Open Dance Figure

spring 2023

I REPEATED A SEQUENCE OF STEPS THREE TIMES ONCE ON THE DANCEFLOOR ONCE IN THE THEATER ONCE IN THE OPERATING ROOM

A DANCE FIGURE IS A COMPLETE SEQUENCE OF WEIGHT SHIFTS DISPLACED IN SPACE TRANSCRIBED ON A PAGE

I PERFORMED THREE ITERATIONS OF A SOLO FIGURE STEPS SHIFTING WEIGHT CLOSE TO DEATH THEN REVERSING BACK ALONG THE SAME PATH COMING TO KNOW THIS FIGURE THROUGH REPETITION IT BECAME BOTH MUNDANE AND PERSONAL REPEATING ONCE TWICE THREE TIMES EACH APPROACH AND RETIRE DISTINCT YET INTERCHANGEABLE THE SAME DEATH SCENE PLAYING OUT THREE TIMES ONE AFTER ANOTHER AFTER ANOTHER THREE DISCRETE PERFORMANCES

This text concerns transition and performance, and my personal efforts to remain living along these lines. I began writing it with an epigraph in mind, words from the artist Yael Davids, whose work deals directly with the lives of people in occupied Palestine. The sense of self-recognition I initially found in her work has shifted in the intervening period, as our present moment bears witness to Israel’s unbearable bombardment of Gaza. I position her words and politics alongside this account of my own, encountering again the contingent scale of entwined human lives: struggles for liberation and continuance without congruence, threaded together through solidarity. 

In the script of A Reading that Loves  —  a Physical Act, Yael Davids’s 2017 performance, I find a representation of death: death, the outer limit of an individual life, is rendered as a heightened moment of performance; an extreme experience tracing the edge of human consciousness.  

Davids:

A vanishing point. The bed a vast empty stage.  
A double bed in dying is an amplifier.   
You have a solo.  
Dying is always a solo.

In these lines, the solo undoes itself, releasing an individual life from singularity through the ordinariness of its obliteration. Everyone has a life to live and die, everyone has a solo; and therefore nobody’s solo especially matters, in particular. In performance, the soloist reaches for their psychic and physical limits, singular in their embodiment of an idea and centered in the viewer’s focus, just as in the subjective cycle of life and death, one’s individual embodiment is their solo domain of expertise. 

Davids’s words are direct yet tricky, delimiting the solo and then circling back to dissolve it, making an ensemble. Emphasizing the borders of the soloist’s subjecthood actually reaffirms the solo’s dependence on the ensemble. Solo-group-solo-group-solo — dying may be a solo act, but the singularity of this death makes way for a plural.

3.

I’m looking out the window above my bed and hanging my legs up on the wall. The sky is dusk and there’s nobody around. I suck down the purple light like it’s a melatonin gummy. I never before imagined I could take so much rest, because resting in my body sometimes feels like a death sentence. Something’s changed, and I can withstand it this week.

The light looks something like another movement of time, the familiar dawn — but dusk, and stillness, are strangers to me. The familiar gloaming: daybreak after a night spent toiling in a windowless room. Waking, sleeping, two edges of the same knife, night. Time cuts both ways.

To stay with the light between worlds, one can stay awake all night and start the day with the dawn, reaching for a state of delirious clarity. It’s a way of stealing time. Stealing time and wasting it — it used to feel subversive, like having a double life, being both in the daylight and nightlife.

Dirty your hands with the business of laying waste to time and risk being caught in the act.   

The risk will always be borne unevenly, and the idea of reward only exists for the venue owners trying to turn a profit on the time wasters.

Now, in bed at dusk with nowhere to go, I’m losing my edge. Unraveled from my context, nobody there. Stillness, quiet: no atmosphere to hold my body in — my outlines blur to meet this void as if it were the vacuum of space, turning my cells to vapor on contact. In bed with my body and its hazy limits, the double-edged dusk slides between me and several restless decades.   

The surgeon sliced me away and glued me back into a long-avoided scene. Forced to lie still in bed: a vantage point looking out over the expanse of my physical form, sliding off along either edge as dusk cuts into the present.

Out from under

I walk side-by-side with the nurse as she leads me into the lights of the operating theater. I swan in, shrugging out of the gown as I enter, matching her tempo as she flows through gestures, guiding me onto the table, my arms in a T, palms facing up, slipping my lower body into a paper sleeve that fills with warm air.

The anesthesiologist asks me if I work in fashion. She’s wearing Chanel logo earrings, I can’t decide if they’re tacky or not.

“You must have a beautiful smile when you use it,“ she says. 

The bluetooth speaker is playing the Harry Styles song about eating pussy, and then nothing.   

I get very attached to the anesthesiologist who puts me under. She finds my edge — just the right dose of fentanyl and everything else to temporarily eliminate me and then bring me back a heartbeat later. I love her for that. 

She did such a good job giving me death, opening an interval in which I didn’t exist. I stepped inside and woke up on a fabulous high. Coming off the drugs I sobered into awareness that part of me had died, but I felt closer than ever to that version of me, the girl that I left in the ether. The anesthesiologist had been right there as I left her behind.

Surgery is the new sex

If surgery is the new sex, then not telling your lover you’re getting surgery is the new infidelity. I sign a form consenting to be sterilized and don’t tell anyone, simultaneously betraying the trust in my relationship and the terms of my body’s agreement with the linear future. Having wasted these intricate structures, barren and clear, my new form is sanctified via the production of medical waste. I’m mostly left alone — I feel almost dead, but so clear headed, flooded with absence.

In the twilight afterglow of anesthesia I grieve the linear coming of age I’ll never have — wondering if there’s any reward for the duration of transition, having been hung up on the outer limits of adolescence for the past decade.

I usually quell my desire to talk about how heartbreak is like surgery — after all, as far as I know, I alone went under and resurfaced, sequentially iterating this solo. What an honor and a privilege.  

2. Is a nightclub a theater?

For a while I was convinced that a nightclub could be a kind of theater. I had to go to the edge of this claim in order to test it, ending up further away from the theater than when I had set out looking. 

In the music video for her 2007 song Everytime, Britney Spears runs, slow motion, down a glowing hospital corridor, her cracked psyche leaking through seductive popstar glam, eyes magnetizing the camera to witness the irresistible spectacle of her suffering.

Britney’s choreography became the source for my own solo in an ensemble performance titled Group work.

enter performer  
throw coat  
arm right arm extended overhead, palm flexed  
pace downstage 2345678  
”yeah“ dopplering under a hazy horizon  
”yeah“ echo chamber conducting memory through synapses into steps  
elbow carving 90 degrees into waist  
tilt, up up tilt, down down   
tears, dance steps grasping into the darkness in front of your face  
a bolt of white light flashing through vision   
conduit facing out to the east  
memory clouds an arcade of limbs  
echoing into the domestic container  
steps channel down, bubble up from the floorboards

1.

count one ladies incline hip left  
arcing path inclining back counts 1 through 4   
quarter turn to face partner  
four hands forearms clasp, lift frame overhead, toned  
couple drags right heel back, left, 1-2-3  
couple cross to front of hall, replace couples front  
couples turn to face back,    
advance and retire  
repeat 

Partner dancing maybe is the most beautiful choreography, a script of undone edges and classical dramatic formations. Improvised encounters can follow a rigorous structure, yet still scrape with a risky unknown; each dance a point on a vast chart of permutating steps, partners, combinations. Risking love, dancers put their bodies on the line, joining hands, crossing with one another, stepping into unison. The love dancers meet each other by giving themselves to the edge, dancing for hours without stopping, without regard for their own wellbeing. The routine of their sacrifice is aestheticized, but the dancers themselves don’t matter, they’re disposable; interchangeable with the kids waiting in line outside.

A false equivalency forms between love dancing and all that is bad, dirty, and toxic about the nightclubs, but who even trusted the clubs with title to this choreography in the first place? Their agenda of louche consumerism meets an overcorrecting counterpart in overzealous self-preservationism, but perhaps a murky continuity joins this terrain of toxicity and absolutes, a way to conserve the potential energy held in the promise of finding each other by going to the edge together. 

Can we have love dancing? The extent of our sacredness — transmitted body to body — exceeds any one context. Love dancing belongs to the dancers.   

For so long I used to make solos and then I died three times, but I’m here talking about it, so who cares? I’m solo again — I can’t help but need the other dancers. I’ll take it.

everytime

Britney runs in slow motion down a hospital corridor wearing an oversized men’s white shirt, covered just barely past the tops of her thighs   
She stands in front of a gurney where her own lifeless body lies,   
crossing the partition to show us a newborn baby cradled in its mother’s arms  
Britney on the gurney being wheeled into the ambulance, her head lolled to one side  
The baby again  
Britney surfaces in the bathtub where her death scene played out moments before; radiant, glistening, grinning into the camera, having faked her own death and returned from the brink — it was all just an act,  
She’s loving it