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)

a wee helpless moment

what am i doing and why?
what am i doing, and why?
what am i doing?
why?
what am i doing and why?
what am i doing and why?
what am i doing and why?


where do i go from here?
where do i go from here?
where can i go from here?
where could i go from there?
how do i get from here to there?


who am i?
who are you?
who am i to you?
who are you to me?
why are you who you are to me?
why am i who i am to you?
where are we?
where is we?

if there is not we then i am not me.

My Golden Birthday

Scrawled by streetlamp light (can we still call them sodium lamps?),
1:05am EST, March 23rd, 2005,
restless in a queen sized bed uncomfortable like a marshmallow trough, sinking in the middle, but at least I have a place of privacy and my period of bodily and emotional trauma from the sickness and the moving are making a graceful exit.

One of those nights when I again feel like adventuring out on strange streets in my maroon nightgown [those familiar with my "Freddy" story from Poland will understand this more intimately] -- instead I venture out onto my gritty "balcony" -- a fire escape -- and feel an unthreatening chill ... spring is finally, finally here.

Returned to my room and seated before my expanse of glass, beneath the iron spirals I catch a panorama of ungodly-hour street life: an old hunched man systematically rummaging through the sidewalk trash mounds awaiting weekly pickup, collecting bottles?, or something that clinks into his little rolling shopping cart. He looks around anxiously for possible observing eyes -- little could he suspect a girl on the fourth floor sleepless in her transition to womanhood.

It is my birthday, and when I draw the blinds there is close to a full moon in the sky, high in the sky that I spy between brick arch and iron ladder -- this is a great present to me. Brings me to thoughts of wilderness and wildness and the fact that I think random roamings in one's pyjamas is romantic.

I really enjoy my room, with high ceilings and double windows framed by a brick arch outside protecting the escape ladder at a diagonal. I feel like I am before a stage -- or perhaps on one? When I lean out, I can see the Hudson river, and the lights from the Jersey high rise apartments opposite reflect in its blackness, making me think of carnival when I walk home to a hardy woman selling "CHHUUURRRROOOOOSSS" outside the subway station and the lime green gated front steps of my walk-up.

I still hear the bottle man in the distance -- I last saw his stooped shadow walking along my side of 136th, but reflected in the facing side's second floor windows.

***

When was the last time an audience has had to become strangers to themselves in watching something entirely new, something they could not recognize, something they had to decipher?

What is the eventual purpose of outsidership, what kind of value can we put upon moments of watching, such as my secreted short of life's continual struggle?

What is Otherness? Can we not train our societies to marvel at it -- whatever it is -- rather than fear and seek to obliterate it?

***

From Bill Young's modern dance class today:

Sometimes you move; sometimes the movement moves you.

Where am I moving next? How am I getting there?

A new place, a new start

March 13th, 2005
619 W. 136th Street Apt. 15, (Harlem) New York, NY

Again, a frustrating inability to access the internet when my laptop is seemingly picking up a network somewhere in this universe, somewhere here, somewhere near this fourth-floor walk-up apartment that I now share with a Hispanic family of ever elastic number – first a mother (Rosario), a father, an English-speaking friend, a teenage daughter, a sullen pre-teen grandson (Isaiah). The next day add one or two babies (“cousins”), a teenage/young adult male (Tito), another teenage girl (friend?). That same evening, add a legion of middle-aged women primping before a Saturday night adventure, the young girls mimicking in the room next to mine where they all sleep. I feel a little strange and alone, in my 10 x 10 x 12 room, on my big queen bed, all by myself, compared to the closeness of the uncountables next door, and I hold a quiet prayer in my heart that I will manage to remain aloof yet friendly enough to retain that persona of foreignness that gets me quizzical smiles and nothing more threatening in this neighbourhood as I live female, young, and without family.

We were, over my first couple days, the loudest apartment in the building, which I noted with a smile and enough sickness, still, to sleep through—-blasting hip hop/reggaeton music interspersed with hysteric laughing voices can be heard from downstairs all the way up the stained staircase of what is now my new home.

My world in numbers

March 1st check-in, Melinda Lee reporting.

My life in numbers:
6:53 am Preemptive strike – head falls back down to the pillow
7:00 am Alarm rings
7:04 am Raise head again to look at clock
7:09 am Actually get up out of bed
7:48 am On the N train, ready to go
10 oz. Coffee from my little espresso machine in my hand in an old Starbucks cup
3 pcs. GOYA brand Mari biscuits consumed
One Seeing-eye dog accompanying blind passenger
8:14 am Change over to
#4 Express train to
14 th St. Union Square, transfer to
#6 Local train to Canal St. (if this is Tuesday or Thursday, minus an hour and a half to all of this to arrive at Astor Place by the same train by 7 am)

All this scribbled on an emptied Nestle hot cocoa packet in sharp lead pencil after thinking that writing my life down in numbers would be an entertaining exercise, until I realized that anything actually innovative to count would be tedious and may require forethought, such as: number of steps taken from home to work; number of people I made eye contact with on the train; number of people smiled at/from on the train; minutes taken to realize that the morning’s AM New York, albeit free, isn’t worth the retinal effort to read for the quality of its writing content. In order to be significant or insightful, the exercise has to either be sustained, or systematic, or both – or maybe neither. I chuckled to myself trying to devise means and goals in this effort during my commute, so if anything, then, it was worth the reconceptualization of what is otherwise routine.

Seeing the world in numbers is also a new and difficult perspective for me to embrace. I have for many years now aspired to viewing the world qualitatively, aesthetically, poetically, perhaps to the point of the impractical. Seeing in numbers now means seeing people as demographics, as representations, as symbols, as capital, rather than as colors (think “rainbow,” not race), friends, compatriots – but correspondently, also adversaries and competitors.

Yet seeing in numbers is helping me make judicious decisions. Emily’s mother Nancy – whom I chatted with after her ritual morning coffee and cigarette when I went for a blitzkrieg Philly jaunt to hold six-day old Kirsten against my bosom! – clarified for me that what I appear to be doing now is learning how to make decisions for myself. She said that was beautiful; I am surprised at just how simple and how right that is. To not feel compelled, but to have my own agency – this is what I am learning to achieve at this time.

Not that I have much of choice – preparations, considerations, and choices have to be made at this point. Due to my current roommate’s father’s ailing condition, I will have to move somewhere in nine days –

(my life in numbers:
9: days: till circumstance throttles me into nomadism once again)

which opened up for me again the possibility of fleeing somewhere else, or going home – Philly or Singapore, oh all those demons once more of "who am I and where am I supposed to be?". Those of my friends who think I think too much – you’re right! – may find it characteristic that yes, I had to think this one through again, because it is difficult to let go of the idea of opportunity for change or for return because those things, as means as well as ends, are familiar confrontations to me. Change means a chance to start afresh, to do better by yourself. Change was also hardly ever my choice. These are the numbers that I had been counting throughout my education:

Prior to arriving at Swarthmore for college, I had moved house or apartment 10 times; I had moved country four times, continent: two. During the tumultous high school years in international school in Singapore I didn't have a consistent close friend for any more than six months to a year at a time -- I lost six significant friends to school transfer, repatriation, and, in one case, the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 90s which lost her father his business (and thus repatriation ensued). Soon after entering college, my parents became missionaries with an organization, Mercy Ships, that has a primarily humanitarian medical mission upon floating hospitals off the west coast of Africa and the Carribbean. They trained in Texas, then served on the Africa Mercy, then lived "with long-horned cows as neighbours" in Garden Valley, TX, when my father became the Chief Operating Officer at their administrative base. By that time, I had returned simultaneously inspired and confused (and just a wee bit heartbroken -- in the time-relative scale of things, because otherwise it was pretty devastating) from my time in Poland. When my parents had visited me in Poland in 2002, I had gone without seeing them for two years. Our gathering as a family of four in Singapore in December of 2003 was the first time we had been all together in our country of origin in four years.

I only restate these numbers as a way of explaining how it is that I have for many years felt homeless. These are in no way uncommon circumstances, but I think I felt it more difficult because of the ambiguity (still existing) of the nature of our moving -- whether immigration to America was ever in the picture (because culturally, an Americanization was happening regardless), of what relevance our vagrancy had to what was putatively our home -- also a ceaselessly shifting landscape, a little natural-resourceless island with a cosmopolitan, hybridized identity developed to adapt to market necessities in order to survive independently.

But I also restate these numbers as a recitation of the struggle and yet the alibi I gave myself for not disciplining myelf to succeed academically, so that I can move on and become a more positive person. Because these numbers are all of what was lost or what was absent -- they are lamentations, epigraphs -- and do not reflect a personality that counted my blessings. I am a lucky, lucky individual, and I have had a rich life in both provision and depth of experience and relationship.

My life recently in numbers:
106: number of people auditioning for a project this July with Shen Wei (whose work I truly respect and would love to learn from)
21: number of us retained for the second round of selection
11: number of us who went home appreciated, challenged, but still jobless
2: number of auditions in as many weeks I’ve been called back for, but not casted in
1: number of auditions in that same time frame I was casted in, but turned down

Making choices, in my case, and despite both an instinctual and conscious reluctance to be involved in the production I did get cast in, still takes the good amount of time of four days. What is important is that I finally did turn it down, because I was able to articulate to myself, primarily, that the cabaret/burlesque style of the production was not going to be helpful to me in achieving what it is that I am here to achieve. This means I must be able to now articulate what it is that I am here to achieve. Huh.

To hone the style of improvisatory dance that I want to specialize in is to go through a detoxification process of life philosophy and physicality. It means to go deeper into the craft of embodiment and creation. I am actually happy to relinquish an opportunity to perform if it means that I can grow in distributing my expressive energy in a way that is neither destructive nor narcissistic. I want to be at the cutting and the discursive edge of my field, I want to develop to be respected and engaged by other professionals who excel at it – but which “it”? Dance as culture or dance as craft?

Not that I think of them as exclusive, but oftentimes I forget where I come from and that ancestrally there are beats, rhythms, and ways of seeing that are not tied to these lands I now traverse, not tied at all to this snow and cold. It occurred to me at some point in February that I was Asian. This occurred to me as a feature, a heritage, that I am allowed to embrace (see my second blogpost: "is it OK?!?!"). It is, like many of the blessings in my life, something I already have.

(Written March 1st, 2005, edited and posted March 23)