In the company of sister outsiders

Return to academia ...
Went to a lecture tonight by Alexis de Veaux on her decade-long biographical project on the “literary lately dead” Audre Lorde: “black feminist lesbian mother poet warrior.” Strangely – or perhaps not so, since I insisted on taking social science classes and a miraculous few in the humanities outside of dance or theatre at Swarthmore – I only encountered Lorde near graduation, when I happened upon Anand Vaidya in the fragrance garden and he lent me Sister Outsider after we commiserated eating Tarble toast over our viewpoints as foreigners in America. The collection of essays felt like something I would have been ape over three years ago, but reading it more recently, I feel like I have a more matured consciousness about the realities those essays reflect upon, to add to my eagerness over its stylistic sensuousness and gynocentric standpoint. De Veaux was a presence in her own right – perhaps not as formidable as Ms. Lorde herself, although much of that mythological status she had ascribed to herself – and spoke openly and honestly about the intimate, perhaps invasive, and risky process of writing biography. Not only did the lecture format remind me (fondly, in retrospect) of days immersed in academia, but de Veaux’s itself poetic expression of the complexities of subjectivity and self-identification in putatively objective academic work recalled my own exposure to and personal wrangling with the concept of Otherness in the Sociology & Anthropology of Swat, and the importance I ascribed to it then. I don’t feel as Other now … but neither do I feel the creative impulse as strongly. My thesis advisor Bruce Grant often mentioned, confounded by yet another desperate rambling submitted as work – desperate, and rambling, not only for the expected bad study habits of a burned out yet over-achieving college student, but for the genuine and heart-felt closeness I felt to the subject matter and how desperately I wanted to be able to articulate it – that my paper writing was like poetry, was enraptured with alliteration and literary devices, was too expressive to be credible. I know that this was as much criticism as warning, yet I delighted in the comment nonetheless, thinking that even if it was a ‘mistake’ and at cost to the soundness of my research, I was at least being acknowledged for my creativity.
Now, absent rules and structure, I am thirsty for knowledge and confused about what creativity is (many artists whose work I’m seeing evidently don’t use it, so who then?), which makes me wonder whether creativity for me was a greater truth or simply rebellion. Whether I am now doodling symbols and patterns in the sand, or whether I am building up a vocabulary and exposure to multiple ways and concepts of moving for the purpose of developing my own capacity for expression and invention. Invention! This, alongside a slice or two too much of well-meaning birthday cake (now attached unattractively to my paunch, hips, underarms, and butt) have given rise to the “wee helpless moment” of yesterday in which I was questioning my ambitions in dance.

Onward in dance ...
So going to an academic lecture on a literary figure made me think about dance in two ways: firstly, in response to the above-stated questioning of yesterday, I thought that much as Ms. De Veaux can relate to being one among the highly respected black female writers, in my own artistic career I should aspire towards being highly considered among my creative peers (should I actually get down to it and MAKE WORK). I realized in this that, although not a bad approach at the outset, I can’t keep up putting out for other choreographers as a dancer for too long. Not only is my right knee already having problems (oh, and did I mention my weight?), I can’t aspire to be, essentially, a letter on the keyboard rather than the writer herself. I won’t just be a tool – with all respect to all the letters out there, who I do think are works of art in themselves. And I know I have it in me – just the other night having coffee with a new friend, I found myself, after lamenting another banal performance of wanton technique and not much more, in surprising glee at breathing the words: “just you wait ... just you wait till I can show you what I can do with dance.”
Secondly, in discussion of the outspoken and controversial persona of Audre Lorde, I reflected upon my blessing and my curse of being mentored by Jacek ("yah-tzek") Luminski, of how compulsively significant he has been to my at first uninformed pursuit, understanding, and not always healthy consideration of dance. How I will, in Modern Class X, when the young teacher struggles to find a way to articulate a principle, often wish to myself that Jacek could just emerge from the air to tell everyone really what’s up; to invoke “luk” (the bend of the bow, one of the images and movements he uses to stretch the spine), or to lead us in an absurd half hour of breathing and plie, in order to feel the true weight of the pelvis. But then I realize that maybe Jacek himself got some of these ideas from the artists here – meeting Bill Young again in New York, for example, after an introduction at the festival in Bytom last year, I am surprised to hear that he first met Jacek in 1993, contextualizing the development of Jacek’s technique in a way I hadn’t thought of before, because to me, as a faithful student, he was always the first if not sole proprietor of contemporary dance.
So what my relationship with Jacek Luminski has to do with Alexis de Veaux’s writing of Audre Lorde is that because of my intimacy of knowledge yet outsidership with him and his company, and my attachment in the years following my residency there, I have always thought that maybe one day I would want to, and perhaps be allowed to, write about Jacek and his work. Not necessarily about his influence upon a national aesthetic in dance in a post-communist society, or about the community outreach of the company, or about the festival even. I would write with the primary objective (one that I identify with my own mission in dance, of course) of conveying what it means to pursue movement arts as a philosophical quest. But put in those terms, I might as well write about tai chi or yoga, which profess that very pathway. Perhaps I should instead write about how a Polish choreographer has returned me to my true Asian heritage!

We women of the hallway
Perhaps another reason I would want to invoke the apparition of Jacek in these hallways of DanSpace Center, New York City, 2005, is for him to give to the many seeking and loving women caught in lifetime affairs with dance the same sense of the phantasmic and other-worldly, because that is what I think they deserve for being here, for sacrificing whatever it is they must in order to be here. To be pinched and prodded and realinged, if not with instructing fingers then with oppresive gazes from the outside, from the magazine covers of Universal News downstairs, from personal memories of other studios, elsewhere close and far away. From the pure science of the athletic work that we do.

How is it that this is the venue for freedom -- for me, a large-boned and -built opinionated activist, well-traveled, privileged, ambitious, but vague? Or ambitiously vague? Or vaguely ambitious?
For Anna ("Ah-na") of Italy, eyelids striped fuscia and dyed-black hair messed and matted, a black-clad flexi-fairy-goth dancing with theatricality and barely contained abandon?
For Anna ("eh-na") of Portugal, lithe and little in purples and coastal toastal tan?

How and why do we find ourselves here, my sister outsiders?

Bill T Jones is quoted on his company website with the following anecdote: "About two years ago, sitting down to breakfast in a Bay Area diner, I had one of those curious confluences of sight and memory that produce a reaction only to be understood as a series of questions...
"The sight was that of three men, between the ages of 50 and 65, enjoying coffee at the counter. These three friends, seen from the back, flesh pouring out of their shirts and over their trousers, represented for me the privileged position of their age and gender in our society. Their privilege was to be unconcerned with their appearance. In fact, they probably seldom had the experience of having their bodies scrutinized or objectified. The expectations and gaze of a dance audience will probably never fall on these three. The spectator's gaze, on the other hand, defines me."

(http://www.billtjones.org/people/index.html)

I won't be fully actualized as an artist until I am presented. That moment is one I long for and that I fear. I am building ideas and dreams in my head, ideas that I passionately want people to see, want people to feel, to dream as I do. Are these worthwhile? Are they "worth it"? What is the alternative, how else can I be useful? How else can I be me? What is so freeing about being constantly defined by the gaze, about being addicted to it -- about being a performer?

(Edited April 16th)