commitment (and care)

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.

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