah, well I’m going to turn myself off so that we can focus on you, but when Andrew is done we’re going to transition to a time of Q&A.

Andrew: So before I begin, I will invite you to close your eyes. And as you feel led, you can open them or close them again. And we’re just going to see what comes out.

[Andrew tap dances.]

David: Thank you so much, Andrew, and you know as I watch you, I’m just shaking my head, I’m like how in the world is that happening?! Thank you so much for presenting that to us, and with that we want to transition to any questions that anyone might have, for Andrew or for myself. It’s kind of an open time, informal if you want to ask question. You can either type your question out in the chat, or you can just kind of pop in and ask your question. And if not, we will hang out for those of you who are able to hang out.

Amilee: So I’ll start it off there are a couple of questions that have come in. But one question just to start off with is thinking about your ability to self-discipline, as an artist who has a craft, and the question is around the connection between discipline in your craft and the discipline of listening. Can you speak to that a bit?

Andrew: Yeah. So a lot of the journey into the practice of listening opened up because David, you assigned “The Spirit of the Disciplines” to us in kind of a pre-Trellis group. And I’m horrible about doing assigned readings but I got to it over the summer, which is like, four months after it was assigned. And when I did there was one thing that opened it up. And that was the idea that a spiritual discipline is something that allows us to do something that we can’t do by direct effort. Because as much as I try and say [to God] “Okay, I’m here, I want to hear your voice,” it kind of doesn’t happen that way. There’s all these other things, and that’s the opposite of training in a craft. Training in a craft is, you spend six hours on the floor, and then the next day it gets a little easier. There’s some kind of around-the-back effort, but most of it is actually direct. Here, the discipline is kind of arranging everything else so that listening can happen. And so making sure that my phone is on “Do Not Disturb” for like the first two hours of my day. Carving out times where I can interrupt myself over the course of my day, and figuring out what to do before I go to sleep, instead of just knocking out, which is a habit. And those things bump right up against physical habits. And that I have a lot of experience with, (laughs) because I spent the majority of my life trying to get my feet to do things and they are the furthest thing from your brain, (so it’s the longest pathway and very specific movements!) And in that space there’s a lot of, “Oh, okay I guess that didn’t work today, let’s try something new tomorrow.” And then identifying, if I do this, the next hour is already pre-determined. But if I do something different, the next hour is not pre-determined…and those moments of choice that run a sequence of things that my body is used to, become really important.

Amilee: That’s great. Thanks Andrew. [Travis and] Amanda, I’m going to ask you to come on and join us on the stage (as it is) and ask your question.

Travis: Hey Andrew!

Andrew: Hey! I still have the thing that you said like seven months ago.

Travis: Oh good, good. I’m so glad! I’m glad that was encouraging for you… We had two questions. One from me and one from Amanda.

So my question is, how do you balance the tension of the demand, with the identity of delight?

Andrew: Okay, I’ll take a stab at it, I think one of the things the world is most starving for is joy. And so, I kind of consider it my job at this point, to be able to share that as my job. And tap dancing is really, like it’s almost predisposed to it to a certain degree, and particularly in the past year where there’s been a lot of conversation around the identity of the craft—who owns it, where does it come from—that has been has been a big conversation in the tap dance community in the dance community in general. Being able to sit in that and still have a pervasive disposition of goodness and delight is highly disequilibrating for other people. And so that’s going to generate a question from them, “Okay you’re sitting in the middle of all this. How come you’re not so angry?” And then you get to have a conversation.

Amanda: My question for you is what is something that you’ve learned about God through dance that we might not know as not the dancers.

Andrew: Oh, that He’s embodied. And that that’s possible. … Now, as I’m in a place that is more challenging and I’m working with tap dancers who are having existential questions, now I get all the questions. If we really believed that, if I really believed that the Father was in the Son and the Son is in the Father, then embodiment is possible…It’s literally here in our physicality and the things that we, the mechanisms that we use and that we try and find, and that we try and make to care for our body are actually either triage—right, [presuming] that the body is so challenged that we just need to stabilize it—or they’re distractions. And that gets to be really interesting. Yeah, it just gets to be really interesting.

Travis: Thanks Andrew, good to see you.

Andrew: Likewise.

Amilee: Thanks Travis and Amanda. We had actually two questions, so I’m going to kind of combine them as they’re somewhat related, around what you mentioned about your relationship with the Holy Spirit. You used the language that the “Holy Spirit was grieved.” And so there was a question around “What did you mean by that?” And another question around “repairing your relationship with the Holy Spirit” and the process you went through, I should say.

Andrew: So, I’ll tell you this story, because that’s really the only way that I think I can explain it. And David chime in, because this was on the phone call with you, if I remember this oddly. I was on a phone call with David asking this question of “is everything that I’ve done wrong?” knowing that if I look back, there are certain choices, definitely not the right choice. But in the moment it kind of spun me down this road of, well then everything is wrong, because everything is broken right now.

And David walked me through this exercise: Close your eyes. Envision that you’re in the throne room. Look at the Father. What does the Father have to say to you? And the Father said something like “it’s okay,” and I was like, “Wow that’s kind of cool.” (And I’m ugly crying through all this.) And then he said, “Look at Jesus, look at the Son. He’s your older brother…” and that was actually a big deal for me, because as an only child, when I was two or three I think it was, my folks asked me if I would be okay having a sibling. And I asked for an older brother. So, all my life God has given me physical older brothers—cats who are just a couple years older than me, in high school, in college, for five years after college, like every five years I had an older brother, and never had I thought of Jesus Christ as an older brother. Lord and Savior, yes, older brother, no. I just didn’t have that language. So, I remember Jesus saying something like, “I got your back,” or “Follow me,” kind of the older brother like, “Don’t worry. I’ve got you.” And then David said “Now look at the Spirit,” and the Spirit was silent. And that for me was, well if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all, it was kind of that. That’s how I took it and it hurt. It hurt for me to stand there and for the Spirit to also just stand there. And I think, I think, the Spirit has been the one to do the mending. In the moments of listening, the things that I’ve heard, or the things that I’ve said that come from another place are the Spirit. If I were to peg one of the three, I think it’d be the third.

There’s a narrative of my life that I can look at and say, these are all the wrong things that I did, and if you put that in front of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is going to say, yes, those are all the wrong things that you did, and that hurts. But if God looks at you through Christ… there’s this, this idea that love remembers everything. So it’s like God’s love is greater than the memory of our faults. And there’s a difference between ignoring something and saying it’s there and I’m going to cover it.

And then what does that covering allow us to then do? Do we take that covering as, okay we’re gonna ignore it and we’re just gonna go ahead and continue in this cycle of habits, or do we take that covering as the opportunity to then attempt with God to change the cycles of our life. That I think has been the biggest thing over the past year for me is that I got to the end of my rope and I said, it seems like I’m doing the same cycle over and over and over again, just at a higher risk level. And the outcome is the same—it’s burnout, or crashing—but the higher, the larger the scale, the larger the burnout, and the larger the crash. And there has to be a different way.

Amilee: Thanks Andrew, and we’ll be sure to point people towards your dream. Speaking of I realized we didn’t, do you want to take just a minute before I pose a final question to share? So Andrew is one of our eight dreamers that is part of our inaugural Dream Forum where we’re cultivating dreams in community and so that might just be a great place I’m going to put the link up so people could watch the video but just maybe a brief mention of your dream.

Andrew: So, I, I think a lot of a lot of things that come to me are out of personal experience and then thinking that I’m not the only one [who has gone through this]. So having come out of an intense crash and lived under the pressure of being a freelancer and an artist, the idea of rest was something that I desperately needed and I suspected many of my friends might need as well. So the dream is to cultivate a place that would facilitate rest. And it’s called Nuach, which is Hebrew for “rest”. And thankfully, it is a dream that is [still] growing, so it’s not something that I’m doing [currently] it’s something that I’m working to figure out where it wants to go.

Amilee: I highly encourage everyone to watch his brief dream video that we showed back at the Dream Forum in December (2020) and you can contact Andrew as well if you are interested in more.

So this final question is for you, David. As someone who has guided people through a lot of darkness; I guess the question kind of comes down to, as we learn to listen to God, do we actually get more comfortable in darkness?

David: Yeah, that’s a great question. In the way that it’s phrased, I guess, in some sense, yes, and in some sense, no. That there is still in darkness the inherent fear of our finitude, the fear of the unknown, the fear from the deprivation of our senses, the past fears that kind of haunt us. When we don’t see something bright and beautiful in front of you, our minds naturally gravitate to places of past fears. And so when we are in darkness there’s always going to be, given our human response and our finitude, discomfort in that. And yet, I think as we come to hear the voice of God you learn how to navigate that darkness better. You learn to understand the difference between a child being in darkness versus a child being in darkness while holding their parent’s hand. The darkness is still very frightening but you’re holding your parent’s hand and so you feel still the safety of their presence. And hearing God’s voice in the midst of that I think is like that, where you’re still uncomfortable, but there’s a sense of security even in the midst of darkness. And I think as we grow in understanding the character of our heavenly parent all the more, and we know that He’s not just guiding us to a place out of that darkness, but He’s actually going to use that darkness to create something quite beautiful. And that there is a purpose, that He’s able to use that darkness actually to make us more like Him.

And I think the other thing I would say about darkness is darkness forces us to live by faith, does it not? You can’t rely upon the things that we typically rely upon, namely sight, but a whole host of other things obviously, and when those things are removed and you find yourself in that dark place, here’s your opportunity now—are we going to exhibit the characteristic, at least in this world, that is supposed to characterize the children of God? “The righteous shall live by faith.” And so I think darkness also becomes the place where our faith gets cultivated in some pretty dramatic ways, so I think that’s another aspect of not fearing darkness because you realize the way that God is able to cultivate our ability to see the unseen reality, as the Apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4. He’s learned to keep his eyes fixed on the unseen things because they’re eternal; the seen things are temporary, the seen things of our pain and all the fears, those are all temporary. And as our hearts kind of settle into the eternal of God’s promises and His goodness, the restoration of all things, then we learn to navigate that darkness with a real sense of hope as well. So I hope that answered the question.

I want to just encourage all of you again and point you guys to the incredible work that Andrew’s been doing and working on. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us again tonight and sharing your story with us and we’re glad that you’re more than a label to us, and we can see the depths of who God is making you to be—you with all your cracks and brokenness, and through that how a real identity is being formed in you in the likeness of Christ. So, thank you, Andrew.

And we hope that you all will join us again. You can check out our website; Andrew mentioned Trellis, and that’s one of programs, a four-week journey that allows you to really grow in this habit, this discipline of hearing God. We hope that you’ll join us for that or any of the other programs, which you can learn from our website.

So thank you for joining us! if you’re able to stick around, Andrew and myself, we’re going to be sticking around and hanging out with whoever wants to just chat so feel free to stick around and hang out with us. For the rest of you, we hope that you have a great evening! Thank you all and see you soon.

More about Andrew Nemr: Mentored by Gregory Hines, Andrew Nemr is considered one of the most diverse tap dance artists today. An international performer, choreographer, educator and speaker, Andrew’s work explores tap dance as a vehicle for storytelling and community. He has played with Grammy Award winning musicians across multiple genres, founded and directed the tap dance company Cats Paying Dues, and co-founded the Tap Legacy™ Foundation, Inc. (along with Hines).

“A masterly tapper” (New York Times), Nemr’s work has been recognized with a TED Fellowship, a FloBert Award for Tap Dance Excellence, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts American Masterpieces and the CUNY Dance Initiative, and residencies with The Quarterly Arts Soiree, BRICLab, More Art’s Engaging Artists program, Surel’s Place, and TED. An avid public speaker, Nemr uses the story of his journey and the craft of tap dance to speak about identity, community, faith, embodiment, and love.