shedding, and transforming, and becoming
Greetings from DURHAM!
I am hoping this finds you well and maybe a little bit sweaty. I’m back! Here I am reflecting on some of what I am dancing through at the moment. I am also trying out a new way of sharing newsletters that is $free instead of $80 per year via Squarespace. If this way of hearing from me is not working or you are no longer interested in these occasional emails, let me know!
ADF (again)
I may have already told you about this, dear reader, but in case I did not, here we go. Last summer I had a dream in which I saw three snakes while walking the dog I walked twice a day. Shortly after, I had encounters with (you guessed it) three snakes. The first was a direct prophecy. I was walking Lupe (the dog) and saw a snake, just like in the dream. The next day, I went to the bookstore near my office hoping to buy a book I had seen there a few weeks earlier, but it was no longer in stock. Having already made the walk I decided to look around. I had recently read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and wanted to read some more of her work. The only text of hers they had in store was Play It As It Lays. If you are unfamiliar with this text, it has a large snake on the cover. Encounter number two. Two days later I am watching a performance. Towards the end of the final number one of the dancers pulls out a rubber snake. I have no idea what it meant within the context of the work, but within the context of my life it was obvious. I had a vivid dream about three snakes (three snakes, does it get more prophetic than that?) and here they are, the three snakes. Obviously this was a sign that it was time to shed my skin (quit my job) and transform (focus on my art). Here I am a year after the snake dreams. I am in the same place as I was then, but everything has changed. My dreams have come true right in front of my eyes and it is somehow better than I imagined. Then BOOM! Another sign from the universe. I was cleaning out my car this morning and dropped something in this patch of dirt next to it. In this patch of dirt is a necklace I lost last summer. My favorite necklace. 725 miles from where I now call home over a year after losing it. The chain that sometimes made my neck itch is rusted beyond belief, the charm is somehow still shining in the sun. So yes, of course I am exactly where I am meant to be. Obviously my whole life has been leading up to this very moment. The passage of time has caused some rust to build in the chains, but the shine persist.
This Wednesday I will be showing a work I have made with three students here at ADF. It feels like a departure from much of my work up until this point. This departure is intentional, but I feel so vulnerable about it. I am proud of the work and excited for it to be seen. I am calling it harm reduction for now. It is something that I see turning into my thesis next year. I am finally facing the beast of addiction that has wrecked the lives of the people I love most time and time again. I am researching how it moves through communities and families and individuals. I am trying to place the shape it leaves behind and attempting to choreograph its aftermath.
THIS WORK I SAW BY A FAMOUS CHOREOGRAPHER WHO WAS ONCE HANDED A CHECK FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS
I am hesitant to name names, but it goes something like M*** M*****. It sort of made me want to quit pursuing dance. I am being a bit dramatic, but also quite serious. I am not interested in getting into the details of what I saw, but want to share how it made me feel. I don’t know how to describe these works without using the word fascist. I know this is a word people use often nowadays, but I mean it here in the literal sense. There is a relationship to music and formalism that I would argue is fascist. Additionally, work that values unison and cleanliness over the person portraying such movement will always feel rooted in some form of authoritarianism. The dancing itself was so flat that the dancers became caricatures of the ideals of the choreographer. It is so readable that any sort of critical thinking is obsolete. I found the work to be understimulating and genuinely bad. I was surprised when the rest of the room stood up around me roaring with applause. A later work in the program was beyond bad and, to me, downright offensive in its portrayal of women and heteronormativity. Yet, again, the room around me was devouring it. Deep fear set in. Is this the work audiences want to see? Is this the extent of what people think dance can do? I feel a profound sadness thinking of this reality, yet I know it to be true.
This was one experience. Luckily, this summer has provided me with several more dances that have deeply excited me. Made me feel my ribcage from my seat. Lead my psyche into a world of pure imagination.
SOME WRITING FROM LAST SEMESTER
I do always vow to write these newsletters more often and typically fail. So, here is a bit of writing that still holds some heat a few months post-semester.
From my research on Cliches in Tere’s class:
I want to look up the definition of cliche but the internet won’t work so I guess I will try to define it myself. Cliche is something predictable maybe? Cliche is an overuse or something that has been run into the ground. Cliche is sincere, dramatic and annoying. IT IS ANNOYING and I have always been scared of being annoying every since Parker Freeman broke up with me freshman year of high school because he thought I was annoying and I think all girls worry about being annoying and I have always felt like I am too much except when I am dancing but even that is not always true and here I am GETTING EMOTIONAL AGAIN!!!!!!!! AGAIN!!!!! It’s my moon in cancer that makes me get like this and yes the fact that I just blamed my astrological sign for my behavior is like THE CAPITAL OF CLICHE CITY! It is so cliche of me to be a girl who is thinking way too much about something a man said to me a year ago and flipping it around in my brain like a pancake that I keep trying to get the perfect shade of brown but everyone knows that the first pancake always comes out weird. Was that cliche??? The thing I said about the pancake??? Cliche is an attempt at something “universal” but I know this word is BULLSHIT but I still want to make work that everyone can connect to and of course that is because I am a people pleaser at my core and of course I am a people pleaser because my mother abandoned me and OF COURSE IT IS SO CLICHE TO BLAME MY MOTHER FOR ALL MY PROBLEMS.
If you’d like to read the whole paper, you can do so here!
Some more informal/personal writing from class with Jennifer:
April 8
Binding, forcing, controlling + pushing against it…
What am I bound by? Perhaps the past and this version of my life that I once dreamed of. I am not sure why that got lost. Did I give up or did I out grow it and if the latter why do I still desire it from time to time? There is friction. My friend asked me recently “why do you have to do so much to feel anything?” I guess I took that to mean much more than he intended but it keeps looping in my brain. I have fluctuated through different seasons of caring so much and not caring at all. In general, I am a person who cares deeply. Lately, it feels like I cannot bring myself to care about anything at all. I know I am caring. I know I can care. I think I am tired. In a general sense but maybe also tired of the forcing. I’m not even fully sure who I am forcing myself to be. So much of this push towards some version of myself that is not so much me is so patriarchal and that is pissing me off but I don’t really know how to escape it. Maybe it all started when I started shaving my legs again in October. Or when I started tracking calories again in August. Or when I realized most of my clothes are too big on me now and that made me feel more pride that almost anything I have accomplished that actually has value. All of these are means of control. Control over my body a that. Ballet has become a world of control that I have finally squeezed myself into. Of course I am evading the obvious; I am bound by the heteronormative world I was brought up in. The God and friends and family that hate who I have become but are not brave enough to say it with their chest. This pushing and quest for control is a queer practice. Or maybe it is anti queer. I don’t really know but maybe I would know better if I hadn’t failed my Queer Theory and Methods class last semester. I guess that was a relinquishing of control. I was too tired to be in control. There are of course things out of my control and I have become brilliant at avoiding those and then feeling like shit for the fact that I am privileged enough to avoid certain things out of my control. Then there are things in my control that I am avoiding. Well is anything really in my control? I guess so and maybe that is how this whole thing started but I am getting lost. For just one second I want to go somewhere imaginary… Okay I guess I don’t. I can’t really think of anything separate from this world and this reality and this life I know. I’m not sure why I have this fear of being too personal. I feel that is something I am constantly trying to control. Don’t say too much, don’t go there, don’t fall too hard. That last one isn’t even true anymore. There are certain parts of myself that I feel sure of but now that I am thinking about it none of them are coming to mind. I guess I feel like my essence is sort of in flux right now. Well actually my life has been a series of fluxes. I have lived in 16 houses in my life. I have no roots. I have no parents. I have no map. Much of this is truly a queer practice. I am building a life for myself from the ground up but I am, of course, haunted by the past and all I was trained to be. This shows up in my dancing. My tendency for movement that is wild and out of control and fully consuming and makes me work so hard I fall over. Like why did I ride that exercise bike for an hour and a half two nights in a row? Why do I have to do so much to feel anything? Why do I keep going on these walks and getting mad at myself for not reading enough and always feel behind? Ugh and I haven’t done my taxes in two years and I don’t know how but it feels like there is no one to ask for help because I don’t have a parent to call about these things. And I need to get my passport but I keep going to the post office and doing something wrong so the appointment never even happens and then I bet once I finally see the passport guy I will have done something else wrong and then the cycle begins again. Well there are these cycles of course. Circles. What someone does to me I do to someone else a short time later. I know I am the villain in that story but I can’t bring myself to care for whatever reason. A lesson. Sometimes you learn a lesson other times you are the lesson. I was the lesson, of course. You are certainly a lesson but I am not sure what of yet. I guess there are lots of versions of me living within me and maybe that is the friction. There is who I was, who I could have been, who I am now, who I want to be, who I will never be. Who I was… a daughter, student council president, catholic, straight, blonde, a theta, a friend, a virgin,
Thursday, April 9
AVOIDANCE
I’m in a season of avoidance. I want to choreograph my avoidance and I think I sort of am. It is becoming a movement vocabulary in this new work. I find a shape and leave it before it can even fully form. I hesitate as I navigate the space. Should I go here? No, yes, no, yes. It never lands in certainty. There is not much I am certain of and of course I am avoiding that. I am embracing ambiguity. Deciding that not-knowing is a worthy site to work from. Admitting I DO NOT KNOW! I do not know why me. In the good ways and the bad ways. Specificity is not clarity. This work is specific. It is not bullshit. The lack of clarity is, in fact, the specificity.
I am reading bell hook’s All About Love and want to bring it in somehow. My obsession with romance and this endless string of relationships I have been in for half a decade. Maybe I can get into these fuck-ass attackment styles. I sort of believe them and I know I have been anxious and I am now avoidant and maybe that is the lesson I taught you. It is certainly the lesson you taught me. So many yous I can hardly keep track of them all. Of course this is the problem. I am being avoidant in love but I am also using love to avoid. Avoid my issues with my family or the fact that I feel as if I have none. Avoid the gaping hole in my heart that will never ever ever be filled. Avoid the fear I have been living in. Rebecca felt that fear, you know. That fear is in my spinal cord. It lives in my left kidney. She asked me where I felt bravery lived in my body. I said my color bones. They protrude a bit when I stand up straight and stick my chest out and STAND MY GROUND! Which I do not do all that often if I am being honest.
I am not sure when this avoidance really began but as I am typing this it feels like it was last February. When we ended. When I lost the closest thing to a home I had ever known and then the physical home that held that was taken by a tornado and then things never actually got better with him and then I met you and I though maybe this all happened for a reason but then you did what you do and then I swirled into another you and he still didn’t call and I went to cleveland and christmas was warm and weird and then there was this dance I made and then I came back here and fell back into you and I don’t really know what we are doing or why but I keep doing it and you say you feel love for me but is that the same as loving me and then there is you who says I was just a lesson and hopefully someday there is not a lesson and just a girlfriend but I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend not even yours or yours or yours oh and there was that night in november when I texted the first you and that was weird but I was writing about you for that paper so I guess it made sense and then I went to new york well the timeline is messed up now but this all happened I promise and when I was in new york I though well duh I ought to move here but because of what he did I am scared I will not be able to but I have to because that desire has been with every version of me and at the end of the day I want to honor all of them and then my car broke down and indianapolis and then there was me back in st.louis and the call that changed my life in a good way and a month where I felt really good about who I was and then I came back here and that all left for some reason and yeah I just don’t really know why I feel so insecure when I am here.
Okay maybe none of that made sense and maybe that was the point and maybe the nonsensical is a way of avoidance. I think I should bring this avoidance into my Tere stuff because really what I have been trying to do is avoid being cliche.
I want to feel content and happy and safe. That is what I really want. I don’t know how to get there but I know it is what I want and I feel my colorbones coming out because it is brave to admit that even though it is so simple. I feel resentment that I have to desire something so simple. I desire it with my whole being. I want a family. I want to be loved. I want to be cared for.
BOOKS I HAVE BEEN READING
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. If you read one book I recommend, let it be this one. Nelson weaves together the personal, the theoretical, the psychological and so much more in a way that is so deeply profound and choreographic. You can read this book in one sitting.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith. “Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend.” A beautiful (though at times slightly convoluted) written book about generational trauma and immigration and the complicatedness of living with one another.
Creep by Emma Van Straaten. Totally captivating book that I had a hard time putting down, but in the end thought the main character could have been a bit more fleshed out. I felt similarly when I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona earlier this year but will admit that the text is sort of haunting me. I think both of these authors are such great writers that I am alright with the plot and character development getting lost at times.
I have just started Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson and I am already loving it. I am also nearly finished with Dopesick by Beth Macy. I have appreciated her ability to take dense and complicated information and make it so digestible.
Let me know if there is anything I should be adding to my TBR :-)
Alright. This feels like enough for now. Great chatting, we should do this more often! And by we I mean me. As always, feel free to reach out with any thoughts, rebuttals, confessions, etc. Oh yeah and I just got rejected from a job I felt really qualified for and quite excited about. Tis life.
xx,
Marlee
