Vertigo + The Fake of The Real

I am standing on the diving board. I feel the spring beneath my heels. I feel my thighs kissing. I feel spandex, pinching. Ok. So take it off. I am naked. I am feeling a draft. I am not looking down. I am feeling the expanse. The expanse is inviting while frightening; the horizon is far away yet so encroaching I can almost grab it like cotton balls and stuff it into my mouth. I am a dummy. I am a cotton-stuffed dummy, held together by PVC-pipe hollow bone and layers of nylon pantyhose. My blood is inert and my nervous system is knotted together every 10 inches. I can barely stand.

If you climbed the ladder and you are going to fall off the board anyway, wouldn't you prefer to jump?

******

AUDITION DETOX, _______ ___ Company, New York

What is this bad taste in my mouth?

I make all rounds to the end of the day, not even sure of what they're looking for, not even sure if this process is reflective of how they work. How they work is what I really came here to figure out--that I can give them something is for me not a question. But that is precisely the problem. I know I can give, and those who can give me work know I can give. They just don't see me giving. And I won't budge until I know they are worth my effort. And I go home alone.

They want me to come in for their workshop and for their rehearsal process. I am actually not resistant to the idea, I just don't have the time until after my show on the 18th. Maybe the bad taste in my mouth is just an unpetted ego that would have preferred an unambiguous "YES". Good art feels like that: YES. What you can say, YES to. Your eyes widen and you shake your head in shock. Or your cheeks lift and you nod your head and smile on one side of your face. YES. YES. IT FITS. IT'S RIGHT. IT FEELS GOOD. I am patiently waiting for a time when the YES is clear and the REST outside of the YES just rests aside.

Am I worried? Also yes, the other yes, the tremulous "do you need to go potty?" yes. As a side note, that's actually not true -- we falsely assign to children the role of shyness, when I've recently observed a live specimen display the greatest enthusiasm for pulling her pants down and tinkling in a bowl big enough to be her bathtub. Only hers is an unabashed "YESH." She has a constant stuffed nose. Going on. I am worried because I am worried that I am not actually authentic. I have another internal haunting dogma that states that if I am not truly authentic in this line of work for which I sacrifice all sorts of unspecified material glory which my above-average IQ could command, I might as well be fully false and wear high heels to work. But I know (I squint my eyes and raise an eyebrow: "I know", what a problematic phrase)...I know the underlying presumption of my potential for commercial greatness is only the smoke blowing from a business-aristocrat's pipe. That's work and sacrifice too. And besides, I'd get fat. At the end of the day, oh my vanity becomes my salvation.

So underlying this worry of inauthenticity is the rudeness of being presumed disingenuous. "What is she hiding?", I hear them ask through secondhand gossip from my friend who dances with the company. I'm not hiding anything. "Those who get to know Pisces-Aries cusp people better learn not to look for deeper reasons or ulterior motives behind their actions. Those born on this primal cusp resent being analyzed, feeling either rightly or wrongly that what they so openly present to the world is exactly what they really are--no more, no less," says my magic Birthday Bible. Tell me what I'm actually saying to you, I hear myself think, please stop telling me what you think I'm *not* saying because I say things differently from you.

Underlying this confrontation with perception and reality is my confusion about trust. Why should I trust the environment of this room--which is by nature of being an audition, competitive and judgmental (professionally, not personally)--to be "the real me"? I AM being the real me. The real me in reaction to this circumstance. There IS no other me than this in this particular moment. You want the real me then see me in the contexts of my choosing. You want the real me to look like what you have discovered is the real you, then hire me and pattern me into embodying yourselves. I am hiding nothing save my disenchantment with this process.

The daughter of a Taurus bull-queen shouldn't be surprised at her own stubbornness. "Make me trust you, show me I can trust you, and I will melt for you like the bubbling brook. Until then, it is winter in wonderland and I am sheeths of ice protecting the river beneath." Is it me? Am I the problem?

Why I am allowing myself this ridiculous obsession and sense of affrontery is because it makes me question what is it I actually have to offer the stage (to direct the progression of my own choreography, which is coming into being and not quite in its own skin yet) as well as to question my lifestyle and love choices, which are still problematic, because there is much at odds with itself, my sex in particular (both noun and verb).

I walked away yesterday with pleasurable advice: she (one of the pair of choreographers) pulls me away for a private counsulation in between rounds: "Listen. Relax. Just relax, Ok? Go with your groove. You have a groove, right? Dance from your pussy, and your groove. Ok?" I smile. The thought makes me happy. I am happiest when I am dancing from my pussy (pelvis). I like concrete advice. I was very pleased with this advice. I think I open my (upper) mouth so much it drowns out my lateral lips, below. But I am tired. I don't like being told what to do. I am tired of being told how to be. And I quickly shift from awkward to frustrated to pissed to disenchanted as we repeat and refine this phrase that is confining, not freeing, that is dramatic by nature but asked to be nonchalant (the aesthetics of cool or the cooled). As if nonchalant is truly feeling. I am not so much into this version of sexy. My sexy does not read this way. My sexy is hot and rompy, not parched and longing. My sexy I feel should be me at my heights, and my questions and my discoveries, not at my being untouchable.

But yes (the confessional yes, the yes-with-a-sigh, the exhaled yes (if there was an even lower case than lower case, I would have used it to write this "yes"), it is true that I am not getting my groove on. I am not getting turned on. Is it me?

I am melodramatic. Yes, melodrama is a mechanism. It is perhaps a release (it feels good, it feels recognizable), it is perhaps a wall (blocking the emergence of the unrecognizable, which is most exciting of all. The monster, unleashed). Perhaps it is cheap. Or is that just another word for accessible? [Child's face, perplexed more than tormented, slapped repeatedly across the face, back and forth, back and forth] Accessibility is a big question I am facing in the direction of my own work. What level of inaccessibility will I accept of myself?

Ultimately, I suppose, the presumption has to be: to be accepted on your own terms. In your own choice of representation. And it will *always be* representation. I am concluding as I write this (fighting to understand this bad after-taste of their process with this desire for the underpinnings of their aesthetic, regardless of results): Performance that is an act of intense private intimacy in public is peep show, violation, or church. Peep show, because the choreography is masturbatory. Violation, because the only way to really share would be to make love to the audience (which presumes consent at purchase of ticket, not at penetration; yet how do they say no?). Church, because it demands complicity. I told myself as much when I realized that this was what was happening at my residency at Nassau -- "if you want a parish, then get a church." I was becoming such a zealot for my cause of lostness in the ambiguity of the making that I lost sight of the theatrical form as presentation, possibly entertainment, possibly treatise, possibly invitation.

I have seen this company's work at many stages, for the sake of my friend that dances for them and who I have seen both grow and be stunted through their work (she will never admit to the latter because she will never realize it - she too is seduced by the ferociousness and exclusivity of their message that it is blinding. The Fake of the demand of the Real -- be authentic, be authentic MY way). They want the authenticity so badly I think that the choreography suffers. The movement is not movement, it is shape to shape, image to image, but there is no punctuation. They want "thick", so they do not want it to stop. So then mustn't that be movement? Their desire for speed does not allow much punctuation, or, at least, they have not learned how to ask for what sort of phrasing they want besides to copy the man delivering the phrase.

In terms of audition functionality, it is a lot to ask of bodies and minds that are trained to create contiguity of disparate elements (to seek efficiency, connection, fluidity, and rhythm = harmony) to abandon it for function which is not really function. For example, they did not score "throw"; instead, inside of this choppy phrase, they choreographed a move of "throwing" that suits ___'s body but that is still decorative since the energy generated is not used towards any end (falling, catching, bouncing, reverbing). The move does nothing but show off the skills that ____ has. That is the conceit of dance. But then they keep asking for us to "just throw". Lie.

It is a lot to ask anyone you barely know to just "be themselves" when being oneself is often in relation to task and environment and the environment here is chaotic (impulse=paralysis). It is difficult to want people to want, it is perhaps harder to want people to be people and then to want them to be your ideal version of people; or the version of people you have fought to become (but not every-people has your fight, nor have you theirs). It is, if you ask me, a little disingenuous to be asking for something specific (a phrase) and then asking people not to be stressed. Of course they are stressed. They are learning. Learning new things is stressful, it is survivalist. If you want it to be pleasurable, stop asking for such specific things.

I am wary of Emotional Evangelicals and Glory-by-Guilt-mongers in general. I hid my true identity from them until I could escape them in their holy houses. I hid my voice from them while mouthing their songs. I fell down and raised hands, hoping the gesture would give me their meaning, because Theirs was The Only Meaning. The more I am detoxing from this experience (and my many experiences in the studio with various makers) the more I am realizing that the only way to fight this bad taste is to work to represent myself the way I see fit. I do not fit. One size does not fit all. "Sorry Ma'am, we don't carry large". I have to create for me and for those who will shape me to becoming that which I aspire to be.

Dive!