MAY 2025 - FLOWERS!

Well, I just spilled water all over my journal and months of writing is ruined. I am trying to make a lesson out of this… I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, some ponderings and revelations and wonders from this big, beautiful, bustling month of MAY! (mostly from memory, because of the whole water thing)

MOVES

I performed this dance in early May that I don’t think has a name and if it does I don’t know it and I think that feels right. Maybe it feels right because I am having a really hard time putting into words what this dance did to me. What it did for me. It was made by Jennifer Monson and I got the privilege to create and experience it with her and alongside Tessa Olson. I’ve admired Jennifer’s work for a long time, and working with her was even better than I could have dreamed. It felt like I was moving in a way I was always meant to. I was pushed to find new, very specific, ways of moving yet it felt more like coming into myself than trying to fit into someone else’s idea of how I should be. The dance itself was physically hard. Really hard. Yet, making it was so easy. I know I use this word a lot, but it truly felt like magic. This is a word I use when something is beyond my ability to put into words. Despite my best efforts, this is one of those things.

COMPOSITION

My office job is putting me in a bit of a creative drought. Sometimes I get scared I will never make a dance again. This really makes me feel like a poser. I’ll get over it and I’ll make a dance again, I know. I want to share my final from Tere’s comp class. So, here it is… 

I find myself getting frustrated in this class at times. Generating movement for the sake of movement this regularly is a new practice for me. I find some days I cannot think of anything at all and most days I feel like I keep regurgitating the same things for weeks on end. There is this tension between developing a personal style and feeling like I just make the same shit over and over. I’ve made things I really enjoy this semester (I know liking it is not the point) and I also think this frustration I am feeling is useful. This way of working has allowed me to create things I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I am grateful for that. I appreciate that the class feels like a lab. Looking at making dances like a scientist testing different variables and seeing what happens rather than having big dreams about where the work will end, I let it work itself out from within my process. Editing feels crucial. I’m trying to not be too precious about the way I generate moves and being more willing to let go of things. 

I am a bit too excited about tangents. I think there has always been an essence of this in my work, but I got really obsessed with it this semester. By the end of this final, I see it showing up in a more integrated way. It is more of a muddling of all the things than this and that alongside one another. I really liked the metaphor you used about a big hunk of marble being sculpted into something more specific. Or when I was talking about it like a painting where at first all the colors were sort of just next to one another, but now they are blending. I feel a sense of blurring and undoing as well. 

I appreciate the way you have been pushing me to look at transitions. How maybe nothing is a transition or everything is. I’m not sure I have much else to say on this yet, but it is changing the way I look at dance as well. Maybe life too, good work Tere. 

I’m considering the role of “virtuosity” in my work. What it means to be in a body that was trained to do triple pirouettes and hold a tilt for four counts of eight. I think I was resistant to putting things in my work that showed this training, but to ignore this part of me no longer feels right either. It was also sort of drilled out of me in my days at Webster (which feels necessary to this progression). I like that my body can do things that other people’s cannot. I have two decades of really intense dancing and want that to show in my work. I do sometimes wonder if this is driven by a desire to prove something. Prove that I am a “good” dancer. But alas, big, impressive moves EXCITE ME! Okay, I said it! I am noticing that the placement of these indulgences in virtuosity can allow them to problematize or enhance or change a moment. 

This feels closely related to this question, what can my body do? Which can be a starting point for generation. Sometimes I do an exercise where I just keep putting together movement that feels impossible next to one another, this also feels related. The existence of these types of moves in my work feels more related to effort than virtuosity. It gets woven in, but it is not the point. I like to think I am doing something different with it. It feels like a sort of processing separate from lineages even if the shapes mean something from certain lenses. This isn’t a Lateral T bitch, I’m just lifting my leg up because I can. (Maybe I shouldn’t have said that word, but it feels right.) I also just want to talk a bit more about this word, “virtuosity,” because I think it is much more expansive and nuanced than the way I have been using it thus far. I think there is virtuosity in everything I do. Moving slowly takes work, stillness is hard, walking can be an act of virtuosity. I feel a lot of pride in the fact that I have dedicated so much of my life to dancing. 

This course has changed a lot of preconceived notions I help about making dances. My work feels more complex, less juvenile. I am on a seesaw of learning and unlearning and the back and forth has me in a deep state of experimentation. I feel validated in many of the sentiments you share about frustrations you had with composition classes because I always felt so pissed off when I had to do a motif study or try to develop theme and variation. These things were fine for my development, but I am glad to “have permission” to let them go. To build choreographic tools and methods for myself rather than reading a book that tells me how to make a dance. I am starting to believe myself when I say that I’m a choreographer.

TEACHING

I wrapped up my first year of teaching at the college level (what the fuck, I can’t believe I just typed that) and it feels so bittersweet. My modern students this semester were just deeply amazing. Their openness and excitement and commitment reignited my love for teaching. I sometimes miss teaching kids. I miss the way they make me laugh and have such deep wonder for the world around them. I miss the excitement in their eyes when they finally get something they have been working on for months. I miss the simple questions they ask that are actually so profound and change the way I look at life. I’ve always found teaching to be the most rewarding part of what I do, but it was always really draining as well. After a night of teaching, I would make my forty minute commute home in complete silence and then lock myself in my room and do absolutely nothing. But now, I finish teaching and I feel better than I did when I started. I have more energy. I didn’t really know that was possible.

I also developed this awesome new class called Ballet Karaoke. It is sort of just what it sounds like. We do a ballet barre while singing karaoke. As I prepare to teach Ballet next semester, I have started to consider what it means for me, Marlee, to do this. I have two decades of experience dancing ballet, but I would hardly consider myself a ballet dancer. Yet, I know I have specific knowledge in this form and feel excited to develop my own curriculum. How can these deeply personal tools I’ve developed show up in the classroom? I have defined these tools as: ballet as church, ballet as drag, ballet as ritual. Oh, and ballet to pop music, duh. Some questions this class asks… How can a fun approach change a historically hard task? Is it easier to do challenging things with your body when your brain is busy singing? How does doing multiple things at once change our experience? What is the embodied effect of singing while dancing? How can I enhance the whimsy of ballet for adult students? How can I make ballet a safe space for people that have historically been excluded from it? This class is not designed to make one a better ballet dancer (another approach that changed my relationship to the form). Rather, a class about finding joy, and maybe ease, in difficult things. Perhaps, removing the pressure to do it well will unlock something new. Maybe even something better.

MANY HOMES

I moved to North Carolina this month (again). And, believe it or not, I miss Illinois. I miss it a lot. I smile as I write that. I never thought I would miss it there and feeling this way now is showing me how far I have come in making a home for myself in a place I never imagined I would be. There were days and weeks and months where I really really thought I made the wrong choice about going to grad school. In a lot of ways, I feel like I accidentally moved away from St. Louis forever. It started with North Carolina last summer, then all of a sudden I was going to grad school, then even more suddenly I lost my biggest tie to the city that held me through the woes of my early twenties. The city that shaped me. One of my longest and deepest loves. I’ve been having a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that I am spending my early twenties in the middle of cornfields in a town with one (1) gay bar. To say it’s not what I saw for myself is an understatement, but despite this I have grown to love it there. I have grown to miss it. I feel at home here, in North Carolina, too. Between being here and missing Illinois and still loving St. Louis, I am realizing my ability to build a home for myself wherever I land; from a place where no one knows my name, to the city where I can name a memory on every street. 

It feels impossible to talk about St. Louis without talking about the tornado that just destroyed some of the most vulnerable parts of the city. You can read more on how to help or where to donate here.

THE OCEAN

I swam in the ocean last weekend. It’s so cliche, but I realize something about myself everytime I’m in there. I look out at all its vastness and understand why it is the ultimate muse. I think about all the people who have crossed this crazy beast in search of something. Something better. All the people who have died in pursuit of that desire in this ocean and elsewhere. The people taken across this ocean against their will. That the better for some was at the cost of many and maybe still it. Okay, probably still is. The people who found the very beach I was on and decided to settle there with their horses but then they left and the horses stayed and now there are horses who know how to survive a hurricane but a horse shouldn’t even know about a hurricane. Or maybe it should. What do I know about what a horse should or shouldn’t know? I feel so small in here. Small in a good way. Small like I feel in New York City or under a really big tree that was here before me and will be here after me. Small like I feel on a swing in the middle of the night surrounded by the essence of what once was. A smallness that sort of folds in on itself and transforms into this desire to be bigger. To dream bigger. To know bigger. To love bigger. 

This time, I kept repeating to myself “trust and timing,” as the waves coming at me grew. I love that moment where a wave scoops me up off my feet and I kick my little feet like a child that only knows how to doggy paddle. For just a second, against my better judgement, my body fills with fear. As if the wave won’t pass and my feet will never touch the ground again and I will just have to tread and tread and tread. I wonder how long I could tread water and think maybe I should have become a lifeguard or something. I think about Jack and Rose and that movie I watched about the Syrian refuge who swam across the ocean for miles while pulling a boat full of people to safety. But then, my feet find the ground again. Like they always do. I used to sort of try to hop over the waves. But now, I just release myself to them. Let them engulf me. Trust my body, trust the sea. I think trust and timing may be two of the big pillars of life. Two of how many? Unsure, but two of them for sure. 

Still working on what lesson I should be getting from the water on the journal… Maybe the lesson is that I don’t have to learn a lesson from everything and sometimes things just suck. Anyways, happy June-Eve. Wishing you all a summer of whatever the hell you want it to be! I will have a summer of emails and spreadsheets and eye-feasts of some of the most amazing dances in the world. Maybe I’ll even write about the dances. Maybe. 

Till next time,

Marlee