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I have an opinion.
Ok, that hardly warrants an announcement. If you know me, which you do because I’m not trying to spam people with these emails, you know that I am rarely without an opinion. My reactions come in hot and often need to be expressed with some immediacy. I also like to be in charge – not bossing, just guiding/facilitating/holding the space—so leading a project, directing new work, that all tracks. Especially in a dominant culture that is still obsessed with asking artists to contort themselves to fit the trope male artistic genius. But…I am not an artistic genius. I am a person. A female-identifying person. And, for all my personal preferences, one of my biggest opinions is that the best ideas emerge from dialogue and collaboration. People talk a great game about collaboration right now. In job interviews, there’s often a question about how you navigate collaboration with others. When friends speak to me about their work and relationship woes, they often stem from difficulties in collaboration. Well, one difficulty really, a lack of interest or capacity for genuine engagement in what the other person/people have to share. Just like the work of attention, listening to understand takes a fair amount of effort. And, to do it well, we need to build trust over time so we can be vulnerable and open with feelings and ideas that are often forming-as-we-speak. Choreographing a dance and bringing it to an audience requires some degree of collaboration. But there’s a spectrum: a director could treat the dancers, sound designer, costumer, lighting designer, production manager all as paid help to support the fruition of their artistic vision: hire their skill, deploy it, and reap the reward in the art. This feels like the baseline expectation in late-stage-capitalism. My opinion? It stinks. It stinks because the underlying assumption is that the choreographer/director knows best. They are the genius in tune with the art and their ideas and instincts trump all. I’m being a bit overly simplistic and hyperbolic here. Obviously, most artists fall on a spectrum, accepting some input whether it’s from their partner, a long-time dancer, a valued board member, but the model of director-knows-best remains dominant. And for some work that may be best. I am not arguing for a fully democratized creative process. That is a noble endeavor and an achievable one, but it also takes a lot of time and energy to get on the same page, a lot. What’s worked for me in the past and continues to develop is a hybrid model. It’s my project: I make the plans and offer initial thoughts and suggestions. For between us and everyone here this meant seeding the original movement material, gathering the group, booking space, and scheduling time – oh and money. But Amanda and Chrissy have done so much more than arrive in the room and learn moves. They have brought themselves fully: their frustrations, curiosity, enthusiasm, all their physical skill and in-the-midst, ever-evolving personhood show up at every rehearsal. And it is that generosity of self that allows us to uncover the heart of the work anew in every performance. To allow this kind of hyper-intimate, auto-phenomenological exploration to emerge, I’ve had to plan and then be ready for anything; trusting that the best way forward for the work is not to be found in solo-prep but in the discourse between the dancers, myself, and our two dramaturgs Verena and Surinder. I write this and it sounds easy and obvious, just get out of the way and let the work happen. But that’s bullshit. It’s not about getting out of the way. It’s a delicate dance of guiding, listening and reflecting, and listening again and translating into an actionable step, facilitating the experiment, giving feedback, listening to the inside and outside takes, refining, trying again. It’s making a piece of art that could only emerge with the alchemy of people and experiences in the room. The collaborative adventure, caring by listening, serious play and experimentation: this is what I hope audience members can experience during our performance. It is why the work must be permeable and transparent, prepared but not premeditated. I want you to join us on the journey, not just witness the final product. It takes more effort this way. It can hurt to share something before we’re sure we know it’s just right. But, in my opinion, the world has plenty of polished, perfect-seeming products. What we need are more generous, open, sometimes messy in-betweens.
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 Still-life of the space around my feet at rehearsal. Credit: Surinder Martignetti As an embodiment coach there are certain phrases I repeat all the time: “find the most easeful and satisfying way to do this movement” is one. When the goal is to develop a communication between one’s thoughts and physical sensations this makes sense. Too much force or effort reinforces the ‘mind over matter’ paradigm that often brought clients to me in the first place.
So, when trying to make friends with one’s body: ease is good, effort is distracting. But in many other contexts effort makes things matter. For example, I know that I could type in some things I’ve been thinking about into AI to write this essay. But it’s the effort of wrapping my own words around these ideas that allows me to connect disparate thoughts and discover something new. My creating and drafting are necessary for the discovery. This is true with cooking too. Josh and I used to order out regularly before we had Harriet. Now we cook pretty much all our meals. We were especially attached to Detroit-style pizza but, by necessity, we’ve taught ourselves how to make our own pizza dough and sauce, creating a product that rivals Jets, our go-to weekly pizza delivery. I lightly dread the work and advance planning but pretty much always end up enjoying the process (and the product of course). In each of these examples ease or effort are the more difficult choice. When listening to my body, it’s easier to override with instructions and fixes, rather than tuning in gently to what might really be going on. And in everyday life, it’s easier to outsource the labor to others (which is sometimes necessary but has been taken to abhorrent extremes in present-day America) than to commit my time and energy fully to the work. And maybe that’s the rub: it isn’t about ease or effort. It’s about attention. Intentional attention. Which requires a strange alchemy of both focusing (effort) and getting out of the way (ease). We’ve been having some wonderful guests come by the studio and engage with what we’re developing. Last Friday, one of them said that she felt ‘implicated’ as an audience member in this work. There was nowhere for her to hide or fully abdicate responsibility. At first, I felt apologetic. “Implicated” can feel icky, like you’ve done something wrong. I want our audience members to feel like they have the option to weigh in, not like they’re being forced to engage. But then, I started to wonder about effort and ease. Our default state in society right now is a consumer. We extract, absorb, exploit…all to minimize our own daily friction. When one of our dramaturgs, Verena, asked me a few weeks ago why it was so important that our audience members be included in the performance my first response was: “why is it the default that they aren’t?” When I asked why you go to performance, the overwhelming majority mentioned community as a part of your answer. And, as any of us who is a genuine member of a community knows, you must give of yourself, in action and vulnerability, if you are to experience true belonging. Perhaps we must feel implicated, seen, or uncomfortable to have experiences that matter or to make us present enough to make an impact on others. Sometimes that requires loosening our grip and listening carefully, other times we step up and act. Either way we need to choose to do the more difficult thing. The other day in rehearsal Chrissy said “why do we [she meant all three of us, C, Amanda, and I] always have to choose the hardest, most impossible artistic endeavors?” At the moment I think I just laughed, she was being funny – honest but funny – and said something like “I guess that’s just who we are.” But, a few days later, I’ll say this: Most artists I know are asking themselves continuously, but especially at this political and environmental moment, why make art? Why does it matter? It certainly isn't economically remunerative nor can one claim (except on a lofty grant application) to be significantly moving the needle on the state of the planet. But we can offer generative friction; pairings of deliciously satisfying beauty with enough discomfort to earn your way somewhere new. But making art like that is impossible. It’s a tightrope you walk between leaning on skill and pushing into new territory without leaving anyone behind. We fail as often as we succeed. Thank goodness the benefit is in the doing, together. Last Fall I read this article by Adam Mostroianni and it’s been following me around ever since. He posits that instead of ‘doing what we love’ we should, instead, do what we can’t stand not to, pursue that which annoys us; the problems we can’t let go unsolved.
Dancers and choreographers go to one another’s shows then they grab drinks and dissect the work. The higher the expectations, the more rigorous the dissection. Dissection is absolutely the wrong word because it’s much, much more emotional. We get elated, deeply envious, woefully disappointed, furious to the point of rage…in short, other people’s art bothers us, in good and not-good ways. I used to feel bad about this practice and at its worst it really is just a catty, gossip-fest. But, at its best, it’s a group of likeminded people getting together to talk about the thing that annoys them the most: dance performance that isn’t quite what they think it should be. Or performance that is exactly what it should be but was not made/performed by them which is both inspiring to experience and exquisitely painful, a bit like eating the ripest, most delectable mango while standing on broken glass. As a choreographer on the verge of premiering a new work, I know why I’m doing this (see above). I even know why I make dance that is permeable and responsive: because I so badly crave that extra-ephemeral, only-this-way-with-this-specific-group-of-people, experience. What I don’t know is why other people attend live dance performance. So, I’m asking you: Why do you see shows? What are you interested in experiencing? What do you want from a dance performance? And, if it’s relevant, you can throw in what really gets under your skin – in performance or otherwise. That’s it for now. Keeping it shorter and, perhaps, sweeter for now because spending my days with a five-month-old is kicking my energetic butt in a deeply satisfying and all-encompassing way.  Past-Gina gazing at the empty seats and gearing up for a RealLivePeople Presents production. I’m a sucker for systems of categorization, especially those problematic personality-based ones. There’s something profoundly satisfying about both feeling seen and being able to point at something and say, “I’m not that.”
A few weeks ago, I was getting bodywork. Rolfing to be specific. I have a new practitioner who knows more about bodies than I do and it’s incredible. I spend so much time teaching people about how to listen to their physical intelligence; it’s a gift to be a student again. She was explaining that children don’t develop the ability to understand clock-based time until they’re 7 or 8 years old because the left hemisphere of their brains develop later. But they can understand space and physical relationships because those are developed in the right hemisphere. In other words, we learn space before we know time. She then posited that some people continue to live ‘in space’ while others live ‘in time’ – an oversimplistic categorization, so of course I perked up. What, I wondered, were the differences? After a brief dip into neuroscience, I came away chastened and enthused. In short: space trumps time in our awareness (which makes sense based on human development), but our understanding of time is also culturally grounded. Not all human societies orient around clock time; it is not a biological necessity. Ok, so what does that mean for my Rolfer’s assertion about ‘living in space’ and ‘living in time’? For me it comes down to social conditioning. I don’t think there are necessarily people who live ‘in time’ or ‘in space’. I think we all have the capacity to do both. However, when you are ‘in time’ you tend to be preoccupied with planning for the future: making schedules, lists, plans—and struggle to be aware of your current surroundings. And when you can arrive in ‘space’ you have more capacity to be present in your environment but may chafe and struggle against external pressures and expectations. Too simple? Absolutely. But what if we apply it to movement? Right now, Chrissy, Amanda, Surinder, and I are trying to solve a puzzle. between us and everyone here needs to be authentically responsive to its audience. The work itself must come alive not just in the space of the theater, but in the space between the dancers, our musician/sound designer Chien, the lighting technician, and every member of the audience. But for this to be possible, we need a way to transport our audience members into a shared ‘space awareness’. I believe that I use dance, movement, improvisation, and some somatic practices to drop into ‘space,’ so maybe it’s just another word for ‘presence’ – but I don’t think so. I think it’s about being oriented to your present experience, sure, but also to place and connection. So, that’s what we’re attempting to cultivate in the studio. It’s…not simple. I’ll keep you posted.  Me in my red cardigan sweater during a marathon cluster feeding (IYKYK) I’ve been asking for help a lot lately. My husband Josh and I had a baby in December. Her name is Harriet. She’s exquisite. And she’s a baby, so her needs aren’t negotiable. One of the trickiest parts for me of being an adult, in relationship with other adults, is figuring out
Despite the above, I’ve found myself asking for help, direct assistance, a lot these days. Community care is more than a nice idea; with a new baby, it seems to be a necessity. I’m not just asking for support that I can immediately return, I’m asking for time and energy that I will likely not have the resources to repay for months, maybe years. The irony is that for the last two years I’ve been collaborating with Chrissy Martin and Amanda Maraist on a duet (between us and everyone here) that has turned out to be about friendship, specifically: vulnerability, self-reflection, care, and the ongoing negotiation of meeting needs as they arise. We’ve been rehearsing for TWO YEARS and talking about how helpful it is to share hard things and get support. And yet, every time one of us brings something to the table that’s genuinely challenging, we feel so apologetic about it. “Sorry for taking your time.” “Sorry, I’m so much/so emotional today.” “Sorry, all these hard things keep happening and I’m having reactions to them.” Sorry, I’m a person. Because people have needs, right? My daughter Harriet certainly does. No one has yet taught her that her needs are a problem. That she is too much. That it’s important to track the math of ‘need-meeting’ and make sure the balance sheet always totals in someone else’s favor. I am desperate that she never does. One of the insidious aspects of heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacy culture, is the way it rewards us for dehumanizing ourselves. The less help we need, the better. The smaller female-identifying folx can make ourselves, literally and figuratively, the more we are winning. And so we find ourselves apologizing for genuine engagement, for being people who need other people to get through the ever-shifting terrain of our lives. In the duet, Chrissy and Amanda don’t just need each other, they need the audience too. That’s where we are right now in the process, figuring out what we can ask of our viewers. How much will they want to engage? Will they find it too much? How can we invite them into our world and imagine something new together? Because the price of not asking is suffering alone and the reward of being honest and soliciting help is connection and the possibility of something different. Josh and I have allowed so many people to come into our home and drop off food or cook, do laundry, wash so many dishes…and, in the meantime, they’ve told us stories, given long hugs, seen me in the same red cardigan sweatshirt day in and day out. Our community showed up, they are making our lives better, sweeter, easier, and yet I still feel like throwing up every time I reach back out to ask for more (see above). Clearly, I don’t have an answer here. between us and everyone here is loosely about this topic because I have a history of making art that asks the questions I don’t know how to solve. But it seems like ‘solving’ is not the right orientation for this challenge. Solving implies a tidy sum sitting on the other side of the equal sign. Living, especially with an infant, is less like math than strapping yourself in for a much scarier, incredibly fulfilling rollercoaster ride. Sometimes you need a hand squeeze, sometimes a bucket. And like all rides, I find it helpful to look around and see the faces of terror and delight around me. Because while I’m on a more personal, infant-shaped ride, all of us are unwittingly strapped into the deluge of horror and subversive care of this current moment. As usual I’m writing to you what I want to say to myself: let’s stop pretending we can handle it alone. And that our inability to handle it alone is a sign that we are inherently broken. This is the point where I want to offer you some kind of support in return for you reading this essay and engaging with my meanderings. But let’s be honest, I barely have the capacity to make dinner this evening. What I can share is some art: between us and everyone here premieres the first two weekends in July at the Neofuturists Theater in Andersonville. Every show grapples with these questions and never the same way twice. Also, there’s a lot of really spectacular dancing.  Trisha Brown perched on Steve Paxton's back. Commitment. Usually referring to an enduring agreement. The work of choosing a relationship, project, or event over others. But there’s another kind of commitment, the all-in-right-this-moment version. This commitment relies upon presence and attention to hone a type of action that is categorically un-casual. Yesterday, my friend Craig was giving me a ride home and we were talking about the ways that our friendship meets each of our needs (yes, these are the kinds of conversations 38-year-old me has with close friends). While he was thinking of examples, I named his quick uptake and habit of integrating humor into ‘serious’ conversations. But this morning I realized I’d missed an important one: Craig is not afraid to show how much he cares about me, my life, my opinions. There’s no guise or guile between us about how much we enjoy one another’s friendship. At the physical therapist on Thursday, we figured out that my ongoing knee bursitis was partially caused by a lack of strength and engagement in my big glute muscle, the gluteus maximus to be specific. To activate these muscles, the PT instructed me to arrange my limbs into specific poses, load with a resistance band, and stay there for a while. While shaking and squatting, I turned to him and said, “This makes me so happy. My body loves these kinds of challenges.” I spent most of my late childhood and early adulthood working to mask or modulate my all-in, un-cool, full-on commitment and care to almost everything: dance, friendships, fantasy novels, romantic entanglements…I tried to play it cool, or, when that failed, to make fun of myself for my “intensity,” show that I was in on the joke of my, clearly embarrassing, too-much-ness. In my mid-twenties, this gradually started to change. One of the things that made a difference was starting to make a dance with Scott. Scott McPheeters was, in my mind, an exquisite dancer with high social capital that somehow didn’t go to his head. I found him kind yet intimidating. I wasn’t quite sure why he’d invited me to dance for him a few years earlier, or how we wound up in the big open space of the Latvian Society, rolling around the floor and gearing up to maybe make a dance together. I did know that when I took his class the way he moved made sense to my body, and so did his teaching style. He was kind. I know I’ve used that adjective twice, but it can be a rare one in a field with a lot of nice fronts disguising competitive, scarcity-minded insides. So, we’re rolling around on the floor and we start talking about our lives. Scott doesn’t just recite his laundry list of jobs and gigs; instead, he shares honestly about his mental health, his family, his relationship. I do too, freely, joyfully, with massive relief. And then, we make a dance about it. We spent three years creating, performing, re-creating, and touring various iterations of Presenting: you first, with the hope for reciprocation. It was a process that taught me the value of my care and commitment. Improvising with Scott, I felt the generosity of his attention and presence. He didn’t dance at me, trying to demonstrate his abilities; his dancing was just like his friendship: soft, particular, and all-in; an invitation I knew just how to follow. Forgive a quick deviation into the history of postmodern dance improvisation: Abstraction was one of the guiding interests and principles of the Judson Dance Theater choreographers, credited with following the footsteps of Merce Cunningham and John Cage to generate many of the questions, prompts and ideas that continue to form the basis for much contemporary western dance choreographic and improvisational inquiry. Their abstraction meant utilizing movement as material and discarding obvious meaning-making associations or expectations. To take this one step further, imagine human bodies as objects whose shapes, actions, and relationships can be a kind of living sculpture. This approach was a breakthrough, opening new avenues of creative exploration. It's also a strange partial truth. Yes, human bodies are just sacks of flesh with a starfish of limbs sticking out in different directions, but we are also sentient, relational beings whose nervous systems overlap, cluing one another into how we are feeling. Why am I talking about this? Because abstraction is a way of creating distance: between a choreographer and the humanity of their dancers, between the audience and the meaning the choreographer is trying to communicate, and even between dancers themselves, in improvisational and pre-decided environments. Is this distance necessary? For some artistic endeavors, absolutely. Does it need to be the default method of creating or improvising? I don’t think so. In fact, I’d argue that a lack of inquiry around the impact of a culture that encourages a cool, aloof distance and an aesthetic that prioritizes turning one another’s bodies into objects, is in danger of producing dances that could mean anything, and don’t really mean anything. It can also turn improvisation from a means of real-time expression and visceral humanity into a ‘movement generating tool’ or a place for flagellatory navel gazing. But I can’t just say to myself, my students, or my dancers: make movement that means something! That command is a surefire way to make us all tense up, second guess, and get stuck watching ourselves from the outside without feeling anything. What we can do together is practice commitment. Commitment to the moment, to the sensations in our bodies, to the space we are sharing, to the actions of one another and what they elicit in ourselves. Commitment requires attention which leans upon our sentience and an awareness of our subjecthood. We can still choose to play with our bodies as objects, our movement as material, but it’s only one option in a sea of eye contact, gesture, and relationality. For most people, commitment is difficult. Our minds wander. We get distracted by thoughts, by trying to do a good job, by comparing ourselves to someone else. It’s not easy for me either. And yet, it gets easier when I remember the space Scott and I created together. How our care about one another fostered a bond that made the challenge delicious, rather than a terrifying slog. I’ll never fully know why my being has always been tugged into dancing, even when I’ve yearned to escape into something less risky and more stable. But dancing is one of the only spaces where my care and commitment are useful. If I’m brave enough to dive in.  Me, redwoods, and space The Journey from Space to Place
I just found out that I’m 0/7. Seven big applications, not selected for any of them. In past years, a development like this would have really got me down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m disappointed. I’d much rather be looking forward to a check or a residency than an awkward conversation with an arts administrator about why a panelist found my work sample “uninspiring.” But there is no despair. As of this moment, I am not attaching the value of my work as an artist to the opinions of a handful of gatekeepers and it is a big relief. I never wanted to outsource my value, it’s been a subconscious pattern based on a series of intersecting personal identities and societal contexts, but that’s for another essay. Here I want to focus on the shift out of the convincing-other-people-of-my-worth business because it didn’t happen the way I expected. I tried a lot of things: therapy, meditation, venting, hyping myself up, tearing myself down, trying to hype other people up and sometimes tearing other people down (not my finest moments), doing LOTS of research, pretending to be what I thought X funder or employer seemed to want – and sometimes convincing myself, and crying. Lots of crying*. Many of those attempts were helpful in other ways, especially the therapy, but none of them made it hurt less when the rejections piled up and clearly indicated that I was THE WORST DANCER/CHOREOGRAPHER/TEACHER OF ALL TIME (yes, I am a bit hubristic in my self loathing, aren’t you?). Finally, I stopped. In January 2023, I stepped back from all applications (grants, residencies, academic jobs, teaching gigs, you name it, I didn’t apply for it). Instead of chasing the moving vehicle of artist resources and opportunities, waving my hands in the air, shouting until I was hoarse; I let it drive on by. I didn’t stop dancing. I rehearsed and performed a work that challenged and fulfilled me deeply. I committed to regular solo studio time and kept that promise to myself, mostly. I began to learn Aikido. I did my second sprint triathlon. I became a volunteer counselor at the camp that changed my life as a teenager. I traveled to stand under some crazy tall trees and wade into the frigid ocean. I laid around with my cat and dog and partner and made-up songs to the tunes stuck in our heads. I got fed up with myself. Looked hard at some uncomfortable truths I’d been avoiding. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I did it anyway. Here’s what happened: I began to settle, nest, and root. My presence, previously frenetic and future-oriented, landed here, on this stolen land, at this precarious time. In postmodern dance pedagogy we speak a lot about “space” as a collaborator, compositional tool, and perspective. I explored space as a theoretical concept in undergrad, grad school, summer programs, one-off workshops, and creative projects. What I never realized is that “space” is just a way of abstracting place. If I were explaining this to my students, I’d say that place is where space, time, and emotion overlap. Place is a space, defined by topography and architecture, etched by time spent commuting, buying pita chips, treading circles in the park with friends, running late for shows; the unpredictable balance of repetition and novelty that makes up a life. To put it another way, I have a map in my head and can, with relative ease, point you in the cardinal directions, the loop, or the airport. But as I sit in my apartment writing this essay, I can feel the distance between myself and my childhood loft bed which is the same direction as the pool where I swim laps and a bit further than a friend’s studio where I’ve been gestating a new dance. When I moved to Chicago after fifteen years away, my map felt empty. I remembered some street names and neighborhoods, but it was a space, not a place. It didn’t mean much to present moment me and, more importantly, I didn’t mean much to most of the people who had been living here. Yet. When asked the most valuable act a young artist could do when trying to ‘make it’, the incomparable Lois Welk answered, “Show up.” To twenty-two-year-old me, this meant arriving with visible effort and performative presence (see: metaphorical yelling and waving my arms above). But now I think she meant something different: allow yourself to be seen doing your work, contribute to your community, engage with relevant issues and causes. Allow the place to get familiar with you. I couldn’t do this before. Not really. Too vulnerable. But this year, it happened anyway. By not forcing my life forward, towards the ‘right’ direction, I stumbled (over and over) into my right-this-moment existence. This place and its people accepted me into its folds. It feels a little claustrophobic sometimes, being known and recognized, but not in a bad way. How does this relate to applications and rejection? Well, it seems that if you root down and stay put for a minute, that vehicle of arts resources will drive by again. More importantly, by softening into my environment and community, I made myself available for opportunities to come to me, something I genuinely believed only happened to “lucky” people. Which brings me to the unbearably cheesy ending to this ramble: every one of my rejections has been another artist’s opportunity. And those artists, many now friends and colleagues, I begrudge less and celebrate more. I see how our entire ecosystem benefits from the ways the recipients of these opportunities thoughtfully distribute and share resources. By sharing place, we are intertwined in ways we can either miss in the hustle for the-next-big-life-changing-opportunity or choose to lean into for support. I’ve spent the last two decades perfecting the art of falling on my own, it is surprising to discover how sweet it is to be caught. *Shoutout here to the people who held me literally or metaphorically while I wept about rejection of any kind. It’s a long list. I am grateful for every one of you. |
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