A month has passed since hand written note(s) . . .

A month of massacre and memorial circles, Ramadan prayers for Orlando, Queers against Islamophobia, new vigils in Charleston for the church dead, shapeshifting, Brexit, a high yellow prettyboy spitting truth to power—who knew?—on BET, color drama, stars and stripes, commencement marches, poetry picnics, tall tiger lilies, unexpected rain, and fireworks so loud and so long in Detroit that my mother couldn’t sleep for anger.

And now, an eclipse of more grief, more heartbreak . . . Bombings in Baghdad on high holy days. The unjustifiable murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. The misdirected mayhem against officers in Dallas, Texas along with the slander of peaceful protestors. In the wake of such unbridled evil, what to say about a movement festival? Why talk about something like this at all?

Perhaps because events like this, to paraphrase Alice Walker, can offer ways forward with a broken heart. It took nearly a year to materialize hand written note(s); a month later, my experience feels indelible. I want to write back and maintain the correspondence. I need to remember the energy of healing exploration right now. This feels in line with a key festival aim “to support artists before and beyond the actual event or performance,” which is to say then and now and always . . I write with this in mind my heart.

inviting / corresponding

This is the truth: it made absolutely no sense for me to come to the Spring 2016 Movement Research Festival. I am not white or thin or particularly young. I am not a downtown dancer. I didn’t know any of the curators or performers. I don’t live in New York City. I don’t even live on the East Coast. Instead, I was in the last weeks of a job in the lonely Midwest where I had just served notice (a hand written note, indeed). My urgent need was to take time to get myself together—recover from deep physical and emotional pain, regroup my art practice, and reshape my life. This plan was in the works, but not for the week of June 6. I still had classes to teach, papers to grade, boxes to pack, and, yes, money to save.

Yet, when I tried to delete the message, I couldn’t. It was just a generic post from an e-blast. Still something made me keep it bold in my inbox. Perhaps the words: space, healing, lasting action. The exquisite sea blue and ethereal lines on the portal of the festival website. The loveliness of Ayano Nelson’s design. The scrawls and doodles. The key words of the curatorial statement: self-care, history, rest, celebration, old medicine, and inner ceremony. And the line that rang through me like a bell (hooks circa Sisters of the Yam): “Grieving, getting stuck, and finding new ways to move through it.”

What is the shape of an invitation? How to engage (in) correspondence?

At Mei Ann Teo and Laley Lippard’s session on “open spaces” at the 2016 NET conference in Chicago, a wise person in my small group talked about the pre-work required for people to want to enter a space. Predominantly white organizations wondering about their homogeneity often misunderstand this, as do straight, cis, able-bodied and middle and upper class ones. My students and I talk about this too relative to live performance. Just because you say you want people to do something, i.e. you “invite” them into your action, doesn’t mean that they will do it. What signals are you really sending? How grounded, how expansive, how urgent, how earnest, how thoughtful, how deep, how credible is your invitation? It has to be heart-felt, cross-checked, and irresistible for others to want to bother.

Even then, it’s a risk.

For me, likely the oldest, blackest, fattest, clumsiest person in the room, the festival could be a deep, micro- or macro-aggressive bust. So before coming to hand written note(s), I pored over all the materials, workshop titles and descriptions, participant bios and websites. I did this out of deep loneliness and deep hope for connection, but also as a measure of psychic security.

When I saw the promise of black people, queer people, people of color, trans people, women, artists, and teachers poised to engage and name (unnaming/ renaming) key aspects of themselves as a part of everybody’s central work of self and community care, I accepted the invitation. I didn’t know what would actually come to pass. I didn’t expect it to be perfect. Rather the possibility of some correspondence, some similarity and expression in exchange, meant that I had to try.

At the start of all 3 sessions, we say our names. In my notebook, I write each one down in order in the shape of our circle.

(1) Marissa /Kosta / Josie / Awilda / Gabrielle / Keiko / Elliott / devynn / Coco /Amelia / Juliette / Kat / Randy / David

(2) Ni’Ja / Awilda / Gabrielle / Maura / Marissa / Kosta / Judah/ Victoria/ Josie /// ( a cosmos of ancestors)

(3) mayfield / Gabrielle / Kosta / nyx / Maura / Josie / Randy / Rachel / Bex

I may never see these people again, but I mark and hold them. I appreciate and know them like folks you only see late night at the club.

We create and enter sacred space together.

* * *

Funnily enough, I almost didn’t go to Marissa Perel’s workshop. Would suppositions about the body alienate or segregate me? Would I be the only black person in the room? Would I be too fearful and shut down for somatic awareness? I signed up, telling myself that if it felt wrong in the morning, I wouldn’t have to go. I woke up before the alarm with a gust of wind in my chest. It was hope. To my delight when I arrived, my friend Awilda from Puerto Rico was already there. Like me, she had decided to try all 3 workshops as well. It was a day of coincidences and continuities of community.

Marissa’s workshop was a good call. I am brave. In our introductions, when she asks about injuries, I mention having a broken heart. It was my first time ever saying that out loud. Later in the session, I make a major discovery. For months, I have been highly functional and deeply disassociated. Trying to return to my body is deeply necessary and deeply painful. Marissa stresses that integration isn’t the goal. How can we be present in our brokenness or fragmentation? What do we need that is most impossible? How can we make the unknown a home?

These questions offer crucial somatic grounding for Ni’Ja’s workshop. All along Ni’Ja has been my magnet. I had never met them, but their title had made me gasp. Their workshop description had made my heart keen and flutter. I read it and reworked my class syllabus and got on a plane. I was not disappointed.

In real time, we activate the technology of the circle, resurface our contact with the earth to re/connect with ancestors. We generate an enclosure of energy in the room that radiates, permeates, and envelops us all. . .

At one point, while I was trying to channel my maternal grandmother, my paternal grandfather shows up. This is especially amazing because he died when my father was two. Who are you? I ask. Who do you think? he answers. I’m the one that made all this possible for you! Sweat pours, clear snot falls from my nose, and tears run down my face. Sopping and streaming, I stumble to the bathroom. Standing in front of the paper towel dispenser, I can’t figure out how it works. I can only go back, lie down wet and surrender.

In our discussion, Kosta mentions that people he didn’t know had shown up for him. Inside, I knew. Some of my ancestors had dropped by to check him out. This was confirmed later in mayfield’s workshop when near the end of his solo, Kosta picked up a stray piece of paper and placed it on the wall. He withdrew his hand and it remained there pressed. That piece of paper held my name.

The ancestor energy of Ni’Ja’s workshop is a cocoon and a sheath. Ni’Ja tells us that warrior practice is healing practice. This seems crucial, but I’m not sure I understand. I fear how protected I’ve become around my heart. This protectedness seems connected to numbness and my state of disassociation. They clarify that it’s not about being guarded. Rather, we need to be armored, taking on tools to be ready for the psychic warfare against us all around us. This resonates again in the wake of Orlando, Baghdad, Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, MN.

mayfield’s workshop offers radical openness, intimacy and trust, the release of the head into another’s hands while rising up and folding back down into the ground. We stretch and massage each other’s bodies. We bobble our heads across the room, practice falling and getting up. This reminds me of the movement practice of SNCC protesters in the freedom movement, of Lénablou’s bigidi, the stumble dance of Guadeloupe, how to swerve and catch yourself, rising and falling. This is armor and pleasure too. We laugh and wail and speak in tongues. We become an improvised, improvising corps.

* * *

I may never see some of these people again, but I love them.

I mark and hold them. They mark me and hold me too. At a key moment when I start to feel afraid and unworthy of touch, Rachel pulls me into the dance. nyx twirls me into a duet. On a break, Josie shares bits of her dark chocolate with Awilda, nyx and me. She tells us that she and Kosta are from New Zealand. They are dismayed by what they see in America. They’re trying to get a grip on this side of the world. Me too. devynn mentions my broken heart in their festival writing and I feel seen, heard, and remembered.

I think about how fugitive communities can form in a dance class or workshop. The workshops become an enclosure within the festival’s “porous enclosure for caring, rest, silence and celebration.” How beautiful it is when that enclosure can be heterogeneous and non-normative. How different it is when the wisdom of the space, when the bodies in the room emerge from black and brown bloodlines. nyx talked about this in mayfield’s workshop and Maura wrote about this in her festival writing. This was a powerful thing for me as well.

The presence of these bloodlines brought me to the festival in the first place. Moreover, it mattered to everyone, that our brown bodies were there. Together we were all part of a synthesis of energy that would address, enclose and envelop, overlap and fuse queer / somatic/ black/ ancestral/ knowledge/ movement/ healing / laughter / pain.

I stop short when we get to the space. My apologies if I missed it somehow, but it seems completely physically inaccessible. There is no handicapped ramp to enter the space and, more intense, it seems to lack an elevator. The only way up to the bright, warm discussion area and Liliana Dirks-Goodman’s lovely houses is a set of steep, rickety stairs. The only way down to the restroom is those stairs plus another flight.

As a person who has performed in multiple inaccessible spaces, I’m not trying to get up on a high horse. Rather, my recent reading on disability aesthetics and especially my friendship with brilliant queer black disabled dancer Barak adé Soleil has made me more woke. Barak’s recent, gorgeous performance “The Politics of Space” with Mikel Patrick Avery and Nikki Patin investigated these questions: “Who is welcomed? Who is deserving? Who is allowed?” I think again about the shape and quality of invitations, the nature of community inclusion.

Tobin Seibers writes: “Aesthetics tracks the sensations that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies.” Which bodies are present? Why and how? What is the default dance community? movement research community? reading and responding community? How can we anticipate better the disabled dancers, readers, responders who would roll up in wheelchairs or stroll up with their devices if they were allowed more access?

I make this note, then climb up the rickety stairs. Randy Reyes greets us with a rose and a hand written note. I recognize Randy from the workshops and feel close to him, although I don’t know him at all. I’ll come to feel this way later about Jonathan Gonzalez and Lily Bo from this very event and the next night’s revels, although I know them even less, having never danced in a room with them. This feeling of closeness comes again from the intimacy of sharing moving/ reading/ writing/ healing space. It has to do with being present in the room together. This is why we have to get as many folks in there as possible.

Presence can happen in many ways. Sarah Maxfield sent the notes and roses in her stead when she unexpectedly how to bow out. Her presence became these presents for us, sumptuous bunches of orange, yellow, and lavender roses. It was great to be greeted with a gift, something special and personalized (“To: You / From: Me”). I felt welcome, as if my presence, my being there, was really valued. The curators opening statements also extended this feeling and I loved the acknowledgment of our presence on occupied, indigenous land.

The presence (absence) and roles of various community members were a big part of the readings and the evening’s overall dynamic of responding. Federici and Moten ask us: who does what kind of labor where? Lorde models creative vision as poetry as liberation. At the same time, why do the performers mainly move while the discussants mainly speak? Have we been hard-wired to perform in this way? Is there a way to rewire the dynamic?

The event cracks open when Rihanna’s “Work” comes on and we all dance and later when the performers enter into the circle and speak. How can we keep flipping our scripts, replay our roles differently? Holding a rose close to his face, one black man asked about fugitivity: “What are you actually running from? What are you really trying to avoid?” The flip side of the questions: what are you trying to build? The you is me and us. I left with a lot on my mind.

The next morning, my friend Zetta and I walk together in Prospect Park. She is not a performer and is horrified when I describe the practice of authentic movement in Marissa’s workshop. What do you mean you have to move with your eyes closed while someone is looking at you? That sounds like a nightmare. I try to explain that you are not there to entertain the person and the person is not there to judge you, but rather that person is there to witness you, hold your energy, and keep you safe in the room. Hmmm, she remains skeptical.

It reminds me that however much I think of myself as an outsider, particularly in the downtown New York dance world, I am still inside the room. I am able-bodied in key (although not all) ways, a mover, a performer, a talker, and a person able to hold the gaze.

My festival invitation came to me by wire, not as a hand written note. But still it came. I was on that Movement Research e-list; I can bring other folks into the fold. How can we rewire our networks and forward our invitations even more? How can somatic healing, interdisciplinary connections of reading, writing, moving and making connect with even more people?

I give Zetta the beautiful hand written note from Enclosures. Later, she posts this on Facebook:

“I can feel a migraine coming on but I’m so grateful for this morning’s walk in Prospect Park with Gabrielle Civil! She passed along this note from a fellow woman performance artist, which is just what I needed to hear today since I feel myself sliding into a period of deep reflection: “I wanted to be with you tonight. I am not there. I sent this. In my place. It is a moment–a breath suspended between inhale and exhale. Life and death. Held in your hand. Inside your shoes, there is skin on the soles of your feet. Inside your feet, there is blood in the marrow of your bones. The work you are doing is enough. You are enough. <3”

It got 22 likes and a number of comments. My forwarding this note and Zetta’s posting it on-line allowed the festival to cross from one world into another. Beyond the initial moment, Sarah Maxfield’s words offer widened enclosure around movement research. Hand written note(s) can still offer beauty and solace in these terrible times.

I offer thanks for this note, for the rose and real talk of Enclosures, the brilliant performances there and the next day, the workshops, and overall for the three full days of festival events that nourished, inspired and challenged me.

I offer special thanks to Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith, and Tara Aisha Willis for all their hard work. I am an honored witness of their authentic movement(s). I especially appreciate them letting me, a virtual stranger, share my verbose thoughts as festival writing. Often folks work hard and don’t receive much feedback, so hopefully these thoughts can feed the archive and serve too as a thank you note to them.

Hand written note(s) has become a compendium of correspondence with multiple authors, palimpsests and enclosures. Before and beyond, I hope we can keep rewiring and forwarding, exchanging the radical, healing energy of this experience further and wider.