Accidental Dramaturgies

I. turning

As I was gathering materials to apply for a fellowship this past fall, I went to my website, which has been untouched for over a year. I have not actively pursued dancing, taking a break for mental health reasons, financial survival, and sheer lack of trust in the field. Due to the sudden closure of the University of the Arts this past summer, I discovered that all of the writing and videos I’d created as a student had been wiped from the internet. Amidst the countless losses from the closure of the school on June 7, 2024, one of those included my archive, the documentation of my work thus far. 

All but one of the videos of my choreographic work were now grey boxes, featuring the message “Video unavailable!” I followed the links to articles I’d written for The Philadelphia Dance Journal and Dancegeist, hoping that at least those remained, and discovered the links no longer existed, along with the publications. The drafts to these pieces, of course, lived and died in my UArts account. 

Somewhere in my subconscious, I know I let this happen. My avoidance of turning back to the person I was in May of 2020 upon graduating, of dancing itself, didn’t pull me to my archive or the drive to create. I moved forward and away and my archive did too.

Now, I am turning back. I started a new writing sample for the fellowship. I meant to write that, but I wrote this, by accident, instead. I didn’t get the fellowship.

II. roles, collapsing, and peripheries

When making work by myself, I like to watch. In rehearsal, I experiment and perform for the camera on my phone, for the future-I that will review it in a few minutes time, perhaps for the friends I’ll send it to later that evening if I’m feeling brave,  to my sister if I’m feeling less so, or more likely to myself and my partner when we go to bed. As I move, this self-awareness of my future viewing of the current moment collapses into the practice. My movement is a kind of watching, a voyeuristic meditation of my body. After I dance, I sit on the periphery of the movement of myself, (as Donna Faye-Burchfield would say, alongside my “somatic dust”) and watch as a choreographer, a dramaturg, as self-critic, an audience, as friend and witness. I shed the dancer for a moment and often forget what just happened. These roles compete for space, sometimes one speaking more prominently over the others. There is no show date, no funding, no cast, no venue. There is no reason to make other than a pursuit of pleasure and relief from the guilt that I’m not making as much anymore, at least since graduating, that I situate myself too much in the periphery. I still haven’t officially performed the work in a final state.

The role of the dancer is one I enjoy less now, yet I bring it along with me into the periphery of the dancing itself. Through editing MRPJ #61, I’ve seen attempts at defining dramaturgy, and all have stretched in vastly different directions. I don’t think this issue’s goal has been to define dramaturgy, or even define what it means to labor, collaborate, work, and be alongside someone else’s research, and yet, moving through others’ attempts at naming this relationship has uncovered the natural closeness that occurs, especially with lack of institutional or government funding, with oneself and others when making dance. 

III. special thanks, gathering

I’m witnessing Jesse Zaritt move across the black box at La Mama in March of 2022, sometimes drawing on his body with markers, tracing his veins as they appear through strain and fatigue. As a former student of his, I know that he is drawing with his body to be “in” the world: to recognize himself as the world, down to a cellular level. My name is listed in the program under “Special Thanks” next to his boyfriend, Niall Jones. 

About a month prior, I sat in a rehearsal studio at La Mama and watched Jesse work through an earlier iteration of the same piece. I held off sharing feedback as we cleared the space for the next rental. We went to lunch and I played a video on my phone of the solo I was working on, the same video I watched the previous evening on the floor of MOtiVE Brooklyn, leaving sweat marks in my notebook as I tried to reconfigure the structure; residue of the dancer bleeding into the dramaturg, the choreographer, the director, after running the piece. 

In a section of the video, we watched as I stole a practice of Jesse’s called “Jolening” in which you intuitively listen and move only to the vocals of a song. I used it with a track by Bikini Kill, a stark departure from Dolly Parton’s brightness. “I can see all of your cells moving in this section, down to your fingers,” he shared, “it feels full.” I apologized for stealing his practice. He said, “I love that you did.” He shared that somehow the practice exploded in a way he hadn’t met before. I shared in return, “I’m noticing how close your work brushes up against a confrontation of effort and watching.” 

This hung between us, considering his vulnerability in sharing an unfinished project with me and also how the influence of his practice evolved in my own work. He volleyed back that he was stuck, unsure of the direction that effort was going. I encouraged him to keep diving deeper into what he had, it was interesting to see his effort physically drawn on his body. 

We exchanged like that for a while, pointing out things we were drawn toward and things we’d reshape. Jesse proposed I create an alternate ending to my work (I unplugged standing lights I had scattered through the space in quite a banal way). He shared that it felt too polished for the energy of the work, and I agreed. Jesse asked for specific feedback on the color choice of marker he was using. I forget now, years later, what I suggested, but it made clear the somatic pathways we’d shared and the trust we’d gained as mentor/mentee, friends, viewers, and admirers of the others’ work to share in this way.

I took his words with me and he took mine with him. Being listed under (or even “as”) “Special Thanks” somehow feels closest to describing this communal sharing, proximate to dramaturgy in some accidental way. As a form one must view, dance ultimately solicits gathering. These gatherings lead to conversations and exchanges that are accidental dramaturgies. In that sense, these “Special Thanks” seem embedded within the process of making dance, as gratitude to the collective; the enthusiasm, curiosity, and care for the other to speak on.

IV. exchanges

DRAMATURGY AS PRACTICED CLOSENESS

When we first moved to New York City, Jess Ziegler (my first roommate and eventual best friend) and I frequented punk shows, most of them led by women, queer, and trans musicians, three-to-four times a week in Brooklyn and the lower east side. We’d sit in our shared living space in the mornings, scouring social media for shows, and texting people we’d met out and about asking when they were playing next. If we were exhausted, we still went. We were feeling more at these shows than at any dance performance we’d seen in that time period, the mosh as an avenue to be within the music, throwing our bodies to collide with strangers, to be close to those who chose to be there. It became a practice, and Jess researched alongside me. When making the solo I have discussed above, we would have similar morning exchanges, only they would surround the scores I was playing with, the song choice, the levels of effort. Jess experienced the sensations I was drawing from just as deeply as I did, and she steered my work with care as our practice of closeness and collision lived inside her.

DRAMATURGY AS LIVED CREDIBILITY

My friend Kris Lee came to an informal showing of the solo, a more finalized version, and in the bathroom afterward said, “Nico, it’s almost there, you just have to dig, you have to growl with your body. It’s about punk music, you have to go there.” I think back to the countless times I’ve witnessed and moved alongside Kris as she danced in class with me, as she DJ’ed, as we went out dancing in Philadelphia and Paris and elsewhere. I remembered going to see the punk artist JessX together, and how Kris moshed about the crowd like a tornado. Like looking through a viewfinder at all these moments we’d shared, they informed how I took the feedback and gave lived credibility to her words. 

DRAMATURGY AS “BEING THERE”

Madeline, my partner, sat in on a rehearsal, played music, shifted where she was sitting to view it from different spots, and encouraged me to drink water, to get out of my head. I remember after she saw an iteration, she shared that the work was softer than she expected in a way that served the audience experience. It was a welcome comment since the physicality of the work often left me wondering if all the audience would take away was a body, screaming. She reassured me on the train to our apartment the piece was ready, while also putting language to the textures of what she saw in my scores. Some nights she’d make me dinner when I’d come home late from the studio and stay up watching videos of the piece with me as a supportive presence. We’re both dancers and despite the above observations, we talk about dance very little (and in my opinion, this is a welcome reprieve to the codependence of dance on other relationships in my life). Performing the work at a more substantial showing at Triskelion in Greenpoint, there Madeline was a beacon of support. This support reciprocally extends beyond our presence as dancers, it exists as an encompassing constant, which in turn feeds the ability to show up for oneself.

DRAMATURGY AS PERSONAL DANCE HISTORY

My mother, who was my dance teacher growing up, who taught me to love performance despite the traumas it brought us, who let me pick my music, costume, and where I stood onstage, helped me over FaceTime as I held two similar tank tops next to each other. Briefly, my memory cut back to her secret encouragements of my rebellions against sexist costume requirements at my studio. “Go onstage in what you want,” she would say, and I would, despite the backlash. I asked which tank top I should wear for the piece. She gave the same advice. It made me realize that perhaps these personal (and for me, familial) moments of exchange in dancemaking had started far before I understood what feedback or dramaturgy was. The ability to nurture a work can be a dramaturgical component of the dance community that emerges without designating a dramaturg and elicits courage to create authentically. 

V. returning

Dramaturgy doesn’t just exist as a codified practice or role, it spills between conversations, fleeting moments, and moves along existing intimacies. At least this feels true for me, a young dancer making work alone, unable to pay a cast or other support, with no set performance to work towards.

This past summer I met with Jesse Zaritt again in Sunset Park. We talked about the futile feelings of making in this moment, my loss of trust in the dance field, the closure of the University of the Arts and what that meant to both of us and our loved ones, and about fears of relying solely on dance for income when funding could be abandoned at a moment’s notice. The clash between achieving ample resources to make and the pressures to appoint additional roles, such as “the dramaturg,” beyond oneself seems to be a status in this field I’m far off of, despite years of trying.

Jesse shared that he took me to Sunset Park to see the various groups of dancers there. He described TikTokers, couples slow dancing, and Chinese fan dancers existing in a beautiful, chaotic harmony. However, at that time, no one was dancing. He walked me around the park, showing me where the various groups were often found. I thought of Donna Faye again, and her idea of “somatic dust.” We were walking with the somatic dust of those who were unabashedly dancing for the joy of it, as we were expressing our own precarious feelings on dance at the time.

I didn’t realize until months later the momentum that gave me to write this piece, to start rebuilding my archive through the act of returning, and to fracture some of the pressures I’d been feeling about making, about getting artistic support (whether that’s financially, the ability to codify a dramaturg, etc.) only by capitulating to a field that has mostly caused me shame and notions of sustained inferiority. 

I shared a draft of this essay with Jess Ziegler, and she wrote, amongst other helpful feedback, “maybe add a line about how we’re not really alone, or somethin’.” She, and the many others who weave in and out of my solo artistic practice, remind me of this in my act of remembering their somatic dust in writing this piece.

Jess and I found ourselves in late November of 2024 in the studio at MOtiVE Brooklyn, and we started to make together. I found myself once again blurring between dancer, choreographer, dramaturg, and now with Jess in the room, two friends who have experienced love, heartbreak, loss, and catharsis alongside one another. 

But mostly, we laughed.