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
TINY left eye // Hitting the edges of the 4 by 4 mirror
Fogged up with steam // Piiing Pooong
I watched myself disintegrate
the creases of my lips curved upward
with // resistance
how funny this flesh folds
In 2022, I was diagnosed with low-stage, high-grade triple-negative breast cancer, which later led my doctors to find advanced ovarian cancer at the fertility clinic. It took over a month to realize I had a second primary, despite persistent complaints about abdominal pain. I learned quickly not to over-explain to medical professionals; comments like, maybe I pulled my psoas in yoga only invited dismissal. After too many no, no, it doesn’t happen like that, I was grateful when the fertility doctor urged me to explore egg freezing before starting treatment. It was there I learned I had a large, aggressive secondary tumor, with cancer spreading to major organs and across my abdominal wall. A big, breathless oh fuck.
Dr. Alexis took care of me. She gave me her cell number, scheduled multiple scans within an hour, brought me back into her office to check in, and called the moment the results were in. I remember sipping an iced dirty chai while asking if I was going to die. She set up an appointment with whom she called one of her closest friends — and the best oncologist she knew at Weill Cornell — Dr. Eloise Chapman Davis. Ten hours later, I was in the oncology office, told I carried BRCA1, that my mother had tested negative only because genome profiling had expanded in the past two years.
Too late to freeze eggs, I quickly realized that at thirty-five I would lose all my reproductive organs — ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, cervix — along with part of my abdominal sheath and my breasts. I also had to face six rounds of high-dose chemotherapy with the looming dread of going bald and losing my eyebrows and eyelashes. Terrifying. Humbling. I was at the height of my career — I had just set new work on the Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, was in my third year directing the children’s and teens program, and was preparing for a premiere at the LA Dance Festival with several film projects lined up.
In a moment when so much was being negotiated, I decided to offer up this one thing up on my own. I sent my hairdresser a voice note on Instagram, coldly stating I had cancer and needed to shave my head as soon as possible. I recall using lol several times as punctuation, but I won’t dare clarify by returning to the thread. I walked in unfazed on the outside, folding with fear on the inside. We buzzed my long, thick, curly locks down to one inch; no drama of a slow loss. We talked shit, laughed, and kept pointing out how hot I looked. It eased the grief as I watched my history fall in tight spirals across the floor.
I inherited dance and disease from my matriarchy, and both taught me how to fall with precision, with poetry.
My first experience with cancer was hearing my mom tell stories of caring for my grandmother, then at sixteen, watching my grandmother be re-diagnosed with terminal cancer after twenty years of remission. She slowly replaced her beloved raclettes and medium-rare steaks with Ensure. The family pattern deepened when my mom was diagnosed at forty-one, while pregnant with my sister. I left my fellowship at Alvin Ailey to care for her — just as she had done for her mother. This lineage continued: losing my mom in 2020, then facing my own ride through a misdiagnosis in 2022, which stripped away my naivety about health, my ability to have children, and the privilege of a strong, unmarked body. My privacy. My identity — tangled in the thick mythology of my hair.
Fear and vanity are deeply intertwined, braided into all that I was about to lose. Ridiculous in a way — and yet also revealing of the persuasive, systemic power of the patriarchy and its impenetrable gaze.
Susan Sontag writes in great detail about the societal gaze and punitive language surrounding sickness. In Illness as Metaphor, she argues that the only fair way to engage with illness is to meet it literally and not in metaphor. This is the task I intuitively took on as a mode of retaliation.
I laugh now, looking back on how afraid I was to be bald. It was pre-accelerated from witnessing my mom, from social media and films showing women pulling out long threads of hair in tears, to their lovers leaving them; from the self-deprecation to the shame — horror stories pushed to the front of our collective witnessing. I feared losing my beauty, which felt directly tied to my feminine power — and that fear made me wonder. Memories returned: being taunted for being too hairy, too brown, too weird, too ugly. Smelling like ghormeh sabzi, being Persian, being Muslim — it all flooded my nervous system.
As Persian women, our hair is both coveted and policed — exalted as a marker of beauty, yet wielded as a weapon of suppression. This paradox became painfully clear in September, as I watched Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Iranian, beaten to death by the morality police for showing her hair. Her death ignited a generational uprising among women silenced for decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Women took to the streets in protest, removing their hijabs, cutting their hair in public. What I feared losing in private — my hair as a symbol of beauty and belonging — these women transformed into a weapon of defiance, severing strands in broad daylight as an act of freedom.
That revolution mirrored what was happening inside me, and the wonder grew — Was I afraid of being bald because it was what my community cherished? Did I want to dance now more than ever because the stigma of cancer told me I couldn’t — or wouldn’t? Was I afraid of no longer being adored, exoticized? Would I be caught again, seen as an outsider?
How does hair move us? And how will I move without it — with this aching, transforming body? What limiting ideologies have been woven into my psyche, shaping my formation when meeting a diagnosis like cancer?
Activism looks different in a body drenched in pain. On my worst days, I lay on the floor of my makeshift home studio watching the candlelight bounce against the walls, composing images and dances in my mind while softly wiggling my toes and finding the soft edges of my spine. I spent hours watching the wind shake the leaves to shifting tempos and the light morph my terracotta walls.
My writing practice grew during this time, and the desire to use my voice began with a hum. With the help of my dear friend and mentor, Samita Sinha, that hum turned into a harvesting of my tongue and my voice, opening a new passage for study and expression. Mobility was growing inside me despite my physical limitations. I was living in queer time and fighting the shame loops that aimed to keep me frozen.
Chemotherapy hurts, but what hurts more is the medicine they pump in you to produce more bone marrow, and the tingling that happens all over your feet and hands from the medicine burning your nerves. My movement practice became a series of reimagining and reorienting around pain. It meant meeting my body with radical self-love through the act of study and pleasure. I observed and moved with the sensation of the little mice gnawing at my bones and the relentless, unruly fatigue. I used my years of improvisational tools to create parameters that my body could meet, and scale never felt more generous. Exploring in this way shifted my relationship with movement from one that generates performance into an act of invocation. Practicing the release of shame with the optics and possibility of my body created a new entry point for me to engage with my illness tangibly. In a way that was honest and literal, with even the slightest fold and a shake. Moving while hurting became a radical pleasure practice.
In the same way I used a fold and a shake as a form of protest, I came to see ornamentation and sex as another device for choreography — one that met my body with presence, pleasure, and defiance. I draped myself in a light pink wig, metallic sparkles at the corners of my eyes, colorful bandanas, a red fake-fur jacket from my lover, and my skin dripped with Le Enchanteur talismans. On good nights, I went out with friends to hear live jazz. I dated, I had sex — bald, with my port bulging, chemo brain in full effect. I didn’t hide it. I showed up in discomfort paired with laughter, because it felt better than tears. Nothing signals illness quite like the baldness in women, or so they taught me. In the Persian community, where beauty and hair are interwoven with pride, value, and status, being unapologetically free with my diagnoses was its own scandal. Despite my family’s concerns about privacy and judgment, I refused to be veiled.
Shame is a product of patriarchal indoctrination, especially surrounding the notion of illness in women, particularly women of color. It says that this body deserves more attention, more care, and pleasure than another. This rhetoric aims to shrink, to silence, to marginalize. I will never forget Dr. Chapman explaining to me that the internet telling me I had a 5 percent chance of making it to two years was a lie. The data was based primarily on white women over the age of sixty-five.
When speaking to other Persian cancer patients, the theme that kept arising for us all was shame. It feels like an outcome of metaphor, and hair, in Persian culture, has been one of its defining symptoms. The notion of the honest body — a term from Joan Morgan that encompasses all bodies, Black, brown, white, straight, trans, queer, those facing illness or disability — feels like a gesture toward healing. It begins with the body but extends outward toward everything else that makes us human.
The embodiment of this notion, I’ve found, is perhaps an antidote to shame. It is in the study and expression of the honest body that we find liberation. It is through radical acceptance — and what Sontag argues is a literal engagement with our bodies — that we can find a path toward something not yet here. Moving While Hurting is a place where pleasure, eroticism, curiosity, and celebration co-exist with illness.
