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.

These people know well that though all of us need to heal, not all bodies are equally threatened by violence and exhaustion. At the start to each event, the curators offered up this reminder: “We want to acknowledge that we are on stolen land, labored over largely by unrecognized and stolen people. Recognizing that healing and care are ongoing processes, we offer reverence for what has come before.”

The arc of this festival began last Monday night, as I moved through the first house created by Liliana Dirks-Goodman, feeling birthed into a new and safer space. In groups of two and three, overlapping, coming together, and coming apart, dancers improvised performances in response to one another and to the space and moment we all shared, held by the sounds of Julia Santoli. As Randy Reyes, Lily Bo Shapiro, Anna Adams Stark, Marguerite Hemmings, Justin Cabrillos, Anna Carapetyan, Ayano Elson, Sarah Maxfield, BASHIR DAVID NAIM, Marissa Perel, and Michael Mahalchick enacted this public intimacy, I was watching communities form. As Juliette Mapp, Donna Uchizono, luciana achugar, Kayvon Pourazar and Natalie Green come out to dance their joyful appreciation of Levi Gonzalez before he moves to Los Angeles, I am watching a community celebrate itself.

Appreciating the communities of other bodies in a space transitions to asking how we form our own communities. The doulas, caregivers, bodyworkers, and healers who shared their insights on Tuesday asked us to think again about how we care for one another, specifically in the liminal spaces between birth and death. As Anna Carapetyan, devynn emory, Robert Kocik, and iele paloumpis answer questions posed by Risa Shoup and the audience, I find myself thinking that the boundaries and connections between people are always liminal spaces. I can no longer remember who said what, but written down in my notebook from that day are the lines: “there are times to be closer and times to be further apart” and “reach out as far as you can go to establish the network that you need.” How do we form the communities that will both give us what we need and allow us to offer the care we long to give, how do we navigate consent and needs that are not our own, and who has access?

Volunteering at BkSD before Wednesday’s performance meant taking a step into the work of maintaining a community. I arrived, squelching with rain, at 2pm, and scrubbed floors, laid stones, shoveled dirt, and planted flowers. By the end of the day my body was dry, and dirty, and exhausted, and replenished. Mariana Valencia made me laugh with the joys and aches of queer childhood, jokes, campfire stories, and growing pains. Drawing not a line but a curve on the floor in tape, she made her own space, but that space was open.

Then, Jumatatu Poe comes out and introduces himself and his co-performer William Robinson. Explaining the work to us, he says that he has performed it twice before, but always felt that there was something missing from the audience. This time, he tells us, he is going to bring his own black friends to the performance. In case the white members of the audience need permission to laugh, or feel a certain way. I don’t need to look around to know that most of the audience is white like me. His friends are projected on the far wall, a group of people watching from the other side. The wall is too far away to see their faces, but they watch us as we squint across the room. Or, they don’t. They aren’t there, really, but the screen makes both them and their absence present. Partway through the performance the screen has played itself out. The dancers run through sequences of movement, smiling out as the melancholy lines “Please fall down, testing sounds” and “Faith in prayers will make you see your bones” ring out. The incongruity continues as they push themselves to the point of exhaustion, ending a sequence only to start anew, performing exhaustion. At the end of the night they hold each other, speaking into one another’s mouths: “What is it you want, is it my sameness or my difference?” and then “My sameness is my difference.” I can’t tell who speaks which lines, they come from the same place, they come from different places.

If Wednesday’s event asked us to bring our selves into the communities we had watched and listened to on Monday and Tuesday, Thursday’s healing workshops allowed us to look at and care for our selves in new ways. Regina (aka Wolf Medicine) took time to explain the relationship Ayurvedic medicine teaches us to see between what we eat and the health of our skin, and I found myself casting back to Tuesday’s event. What do I allow to enter my body and why? What will harm me if I let it in? How do I keep myself healthy, and how do I balance what I need from the world and what others need from me?

In my private somatic therapy session, Weena Pauly asks me to reconnect with what my body already knows. I am sitting on a mat facing her, and she asks me to close my eyes. You can open them if you feel you need to, she says. The darkness feels spatial as she asks me questions. I feel like I might fall, but then I realize I am falling into myself. How is your body feeling right now? What are you thinking? What emotions are you experiencing? Gratitude and a little fear, I tell her. I am so far inside myself that when I open my eyes and walk out into the street, I think they might still be closed.

On Friday and Saturday, when we come together as groups to share in performances and readings and reveling, I think the festival has taught us to come together differently. I am bringing myself in a different way when I show up on Thursday, with my carefully underlined copies of Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici, and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s essays. All three of Liliana Dirks-Goodman’s houses are here, and I move around them before I take my seat, holding the rose and message Sarah Maxfield has sent to us all. “What you are doing is enough,” I read. The space is shifting.

We sit in a circle and begin talking about Silvia Federici’s essay on precarious and reproductive labor as mayfield brooks, Justin Cabrillos, Marguerite Hemmings, and Ni’Ja Whitson begin to move around us. Tara Willis and Lilliana Dirks-Goodman, gently guiding our circular, multiple lines of inquiry, ask us to think about the labor that goes on underneath, below the labor that is often most visible. Under and through the houses, the performers participate in the conversation with their bodies and mayfield brooks calls out words, thrown into the conversation when we need them, where we can hold them. How do we reproduce our communities, how do we teach ourselves and those we care for to refuse a system that hurts us, without ourselves doing damage?

As our responses slowly conclude, Rihanna’s “Work” begins to play, Marguerite Hemmings asks us to get up: “You better work.” The circle slowly moves inward, forming a line dancing through the first house as we slowly come back around, remembering that our bodies are part of what we bring when we think together.

We come back to talk through Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s essay on the undercommons. We don’t know what that is, or where, or who, or how to get there, but we’re working on it, cultivating our own practice of studying together, underneath the work that gets acknowledged by the institutions whose resources we steal, giving ourselves the resources we need to do this work. We know it was never theirs anyway. Some of our bodies, one person says, are always fugitive: it’s not a choice. “The subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love.” Fred Moten and Audre Lorde agree about love, but she reminds us that when we come with our love we come with all our pain, too. “And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already.” That entanglement is dark but it lifts us up. There is a lot to fear, but none of it is new. We can bear the pain that may come because we have felt that pain before. All night, we have been wondering how to imagine something new. Poetry, she seems to suggest, is where we can transition from what feels impossible to what becomes potential. It is the threshold of action.

That action enters the circle when Ni’Ja Whitson steps in. I realized, they say, that we’d constructed a boundary or a limit, with the circle where discussion happened and the dancing outside of it, the intelligence of the mind and the intelligence of the body kept separate; and that seemed kind of fucked up. mayfield brooks tells us about feelings, beginning inside one of the houses, standing and facing away from us, drawing on their body with red lipstick and explaining to us that Audre Lorde was an affect theorist. Breaking through that boundary, they brought their bodies into the circle, and then all our bodies were there.

On the last night, we are tired and full of joy. This night is a performance and a party, and we know now that our bodies are required for both. This week has carried me beautifully and devastatingly out to other people and far back into myself, so that now, showing up with other people, I bring myself more fully. I am ready to be here with you.

The night begins in stillness. Michael Mahalchick, buried under a sheet of silver that matches the foil-covered walls, tells us the story of the boy who cried wolf, “a good boy,” “an irresponsible boy” as childhood images swim by on the projection screen. I am feeling for this best, irresponsible boy when he stands up in a wolf mask. Who is the boy, who is the wolf? Maybe I feel for the wolf in us, too.

Lily Bo Shapiro crawls into the room, and Jonathan Gonzalez follows, carrying a light that casts her shadow, a slow-moving vigil. We are watching over, too, as she begins to roll across the floor, uttering sounds at the edge of what can be said. When she turns out the light, we are in the dark, still together.

Social Health makes us move. Ivy Castellanos, Ayana Evans, Zachary Fabri, Maria Hupfield, Geraldo Mercado, pace around the space, each intently engaged in their own activity. There are multiple urgent things happening at every moment, they remind us. We can’t keep track of it all, and we are also in it. First one and then another audience member is called up, engaged in something they don’t know the rules for. What are the limits of a performance? “Where are we going?” the performers call out to one another, but the response is another question. “What will we do when we get there?” There is foil and danger-tape scattered across the floor. We make a mess and we clean it up. They begin to prepare to leave, but we aren’t all always ready at the same time. Zachary Fabri asks again, “Where are we going?” and isn’t satisfied with the answer. “But really, where?” “How will we know?” “What will we do?”

Jonathan Gonzalez needs to get into it. He keeps telling us, he keeps trying. He asks the audience for help. Do you feel it? I’m almost there, he says. He strips and spins around. Is he there yet? An audience member (or a performer?) rolls him in tarp. Is this what we were getting ready for? How do we prepare for an ending? Do you feel it?

We all filter out, and a small crowd waits for the next performance to begin. Becca Blackwell and BASHIR DAVID NAIM welcome us back in. We move from the haunting violin songs of Mark Golamco to Hye Yun Park a.k.a. Ancient Toddler the Clown’s painful, hilarious performance. She plays a toy piano, racing mounting boos and mounting panic. After a great day, after an awful day, she tells us, she feels compelled to eat fried chicken. She takes of her skirt, and begins to rub a dildo against a large, fabric vagina, telling us her story, eating fried chicken, and sobbing. The person next to me is bent over in laughter, and I’m mesmerized. Applause begins to sound, and then there is our applause as well, and I feel complicit in something without being quite sure what. Which is not, actually, unusual.

The dance break between performances is what I needed. My body needs to move, and I’m grateful for this moment of release, of coming together and celebrating one another. I find some of the curators and cheer with them, for them.

Becca Blackwell hula hoops while telling us about their childhood discovery of porn, and then Zavé Martohardjono comes out to help us work on our self-care regimen. Just 30 seconds a day, he tells us. Your self-care, too, can be quantified and commoditized. “When one of us wins, we all win; when one of us wins, we all win; when one of us wins, we all win…”

Cae Monae enacts a ritual. Three members of the audience hold candles, experiencing their divinity as she shares hers with us. There is blood, or is it paint, on the floor.

BASHIR DAVID NAIM closes the show, singing a digitized, extended rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” against projections of kombucha and yoga poses in fake clouds. It isn’t real; it’s all the realness I want. Sometimes healing is painful, sometimes it’s angry, sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s quiet solace, sometimes it’s a party. In the words of my good friend this week:

I am grateful for all the healing and transformation last week brought into my life; I’m bringing it with me, we’re going to need it, I’m going to need you. And glitter.

here are the mornings after. speed has collapsed and anxiety chuckles with retrospect. Saturday’s 8p evening of works tumble into one another — a whirlwind encircling the exterior of the thing at hand…

“Thoughts scribbled in the margins, notes passed on the sly, the indominant culture hidden just below the surface structure. This festival will hold space for names, loss, mystery and darkness, reverence and interaction healing and self-care, attending to layers of history and what comes before as the groundwork for lasting action.”

this night approaching history/memory/periphery contextualized a vastness encompassed in the exterior. each work confounded with testimony offering individuated actions as entry to the other worlds with utility as salvation and abandon. i offer much gratitude for being invited into those spaces from each artists.

with curiosity and suspicion, i posed questions of the curatorial statement which wonderfully provoked generation with a cautionary wide-casting net. i proposed my queries with those fellow artists sharing the evening before attempting this writing / which has culminated between modes of inquiry, ramble, and review…

are you activating this prompt within your process and culminating work? If at all, how?

as i shift focus away from trying to be readable/purchaseable (because it’ll continue without me) and towards the conditioning effect/affect of attempting over time, of what it has been to live this way, where in my life this condition has most profoundly functioned, and where (actually) it doesn’t […] i’m proposing structures and experiences to disorient and reveal. i’m inquiring into the conditions of visibility and representation, the labor and intoxication of those conditions.  – Lily Bo

 By being bold in action. Depth that sits and is meant for viewer reflection. We have carved out our space and the body and actions reflect that. – IV Castellanos

 Performance Art in general is still very much a part of the indominant culture, even though as a practitioner I consider it a medium “of the people”.  Often times I feel as though I am very much passing notes into the ether for whomever is there to pick them up on the other side.  Getting to collaborate with people who’s work I admire and creating a unspoken yet shared language with them via action is to me the crux of this performance. – Geraldo Mercado

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history/memory/periphery – history/memory/periphery – the container comes to mind — what a stimulating and slippery conception coalesces from these three words // the notion of alien derivatives reified through the gaze of performance and an institutions’ homogeneity. as I watched the works and watched the works be watched I wondered how necessary an evaluation of the inside is / it’s allegiances and political bearings / it’s comprehensive and those socio-constructed identity markers, as it attempts to inquire about the outside… a space far from localized with violence continually ensuing as one’s place/past as present silences another’s, stands on the shoulders of another’s, remains in the architecture of that formidable center we’ve become fugitive to.

how does the expiring moment of offering a glimpse, a performance, contain the combustible material of memory? how do you triangulate the periphery? the recapturing from self to self’s past, these personalized artifacts already initiate the distance — the gray — that mysticism that can offer potential to make from, reimagine form, look back at communication…

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Performance is an expression that breaks barriers between people. It often ignores hierarchies and speaks to emotion and experience. If this is your language you can investigate histories, question society, and embrace – cross-culturally. I think that is important.. – Ayana Evans

 The space of performance is so vast and generous, that it allows everyone the potential to define a singular mode of research, while creating a dialogue with other artists. That space provides an exciting platform for generating conversation and building culture. – Zachary Fabri

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the works seemed to catapult onto the static spaceship of JACK’s interior, one following the other with pronounced tension as they arrived with stakes, an interiority from each artists that animated the desire to offer//their vulnerability//disavowing a universal logic. meeting the buffer of audience members. this distance between the two parties articulating the gray with audible reactions, silence, transfixed gaze… collision after collision; how generous on all sides. Even more, the periphery became the center wooden floor, the transitions of blue backlight, the absent voices in the post show one on one feedback, the bodies of color – bodies underground – – the bodies reimagined that will continue to generate magnetism of + for the periphery but surprisingly materialize in minor.

you were not there but I looked for you.

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i heard those absent voices in the mantra’s harked through the work,

can you see me? (Michael Mahalchick)

where are we going? what will we do when we get there? (Social Health Performance Club)

*

ringing a profound kind / a magic of not naming and not arriving. there is still much to share and transgress as we attempt to move past our valences to imagine, and in that way, testify for the groundworkings/ers.

to repurpose lily bo’s words, that Saturday night, the presence of bodies, and the facilitation by MR was deeply human… organized into something, striving to be something as it coheres, coagulates, collects itself to be while not able to be everything at the same time. speculation is necessary, if not only to provoke a mode of production and gatekeeping that is consistently evaluative, but also to instigate a need to roam wildly outside of the conceived bounds, traversing over and around the singular and commoditized thing of the outside. i am left with a thrust and hunger

On Saturday night we came together for an evening of performance that celebrated queer knowledges and practices. Two hours after we left JACK, fifty queer people, mostly Latinx, who had also gathered together to celebrate each other, to move together in a space of their making, were killed in Orlando, FL. These deaths must be mourned. Our laws must change. And our performances and parties must continue.

I don’t want the shadows of this tragedy to erase the beautiful offerings by each invited artist at JACK on Saturday night. For now what I can do is to take up the precious scraps I collected from each performer and try to use them as a way forward. Thank you to all the performers, to the festival organizers: Tara, Aretha, Eleanor, and Elliott, and to Movement Research, and to everyone who showed up on Saturday night to participate.

I’m thinking about the rage and the energy and the resistance that queer artists like David Wojnarowicz and Assotto Saint, along with so many others, displayed in the face of the AIDS crisis, which often involved forcing government officials to confront the actual bodies of those whose deaths they were collectively responsible for. I imagine* a mylar sheet like the one Michael Mahalchick covered himself with on Saturday night, when he transformed his body into a surface to be projected on. I imagine this sheet being thrown over all those who threaten, condone and perpetuate violence and hate. I imagine projecting the images of the more than fifty beautiful people we have lost, while Jonathan Gonzalez leads us in a chant: get into it get into it, until the images and the sounds seep into their skin, until they understand, in their bodies and minds, that they cannot remain untouched by the suffering that they have caused.

A participant is a “partaker, comrade, fellow soldier.” In these militarized and gun-infected times, coming together, showing up for each other, whether in the club or street, is a defiant and celebratory action. Partaking is caretaking. I am feeling more than ever how we must look out for each other—and learn from each other, always widening and extending our coalitions. Performance trains us to deal with the unexpected. Performance rips apart and rearranges realities. But the worlds that performance creates only become real when we are there to co-create them. Let’s be there.

*Note: In this imagined performance ritual, I have totally recontextualized the performances of Michael Mahalchick and Jonathan Gonzalez. Mahalchick, in his performance, projected adolescent photos of himself onto himself under the mylar. Gonzalez, in his performance, repeated variations of the phrase: “I’m trying to get into it.”

Ni’Ja’s work serves as a conduit to action. In service of hosting the histories and complexities of both warrior and healer, they engaged exercises from resistance-based physical practices and creative cosmologies to move beyond sorrow, rage, grief and, for me, inaction. In a variation of Deidre Sklar’s 5th premise, there are things only the body knows and once the body can find itself activated, the spirit can find its power. I arrived weary and wary, would have called myself weakened and worn down from extensive engagement in the very specific hierarchies and oppressions of public higher education in NYC. But, after the group circled and rocked and rubbed and crawled and sweated, I found deep in the body my pelvic floor and from that floor, my voice. And, from that voice, my loud.  And, from my loud, action.  In vocally getting loud, I realized that my earlier inclination for quiet had been from a need to protect the self.  So, for me, I couldn’t know what I know or remember what I knew until my body could remember that it knew how to act. A fellow attendee pointed out that it wasn’t just physical practice that activated the power centers, but intention. With that final ingredient, I realized there is still much work to be done, to be loud for those who are not listened to. And, to remember, that the quiet is good when it is practiced with an intention to observe, but not hide, and the loud is required when my intention is to serve.

mayfield’s work on Improvising While Black informed the later afternoon workshop, though it was only mentioned briefly in the beginning and at the end. We were asked to share with the group something that we really, really wanted. Some wanted ginger tea. Someone wanted real healing. I wanted clarity. We were also asked to share with a partner what it was we hoped to rupture or disrupt. In the moment, I expressed that I wanted to disrupt my behaviors of obligation (perhaps, obedience) of behaving responsibly and appropriately. My partner didn’t have a word for it, but “white female performance art” collected some of the ideas and systems, ze were negotiating with. After lengthening, condensing and releasing our heads with our partners, we spent a lot of time letting our heads guide us in and out of the space. We’d cross the floor or circle in and out and sometimes rupture the improvisation of another by connecting with their hips and following the rotation of their hips or redirecting it ourselves. We built up tremors in the body, faced each other, began speaking in tongues and found ourselves in rousing bouts of laughter. There was a regular stream of bodies laying on the resting place mats in the corner and some of us gathered bits of our work into short “rupturings” that we shared. I shook and gurlged and kept my head off center and spun and teetered til I dropped and found in the pocket of sunlight my answer. In the bright, I found the clear. When the group gathered and shared last thoughts, my first partner spoke of the power of improvising in a room filled with people of color. I welled up and realized, I had not gotten as loud as I’d thought after Ni’Ja’s workshop, because I hadn’t even dared to express that want so explicitly to myself or the group. But, thanks to the festival’s curators, the safe and supportive space that Ni’Ja and mayfield established and the strong and present work of my fellow participants, I found myself well.

This week, we continue to bring it all, and we have asked you to do the same, and i am so grateful for the lessons you all have taught me about what can happen when we show up in spite of everything.

I learned to think of my pain not as a flaw to push past or separate from my well Self, but instead as a valid part of my self that commands respect / that has much to say.

I learned that while we might strive towards a daily self-care practice to always be well and ready to give care to others, it’s okay to have some back-up plans for the times we have to stop and acknowledge that the work is weighing too heavily.

I learned that the container we’ve been building for ourselves all year had truly become our offering to the artists we are presenting and to the community who showed up to witness and share space with us. That feels like a kind of power i want to know further.

I learned that i can strive to make a safe place for POC and other Othered bodies, but i cannot control all factors. I still need to learn what to do when safety fails. When the performers are brilliant queer artists of color who, through the dances they are making, are asserting their own stories in this very white european colonized lineage, but the keyholder of the performance space is a straight cis white male. I also learned the importance of addressing the privilege-blindness that often aligns with white soft masculinities. And i promise you that i will do the work to learn to identify my own anger or discomfort as a starting place, not just an ugly thing to be suppressed.

I learned that my way of accessing ancestral knowledge is perhaps not through a workshop or a performance, but through myself. I needed your workshops and performances to find that permission, though.

What is a word for witch that comes from a poppy farm in Asia Minor? (You don’t know where that is, but it is who i am.) Bonesetter is as close as i can find. What is a word for witch that means you have been called into being by your ancestors? How does that knowledge change the way you place your self in your body?

We spent last night listening and sharing wisdom and witnessing one another among Liliana Dirks-Goodman’s porous structures, soft nomadic shapeshifting yonic feminist houses. I have been asking myself all year how to build a home within myself and i found it last night.

I’m not ready for this to end, but i am ready to celebrate what we’ve had this week. I am going to cry tonight. I am going to dance and celebrate tonight. I am going to be in love tonight. I am bringing my body to the party tonight. I hope you will bring yours.

“For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.”
-Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury.

Space is made and held. And then it undoes itself, slow fade. When we hold, we hold it for others. We hold each other.

Somewhere, Fred Moten says something like: “you’re already doing the thing (that calls you? that you need to do?) when you get together to figure out what is to be done.” It seems fitting that because I couldn’t remember exactly how this quote was phrased, I texted my friend James when I got home to ask him how he remembered it (“you’re already doing the thing you mean to be doing when you get together to figure out what to do”). And so, in our own way, we were already doing the thing, too—touching knowledges under the guise of figuring, in the space that figuring it out makes and holds.

What kind of labor is making and holding space? Move(d) into the center. Center the black, the feminine, the queer. Name these knowledges, these movements, their provenance, their power.

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Learning how to build like this, how to be (together) like that, how to hold (each other) like this, how to move and be moved like that, requires an unlearning, too. (Because there is so much that we learned too well. We felt ourselves becoming formed too tightly. We became (re)productive and private and professional.)

Intimate pedagogies: care differently, unfold a different rhythm, teach refusal but also reaching-finding-roaming. Teach and learn how to both build and run. A woven line of flight. In but not of. “fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said…” (Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness”)

To live freely, dangerously—to be a danger to their wealth, their power, to threaten their institutions. (The dance company needs the dancer, but cannot bear her, cannot bear what she brings.)

Fugitivity: what are you running from? what is being embraced?

Are you sure that what you do in the bar is not study? Do you know (for sure) what you will find when you come together? When we decolonize our spaces of study, we can imagine an endless (never selfsame) relation like/in/as the knit of a web. Maybe we just move together for a little while and talk softly and have a beer and oh wait will you dance with me too?

“I’m glad the mind and the body are happening together” (Ni’Ja Whitson). That’s another way of listening, of being heard. The feeling that pain & pleasure & power & flight are all encysted in the body. I feel good here. I know something (differently) here.

“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Just new ways of holding and being held, new registers of listening. A way of feeling the body, feeling the other feeling you, haptic brush of a knitted home, a way of navigating your way through its flexible architectures. “And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already.” (Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”)

Our circle unclasps itself, spreads out. What does space feel like when it’s open? Available? Fluid? In motion? When it wavers and inverts itself? When centers & margins move, become porous? When it becomes a practice?

Knowledges always danced unpredictably, didn’t they? But we had to unlearn somehow and learn how to make recognition (and care) our (poetic) praxis. Can you find the thing we’re already in, the thing we want, that thing we know we know—and then let it breathe, give it space? “Our feelings were not meant to survive.” (Lorde)

But we felt them anyway. We reached toward that abundance.