curiosity over scrutiny
prelude to dancing notes
I’m back! If you were previously a paid subscriber, you’ll notice that I paused subscriptions in September. If you’re still interested in supporting my writing practice for $7/month, there’s nothing to do! I will resume subscriptions at the beginning of August. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, there’s still time, and I would greatly appreciate it.
In April, I bought a used handy cam for $80 during a somewhat restless day of needing to get away from myself by finding a way to archive myself. It sounds backwards — there’s something in there about wanting to be witnessed by myself at a distance, crab-walking around self-perception. earlier that week, I had started preparing to move out of my home, and in the middle of packing up my most loved possessions (my books), I left the house and drove from store to store looking for a new toy.
I remember being on the beach with Gabe this winter and saying to him, “I think I want to explore moving images.” The sea lapping in front of us, my hands adjusting the red cashmere scarf his mom let me borrow that morning, the massive dogs circling each other on their way towards us.
I find a lot of value in capturing the scenery, my friends and family around me, dancers and artists that they are. It feels important to me to keep proof of process, performance, experience, and, too: my cousins’ favorite view of the sunset in El Paso, poetry karaoke night in Tyler’s backyard, the waves at the oxbow during a full moon— I want to look back at it all in motion. My childhood looked like this, someone always taking a video or picture of what and who was around. In my family, there exists an abundant archive of birthdays, funerals, cookouts, and graduations in New York, Salem, Lynn, Haiti, and elsewhere.
To boot, it feels imperative that these moments exist outside of a device that is not so tethered to social media. How often do I record a moment and quickly maneuver my thumbs to Instagram to see how it translates in my stories or on the square grid?
The beautiful moments with my family and friends feel self-explanatory in how they exist in my body and memory. But I’ve noticed that the more I witness myself or others in a movement practice, the more something begins to bubble up in me. I’m discovering that I have a need to justify and prove my viewing — or even just get clear with myself about what I think is happening — through writing.
In some ways, this feels like both a ridiculous and unnecessary endeavor. In Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker by Arlene Croce (who is the OG writer of the dancing column in the New Yorker), she writes:
It seemed that in those days I could never write as much as I had seen… I realized that what I wrote was always going to be at a certain remove from the actual experience—I believe it was Merce Cunningham who said that speaking about dance is like nailing Jell-O to the wall— but getting comfortable with that distance took some doing. It required accepting a possibility of success based on an inevitability of diminution. In the course of writing about a dance, you invariably diminish it; you change its nature. It becomes, or aspects of it become, utterable, therefore false. It is a real temptation to a dance critic to prolong the illusion of utterability; art is, after all, a world of semblances-even dance tolerates falsity to an extent. However, if you get to where the reader is saying to himself, "I guess you had to have been there," you have gone past the point of toleration.
I don’t know if I totally agree with Croce as it relates to diminution, but I understand what she’s getting at. Part of what is fueling my urge to write about dance comes from the corporal reactions to seeing it in real-time, and how often can that feeling be clearly translated into words? Like watching mayfield brooks perform an interation of their Whale Fall project at SCDT in Northampton this past May. They wailed and sang while crawling, and distorting their body across the floor in a sequin dress, moving from one threshold across the space to another. Their sounds were like crying just as much as they were like laughter; just as much as they held echoes of despair, they created joy. It was an experience that slowly sank into my body until I myself was weeping. Even trying to construct a clear image in my sentences feels somewhat demanding of my felt memory; you just had to be there. But maybe this is also a reason to move further down this road. I am not wholly interested in you feeling exactly what I felt; I am more curious about what sensations arise in your body and what images you imagine from my telling. It is not important how closely we relate, but that there is a relation at all. The possibility of you had to be there, becoming, I wish you had been there— let me tell you why. Let me tell you all about it. Maybe you will feel something in your body that translates into your own language.
I should also say that perhaps it feels ridiculous for me to write about dance because I don’t feel like someone who deserves to write about it. I want to; I’m always trying to understand where I am at with it, where it is in my body, and how I perceive movement in others. But my history with dance makes me feel a bit awkward— a few years of dancing in high school, including one year of competitive dance; 1 class freshman year of college; picked it up as a minor during sophomore year, and then just stopped altogether, after having to bow out of a grad students thesis project so that I could begin going to therapy. I began dancing again, slowly, in 2021, and I am always, it would seem, playing catch up. It’s generally a very exciting experience, and I’ve had to grieve how much I feel like I missed by abandoning my practice 7 years ago.
As I’ve re-engaged, I’ve found that my dancing body often confuses me— I can’t figure out what I’m up to, why I made a certain decision, and where my momentum is coming from. I’m not even sure how much the improvisational practices that I engage in require this much scrutinizing. So I’ve started filming myself more, and as I move towards being able to look at myself without immediate critique, using the worst words I can think of, I move closer towards curiosity over scrutiny. Fascination over judgment.
My sweet friend Sonya and I have talked about this a lot— how hard it is to look at yourself, to explain what you’re experiencing in others, to want to share about your findings. Particularly one day, in a beautiful sun-soaked home covered in dog hair, we ran through all the different issues and hold-ups we have around feeling like there is some authority needed to breach the topic of the arts, particularly through writing. Sonya is a dancer, film-lover, poet, and one of my trusted people to parse through these topics with. Our feelings about talking about dance are similar but different. I have a high-pitched, bug-eyed approach, I’m always watching dance films, doing research, and dipping my toe into some theory— constructing my own personal MFA program. Sonya’s wholly engaged with me but much more reserved as they navigate a moment of taking a distanced look at their life-long identity as capital D, Dancer.
What emerged from this conversation was a clear understanding of our shared desire for inquisition without authority. Answering the call to communicate what we experience without worrying about pretension. How often does the concern of pretentiousness actually reveal a fear of looking like you really care about something? That you are stewarding a deep and sincere interest?
I write this letter as a prelude to future notes on dance and archiving my experiences of movement. Like this moment outside of the Hadley Cinemark before Sonya and I went to see Challengers (2024). In this solo, they are wearing bright pink platform Crocs; it is only maybe the fifth time I’ve used my new-to-me camera.
They amble around the metal beam held in place by concrete, leaning their weight on it, pushing it away with a calm effort, pedaling their legs backward. And suddenly, it is a duet. Sonya moves behind the beam, and with much of their body hidden from view, their hands gently wrap around it. It is not sexual, but it is sensual, almost loving. It actually feels deeply romantic— like I am witnessing someone hold a cherished thing for the first time. Then I realize that the duet is not between Sonya and this structure but between Sonya and Sonya. The metal beam almost acts as a curtain of privacy, or a stage, depending on how you look at it. Their hands move up and down until they meet to gently circle one another; they’re rinsing each other off; they’re kissing. Sonya’s hair flickers from behind metal while one hand reaches out and away for air, both hands rest. To the camera, their left hand slowly retreats backward, their right hand follows towards it, and in the left’s empty space, it pauses. a “come back” pause. and as the left hand re-emerges from it’s hiding place, the two move together, almost entwining. Two lovers chasing one another in slow motion. Until, of course, it happens in reverse — right retreats, left rests in its absence.
I’ve danced this dance before. With friends, lovers, newsletters, hobbies, with myself. I leave, I come back, I call out, I search, I almost touch. I let it rest. And the dance always begins again.
love