HALF WAY!

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii So… it’s been a minute, huh? Well things got a little wild last semester and it turns out there is a reason people tell you not to take twenty credit hours. THEN over the break I was busy making a dance. No, making The Dance. We’ll get into all of that (and a bit more) here… 

THE DANCE 

I am still grappling with this beast of a dance I made over winter break. How special it was to make it and how proud I feel of the outcome. My wonderful friend Zoe wrote a bit about what it is like to be in my process… 

“I often tell Marlee and whoever I am speaking to about this process that it is an enormous test of faith under uncertainty. It demands a terrific amount of openness, improvisational aptitude, and a release of attachment to any sort of specific outcome. While these pressures seem to relate to a variety of creative processes, nothing I’ve witnessed, heard about or experienced pulls tension on them quite like Chew & Spit.

Navigating 13 schedules to pull together rehearsal times is a feat in and of itself, and provides a level of coincidence to influence the curation of duets, trios and group phrases within the work. Within that, the performers themselves hail from diverse movement and experiential backgrounds, requiring from them an ability to stay open despite the discomfort of the unknown. Acknowledging that it is not guaranteed whether the entirety of the cast will perform this work together until the day of the show, it is a master class on treading toward the unknown territory of a dance none of us truly know, but are eager to discover alongside the audience. 

This is not to say this work is wholly improvisational. In fact, this year’s production is heavier on set phrasework, and to consider this work an “improvisational score” would be an understatement. But the connecting of the tissues of this piece has not yet been fully fleshed out, making for one of the most alive, emergent performance experiences I have had the opportunity to be a part of. 

Marlee enjoys the term magic to refer to the creative process of dance-making, and I feel that to be accurate. There is something otherworldly going on here, throughout the process and within “the product,” if we may call it that. In a way it could be linked to the wise choices by the artists within the work, but I believe that has been made available through an intuitive wisdom activated by the openness of Marlee’s process. It is — in the truest sense of the word — a collaboration; a collaborative process that honors tangent, using even the traces of words and movements that linger in the atmosphere. Like a good cook, nothing is wasted. 

The lines of dramaturgy, friendship and collaboration are inherently blurry, and I write as all of those things, not any one of them. Our process together is about processing together. Dramaturgy is a nebulous title that in this context means only this: I am a friend to Marlee, and I am as much a friend to the work. I will protect it, be honest about it, attempt to see it clearly, do wrong by it and apologize for it. I bring everything I’ve experienced into the viewing of it, and I try to let go of everything that does not serve its best interests. I realize I am talking about both here. 

Beyond friendship, I have great respect and admiration for this project: I think it comes down to faith. Enough faith in art making, enough faith in the magic-potential of putting artists in a room and reminding them there’s nothing to prove, enough faith in the gut, in the body’s knowing. From the depths of me, I am grateful Chew & Spit exists, because it reminds me that dancing feels like flying, like friendship, like freedom.”

Melissa Miller also wrote a beautiful review that you can read here: https://www.stlouisdancehq.com/blog/chew-and-spit-winter-weekend-space-station-chew-spit 

Sometimes the SD card of the greatest thing you ever made goes missing and then you decide it is the universe telling you to do that dance one more time. SOOOO if you missed our shows in December you can come see it on Thursday, March 26 at Hope United Church of Christ. More information very soon but you, my dear email subscribers, get a soft launch. Oh yeah, the work is called dyke devotions. Here is some writing (by me) that goes alongside it: 

dyke devotions 

(dyke) devotions 

ddevotions

devotions 

SO THIS WORD DYKE…. 

I hesitate to use the word dyke in most rooms. I hesitate to use it here. I don’t implicate it in an attempt to shock or upset you. I use this word because it feels like who I am. (okay and I also love alliteration… okay and also maybe it is okay if it upsets you). I guess I just started calling this dance dyke devotions in my head once and I couldn’t stop calling it that and then I thought why should I stop calling it that. If dyke is not a word for you to say, you can call this dance devotions. I actually prefer that if you are not a dyke you call this dance devotions. I will not decide for you if you are a dyke, but I will say decidedly that not all words are for all people.  

I guess I like the politics of it. Do you say it outloud? How does reading it make you feel? Where does it live in your body? It lives in the nape of my neck and that space between my ribs and on the strawberry tattoo behind my left ear. I can’t remember the first time I heard it, but I remember that time I was walking with a girlfriend of mine and a man shouted it at us. I remember she let go of my hand. It must have been after that when I claimed it as my own. I feel proud to be a dyke. I love the word dyke. I like the way it feels on my tongue. How it flicks on the yke. I love dykes and date them and befriend them and dance with them at the club and dance with them in the studio and admire them and long for them to be happy in this world. 

I used to know a girl whose last name was Dyke. It is also a type of volcanic rock formation. I don’t know much about volcanoes but I have come to understand the dyke of the volcano to be the channels that magma travels through before it bursts through the surface to become lava. I think dykes move through the world in a similar way; below the surface making things happen. 

& DEVOTIONS

I grew up Catholic. Well sort of… I went to Catholic school but we never said grace before dinner. I did spend (at least) over 100 hours of my adolescence in prayer. I’m not sure what I prayed for back then, but sometimes when I’m really scared I still pray to that God. God with a capital G after all these years. The God that people pray to in this building every day. 

I feel that God (or something like it) when I am dancing. Mostly at the club; surrounded by strangers, absorbing their sweat, breathing the same beat. I feel it when I am performing too. I used to read the gospel to my church during mass until I realized the feeling I was chasing was being seen by people not by God. I also must say that ballet feels like church to me. Church without the morality. Or, perhaps, I just don’t prescribe to the morality of it. Like if you went to mass to kneel and listen to the music and say the prayers but not really believe them and you just like how they feel in your body. 

As I am writing this my dear friend (and collaborator) Zoe said, “the church body can be anything.” YES! For me, God is within and beneath and behind anything I encounter. I taste God in the bottom of that bottle of Burnett’s cherry vodka. I feel God in the touch of a lover's hands on the arch of my back. I hear God in Dolly Parton and Charli XCX and Tracey Chapman and Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell and Vivaldi's Four Seasons and that treadmill at SMTC. I smell God as I inhale the smoke of an American Spirit Orange on an unreasonably warm night in January. I see God in the rearview mirror as I go towards the unknown and away from everything I have ever loved. My ability to find God in anything – no everything – is at the crux of my practice which is culminating in this work. 

QUEER LINE DANCING 

In October I started teaching line dancing at a bar here in Urbana. I attended an event called Queer Line Dancing in Durham, North Carolina last summer and thought “Wow I really wish something like this existed in Urbana.” I am sure you can see where that thought led me. In short, it has been amazing. I’ve hosted three so far and plan to keep doing them monthly for as long as folks attend. Teaching in this queer and social setting has heeled a lot in me after years of being semi-closeted in different teaching capacities. I am also just obsessed with Line Dancing as a physical practice. I am teaching it as a course at U of I this semester and am so deeply excited. My wonderful grandmother has been teaching line dances for as long as I can remember and us having this new shared love is special. Below is a bit of writing about this practice… 

What’s queer about queer line dancing? Well I am queer and I am line dancing. The lines are still straight but queer bodies are operating within this predetermined structure. I love my camo hat and my cowboy boots and Tracy Chapman is like Jesus to me. I grew up surrounded by country music and no longer feel ashamed at the comfort I find in it. Maybe it’s the Midwest Princess of it all. The fact that people know where Missouri is because of a Lesbian Drag Queen. My grandma has been teaching line dancing for as long as I can remember. We have a new shared language. I am making sense of the world through collective movement and this obsession with imperfect unison. Okay and also I like to wear a cowboy hat.

MEMOIR

I took the most brilliant amazing extraordinary genius wonderful LIFE CHANGING class with Cynthia Oliver last semester. We read a memoir every week through the lens of choreography and then wrote a paper about our choreography through the lens of memoir PHEW! Here is my final paper… Mama!

DANCING/MAKING RN

I just performed in Urbana this past weekend! My wonderful peer (who I also happen to be a superfan of) Nik Owens gave me the great honor of dancing in his thesis, Taking Care of the Dirt.

I am taking so much ballet and gaslighting myself into liking YOGA as I work on a 200-hour teaching certification. Working with the one and only Jennifer Monson again this semester on some things we started brewing last spring and dancing in my dear friend (who I am also a huge fangirl of) Maggie’s thesis in March. For my STL angels, I’ll be back performing in the Space Station Fundraiser March 27 & 28. And also likely back on April 3 to perform in a work by the magic Jane Tellini. WOWWWW! i. am. so. lucky. 

I also wanted to share some writing I did recently about the role competition dance plays in my choreography which is also a sort of micro-reflection of The Dance: Competition dance is all over my work. I problematize the structures of this world my dancing body was born into. I see it as the ultimate commodification of dance and exploitation of the body, yet I am obsessed with its aesthetics and its repercussions on the dancers I am working with. Let me be clear, I am not interested in replicating the environment or functions of competition dance nor am I trying to make a competition dance routine (besides every August when I make 6 or 7 of them in a week to be able to pay my rent), rather I am trying to take what I gained from years in this world and let it work for me rather than discarding it as useless. This shows up through attempts at perfect unison, over the top theatricality, and pushing the physicality of the work to an extreme. Then, all of these methods exist alongside movement that is more about the body and less about what the body can do – extreme slowness, scores about your insides wringing, contact with another human being and the negotiation required of that, an openness to follow your gut and get lost in the movement, a fluid sense of malleability.

THE AMERICAN DANCE FESTIVAL (aka siren’s call)

Well… I’m going back to ADF this summer. BUT THIS TIME AS A CHOREOGRAPHER!!!!! WHAT??????????!!!!!!!!!!!???????!!!!!!!!!!! I am the US Representative for the American Dance Festival’s International Choreographers in Residence Program. Still sort of pinching myself. Basically, I’ll be at ADF for 4 weeks taking all the classes my heart desires, getting to know a cohort of international choreographers, making work on students, teaching a bit, and watching so much dance. Oh yeah and I won’t be making spreadsheets or picking people up from the airport or sitting at a desk for many hours everyday. It is basically a Dream Come True and I am so grateful and excited. 

READING

So, I ended up reading 35 books last year… WHAT???? Some highlights/recommendations: 

Non-Fiction:

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch – FAVORITE book I read this year and maybe one of my favorites ever. Lidia writes with such honesty and lyricism; she is somehow so vulnerable in the most poetic way. Her story is captivating but the way she tells it is beyond. I especially appreciate the way she writes about the body and memory and okay everything. This is the book I keep telling people they have to read. 

Bluets by Maggie Nelson – Another book I can’t stop talking about. It completely changed the way I think of structure and showed me how the emotional, the physical, and the philosophical can exist alongside one another. Also a quick read!! 

Black in Blues by Imani Perry – Phewww! This woman can w.r.i.t.e.! A book that is rich with history and honesty and bravery. Perry tracks the history of Black people in America through the color blue in the most beautiful historical text I have ever read. 

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr – A re-reading of the bible through a feminist lense. Barr is an ex-evangelical pastor’s wife who is still a devout Christian. She breaches this topic with the love of someone who still believes in that capital G God, and also with the anger of a woman who has seen that same God used to do all sort of terrible things. 

Fiction:

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar – I think I’ve already written about this book in one of these. My favorite work of fiction I read this year. Beautifully written and tragic in all the ways writing can be. A book I can’t wait to read again some day. 

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang – Deeply funny and current. I have never hated a protagonist more than June, brilliantly written. 

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfeg – I really did not want to like this book and it took me four tries to get through it but once I did I accidentally loved it, sue me!!! The way she uses the structure to put the reader in a similar state to the protagonist. How it drags and you get so bored you want to die but can’t stop reading. Also the role 9/11 plays in this text is brilliant to me. I also read this while I was in NYC in the middle of winter and that feels like the most appropriate way to. 

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher – Another book that took me a few tries to get through. Sort of Rest & Relaxations cooler and weirder older cousin. 

I am currently reading Wuthering Heights in preparation for the adaptation coming out next month. The copy I am reading is from my senior year of high school and full of annotations from my 17 year old self. It sort of feels like we are hanging out which is very sweet. 

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Okay I think that is wayyyyyy more than enough for one little email. As always, thank you for being here. As always, let me know if you have thoughts. As always, I will swear to try to be more consistent with this and likely fail <3 

xx,

Marlee