A note from Jmy James Kidd, guest-editor
I wanted to work on this Cancer Dancer project for reasons similar to why I have created the organizations / communities / spaces throughout my life like AUNTS is Dance and Pieter Performance Space – something I needed that wasn’t available yet, or available to me, or available in a way I found inviting. I would have loved to have found the support / inspiration / camaraderie of a range of written experiences, images and videos by dancers who had or have cancer in their lives when I got my diagnosis and went through many, many treatments. Arriving on the “other side of cancer” I found myself cleaved into me as cancer patient that couldn’t really believe what I just went through and a new me that was completely lost and empty – who am I, who am I now? Reaching out to other dancer people that I know and that I don’t know, responding to my own writing prompts, peering into and sharing my own experience with myself and others, connecting to these incredible humans that are part of Cancer Dancer is part of my personal integration project that I hope offers insight and support to dancers as well as caregivers as well as anyone, should they find themselves with a god damn cancer diagnosis. I was interested in Dancers writing as Dancer People; from the rhythms, vocabulary, way of their own dance trainings, practices and lives. So much love to Kyoko Takenaka, Roya Carreras, Lindsey Red-tail, Sue Roginski whose writings had me in tears, laughter and deep respect. A resource guide, compiled by us all, can be found online at Pieter Performance Space.
Cancer Dancer Resource Guide on Pieter website: https://www.pieterpasd.com/cancer-dancer-resources
Prologue
Lay people (non dancers) tell me that being a dancer must be filled with joy, health and being fit, listening deeply to our bodies. My western ballet based training was at times joyful and exciting but from a very young age I was taught to listen deeply to my body and THEN override the messages of pain, exhaustion, emotion and dismay. I was taught to leave my “baggage” at the door. Which for me meant shutting down emotionally, dissociating from my own body in order to withstand and smile through the intense physical pain, the extreme competition and the emotional abuse in the western dance, especially ballet, world system. I don’t think that all dance, or all dance training or even all ballet training is so fucked up but my experience of it definitely was. In many ways I still witness the beautiful world of dance as abusive, with repressive behaviors continued to be enabled and supported at every strata. I think it is in large part because of scarcity issues, by forcing capitalistic models on bodies and spirits and DANCE, not thinking that there is any other way to do this type of work. I was told that I had to be a dancer at every moment in my life like when I was brushing my teeth, not just in class or on stage. I was taught that ballet was the foundation of ALL dance. I think that many lifelong dancers, including myself, come from emotionally shut down, dysfunctional, repressive home systems and are drawn to dancing because it is a familiar place. Dancing also saved my fucking life, focuses me, brings me incredible joy and connection to the sacred divine. I intensely love dancer people who are my people. I believe and experience dancing to be a way humans can participate, find and share in emotions, transformation and transcendence.
Story
I found the lump in my left breast Feb 2024 while driving out to our compound in the Mojave desert from our home in Upper Ojai. My breasts were not large, I touched them all the time and when I felt this lump I went cold. The lump was hard and rectangular, about the size of a peanut. Tara Jane, my boo, was driving the car and we immediately called my doctor to make the earliest possible appointment. I was 44 and TJ’s mother had passed away a month prior from metastatic breast cancer. I was so good at compartmentalizing in a way I can’t do now and told myself that it was ok if it was breast cancer because there are so many new good and easy treatments. In hindsight I had no fucking idea what it was like to dance with cancer.
I started the process of the string of doctor visits – primary care to mammogram to biopsy – that took a minute. I did some dance performances. A short west coast tour with NYC friends – TJ playing music and me improvising. I wanted to improvise from the complete unknown. I was trying to take my time with the movement and the pauses in movement to let whatever wanted to come in, come in and express out. I am impatient and I like to be in control, I like to have a sense of knowing. Usually when I improvise I create a loose structure, safety net, known resting places. This performance we gave 4 times in March was just me, my body, my boo’s music, and my costume: white pants and shirt I had painted with floral abstractions for performances summer of 2021. Then adorned for 2024 with a black sequined snake around my torso, spider on my leg – crawling and slithering through the fauna.
I waited until just after my 45th birthday on April 5th to get the biopsy, I think because I knew I had the cancer and wanted to have a birthday where I didn’t have cancer (yet). This birthday felt like it was the halfway point in my life. I thought that, yeah I could die at 90! 90 is old enough for me, long enough for me. 45 felt like a crease in my life, a fold, a pivot point and in a very different version than expected, it has been.
April 12, the day of Tara Jane’s new record release for her amazing album The Cool Cloud of Okayness, I got my cancer diagnosis. My primary care physician called with the news and told me it was going to be just fine, I would do a little chemo and a little surgery and be ok! Biopsy pathology was HER2 positive, 9% ER positive, 1% PR positive, Grade 3, approximately 1.2cm in diameter. The show she played at Zebulon was one of TJ’s best shows ever, we were all in tears.
May 15, I got a double mastectomy (DMX). I was always fine with cutting my titties off, they sagged and flapped anyway and I was and am happy with my flat ass chest. My pathology came back with a 3cm tumor, HER2 with the same ER and PR as biopsy, stage 2A, sentinel node negative, most margins clear but there was a very confusing line about one margin not being clear that no doctor or surgeon could or did ever make sense of.
Because HER2 is considered aggressive, anyone with a tumor 2cm or larger is given a recommendation for Chemotherapy. Of course I didn’t want to do Chemo. With no known positive nodes I decided to just go for the targeted therapy called Herceptin, considered a miracle drug, which I started July 22.
But one week after my biopsy I had felt a node in my armpit swell up and something about it felt weird and off. I told every doctor about it but no one seemed concerned as my sentinel node had been negative (when doing breast cancer surgeries they usually take out 1 – 10 nodes to check for the spread of the cancer and in my case they took out just one node, the first in the chain and there were no cancer cells present). The doctors said it was probably due to the healing from the biopsy and then surgery. 2 months post DMX, my node wasn’t going down, it would change shape but was always enlarged. In 99% of cases when the sentinel node is negative it is true that the cancer has not spread. I kept feeling like the cancer was going to eat me alive even though on paper I was considered in the clear.
I was called into a radiologist appointment with Dr. Ko who told me she strongly recommended radiotherapy for me because of the confusing margins and also because there was lymphovascular invasion. I had thought that by getting a DMX and not having any known positive nodes I would not have to radiate. She was the first medical person that noted my lymphovascular invasion (LVI). When I did a deep dive online search on LVI I fucking freaked out with the poor prognosis indication. Of course I didn’t want to do radiotherapy. I didn’t want to do any of these treatments except for the DMX. I told her about the still enlarged lymph node which she felt and got me a much sooner appointment for a biopsy than what I had scheduled for Sept 26. I had had an MRI on the node which showed it enlarged but not misshapen so possibly normal? In hindsight I am so grateful to my enlarged lymph node and to Dr. Ko. Nodes can be cancerous without being enlarged.
The node biopsy came back positive for cancer with a new pathology of triple positive. So now it was still fully HER2, but 100%ER and 95%PR. I was the 1%; my cancer had skipped my sentinel node. My new and better oncologist said that she considered my cancer to always have been triple positive and she had seen the percentages shift around before. To me my cancer wanted to live, it was adapting, it was telling me that it absolutely did want to eat me alive.
I had CT and PET scans which showed the node as cancerous, possibly other nodes as cancerous and 2 very small nodules in my lungs that were maybe possibly cancerous. I fucking freaked out again and couldn’t eat or sleep. I decided I had to go ahead with chemo: 6 rounds every 3 weeks of a regimen consisting of four drugs—Docetaxel (Taxotere®), Carboplatin, Trastuzumab (Herceptin®), and Pertuzumab (Perjeta®) known as TCHP. My first dose was September 24, 2024. TCHP is notoriously brutal. I had to cancel my fall plans that I had uneasily made when I was told I was cancer free – the wedding of Devika + Miguel, going to the MR Gala honoring AUNTS, going to Cabo San Lucus with my first-grade friend Silvia.
I scheduled my chemo for tuesdays which meant I started taking my steroids on monday morning, went to gyrotonics monday evening, tue was long chemo infusion day with cold capping, wed I went to acupuncture in the morning and then did Peer Share, a communally structured dance class with my Ojai dancepak at the small dance studio at my house in Upper Ojai that, through this chemo process named itself The Healing Cave. Wed and Thur of the chemo infusion week I felt weird but the chemo didn’t start setting in till about the first friday so I tried to do what I could while I could. Dancing, especially with others, helped me feel like myself.
As the chemo penetrated my every tissue I descended into the underworld. I wouldn’t know if I could ever go through another round of this poison that was killing off my body, my body that had made its own new organs, my cancerous tumors. I have never felt more awful, more truly awful. I considered getting diapers. I had rashes, sores, styes, nerve twitches. My weight maintained but my muscles mostly dissolved. I had no ass, my boo mistook my thigh for my arm in bed one day. Luckily I had done all that Klein Technique so I could move my skeleton without my muscles! I was stoned all of the time. I danced when I could. My cancer mentor that I connected with from an org called Immerman’s Angels was my virtuosic cheerleader. Round 4 was much improved as TJ and I learned to sustain my body’s reaction to the Chemo. Round 5 I stayed on the rim of the underworld and never went back in. Nurses and people who have been through Chemo told me that typically by the time you figure out how to deal with your chemo it is over.
My dance communities of the Ojai zone, LA, NYC and beyond sustained me, buoyed me greatly. Money from my stepfather’s family was a huge and welcome resource. Navigating Health Care is a whole other essay. Caregivers need fucking awards. It was my boo, Tara Jane, my primary caretaker, that managed me and my care so sweetly, devotedly. With the help of many others. She had to cancel all of her fall engagements too, but hers also included shows in support of her new record. Shit hole. My last chemo infusion was Jan 7, 2025. The day the Altadena and Palisades fires began. Many of our friends lost their homes and studios.
Feb 24, 2025 I had an axillary node dissection surgery (AND) to remove what turned out to be 15 more lymph nodes in my left armpit area. My nodes protected me and informed me of my localized spread. I am so sad that I had them removed after going through chemo and I will always be grateful to them, my nodes. Pathology showed a Complete Pathological Response (CPR), meaning no cancer cells were found. A PET scan showed no cancer (it takes about a billion cells clustering to show a cancer on a scan). My lung nodules did not change at all in size, not affected at all by my strong chemo, so very likely not cancerous but my oncologist wants to continue to keep an eye on them. My nerves and tissues are still healing and regrowing from chemo and surgery. Summer 2025 has been all about working on supporting the regrowth and guiding my scapula and shoulder area towards good clean functional movement. And Resting.
I designed and performed a dance May 2025 with my Ojai dancepak based on tension and momentum, a very simple dance that I could do after my AND. 7 weeks after I had finished chemo and 1 week before my AND surgery I performed a dance with my dear dancer friend Nick Duran and music by TJ called Pinnacle. The title was so right and I was also like why the fuck are we calling this dance Pinnacle, should we change it to like Easy River and have that be the reflection, the dream of our reality?
Pushing past exhaustion needlessly could no longer be a driving force in my dancing, in my life. Nick and I rehearsed this dance when we could, to the best of our abilities. Nick and I met dancing for Neil Greenberg in 2008 and then worked together in so many ways, so many projects in Los Angeles. Performing Pinnacle felt like an end and a beginning. Working on Pinnacle with Nick and TJ kept me going, kept me alive and taught me to not PUSH myself to do more. Less is more, I had been telling myself without listening for years.
As we start dancing Pinnacle, I was almost in tears standing there. I had just fucking finished chemo, the hardest damn thing ever and here I am staring in the eyes of Nick who was staring right back at me a few inches away, TJ nearby and so many people in the room staring at us. One thing I love about performing and also being an audience for dance is that it is a space where I can full on stare at other humans and I can give myself over to being stared at, examined, what is this human doing? Not everyone in the audience knew what I just went through. I hadn’t done an instagram post about my cancer journey, I didn’t do a gofundme. When I told people about my cancer I often told them that I didn’t care if they talked about it with others but that they should also tell people to not expect any response from me. I had to surround myself with people I felt good with, that didn’t ask anything of me. For the first time in my life.
Video documentation of Pinnacle by NICK + JAMES w/ Tara Jane O’Neil
While I have always in theory revered my material body, in practice I felt it was indestructible. In a weird way I didn’t think my own body was alive. I think that every person who gets cancers considers why they might have gotten it. I think that there are usually a multitude of reasons including no damn reason at all. Cancer is senseless.
For a seed to sprout it has to have all the right elements at the right time for it to grow. While I think that it isn’t just cause and effect for cancers in the bod, I think that I did fit the profile of a person more likely to grow a cancer. I grew up in a dysfunctional, abusive environment both at home and in my ballet studios where I was trained to blame myself, repress my emotions, not trust anyone. I was raised by the demons that my Mother and Father never faced. I had few healthy, good role models for how to nourish myself with food, faith or family. Food was definitely not love and Love was entirely conditional. I grew up mostly microwaving, sometimes starving myself, taking laxatives, throwing up, angry at the world. I lived in large polluted cities until I was 40. I lived on beer and french fries into my early 30’s. I was exposed to toxic chemicals. Our waters, airs, and soils are increasingly polluted. I was a workaholic. I was an escape artist.
I moved to Los Angeles at 30 to start my own dance studio which became Pieter, a refuge for dancers including myself. I began the slow process of disengaging from abusive relations, engaging in harmonious, healthful relations with my own self, others, dance and art making.
When I turned 40 I was so tired out from life. Exhausted. I imagine that my cancer had already begun growing. And then pandemic happened in which I transitioned into middle age. My cancer was not unexpected to me. I wonder if all my years of dealing with my exhausted, often injured body, all the resulting inflammation, contributed to my cancer?
Sometimes I wish that I had died from breast cancer already because then I would know how I died. I am also just happy to be alive now, to be dancing, to be living, to be opening my heart, to be sharing my story. I don’t feel like I am a parasite on this planet any longer. I am an energy being in this material body for a minute on this beautiful wondrous planet with a bunch of other crazy humans and everything is alive!
6 months post chemo I wonder what the fuck just happened to me and who am I? Doing this writing project for me is a necessary integrative process. It is so intense to go back into a place where I dissociated from to make it through. It is so intense to connect with other dancer people who have or are inside of cancer realties. It is so hard. Cancer is so scary. Until you go through cancer yourself or are a caregiver you just don’t know. I didn’t know. When people tell me they are so sorry to hear about my breast cancer my standard line is it has been sucky and entirely transformative and this is true.
My hairs began growing back 6 weeks out from my last chemo. Of course my chin hairs came in first. I don’t remember the order of it all but my leg hairs came in thick and dark and so for the first time in many, many years I shaved my legs. To see if the first round of growth back were chemo hairs or something. My pubes too came back so coarse and then I trimmed and they are growing in silkier. My leg hair growing in is slow and I just don’t know. My eyelashes are about half the length they used to be and I am not sure if they will get longer.
TJ and I recently looked at pictures of us going through the chemo and I looked like fucking shit. Going through it we both thought I looked ok, a little funny, but we were acclimated to my grey green coloring and steroidal puff I guess.
My own coloring is returning. My spirit feels dazed like just stepping out into the bright sunlight from an afternoon movie. This is all still so fresh. I am in forced chemical menopause. My nerves are funky. My energy I know now and appreciate is limited, has always been limited even though I previously thought differently. Now I (have to) do my best to replenish my stores. I don’t feel like cancer is going to eat me alive any longer, even as I accept that this is still and always a possibility. I feel flatlined and not in a bad way. TJ too. We go to see art and performances and we are just happy to be there. We are tired. We are transitioning out of our roles of cancer patient and primary caregiver into boos, lovers, partners. We can never go back to the Before cancer grew in my body.
I am enjoying this new me, body + spirit in a way I never did before; I didn’t appreciate that I am actually alive. Cancer brings revelations.
Thank you, Tara Jane. For being my boo. For being the best fucking caregiver. For showing me such beautiful caring. Your caring saved my life.
Epilogue or Coda
Being closer to death, going through the worst feeling time in my entire life, getting clean pathology, accepting what may happen in my future, having had to deal with so much bad news, I feel everything differently than before. Getting a grant, a gig, a recognition for dancing pales next to me feeling a confirmation in my own living being. I care about everything more and I care about everything less. I feel my spirit guided by ancestors, angels and holy spirit. I have a few ideas and I have no idea what is next.
