Dancing on to remember our connection
During my first 10 years working as a performer and dancemaker with Dance Exchange, I spent the equivalent of six years on tour. That’s 32 weeks out of every 52-week year, for a decade, on the road and in the air. The pace of travel and time spent in airports, on planes, in hotel rooms, and dark theaters left me without a feeling of connection to the natural world. On one trip, I found myself standing in front of a magazine rack at an airport, passing time until my next flight. The glossy covers in front of me were filled with gold and maroon leaves framing a long walking trail, pumpkins and bushels of freshly picked apples on picture-perfect porches. I remember thinking to myself: “It’s fall? Is this really how I’ve come to know and experience the change in seasons?”
The way I made sense of the world was changed by the endless travel, and my connection to the natural world felt diminished. I needed a way back to a different way of knowing, understanding, and experiencing the world through my body. In search of this, I didn’t stop dancing, though in many ways, my dancing changed. Ultimately, I moved into new terrain, often off the stage and away from standard models of touring. A growing tension was forming between the value I saw that touring could offer and my heightened awareness of its negative impact on the environment.
I never fully let go of the stage or what is possible through the repetition of creating and performing in this way. Waiting in the repetition was the possibility for change.
Dancemaking invites each of us to locate our personal connection and feeling into the context of a larger subject, supporting us to see our world in new ways. I’ve always felt that when we are making a new dance, we are simultaneously making and shaping a new life. This making and shaping anew is not a given, it is a choice. It is a commitment to show up in the process over and over—to be stirred, to remember, to shed the protective layers that accumulate each time we think the change will be more than we can bear, requiring too much of ourselves and our world to change.
The dance I toured and performed longer than any other in my career is Ferocious Beauty Genome, a work by Dance Exchange’s founder Liz Lerman. The work poses small and large questions about genomic science and the implications of genetic research in our lives. One of the central collaborators on the project was the marine scientist Stephen Palumbi. Stephen’s work on the genomics of marine organisms focuses on evolutionary questions and on practical solutions to questions about how to preserve and protect the diverse life in the sea. In one part of the performance, Stephen appears on stage via video, standing under a suspended skeleton of a whale. We, the dancers, have just finished a section of the dance that sends us careening across the stage. In this moment, with Stephen and the whale, we are breathless and on the floor, still and small. As the video closes in on the whale’s fins, you realize the skeletal structure of the fins looks like our hands—and Stephen reminds us of our evolutionary connection to whales: We came from the sea.
Lying there still and small, no longer the center, our bodies and histories out of view, I feel us becoming the We. Night after night, each performance, this moment becomes a ritual in remembering and becoming the We.
Remembering we came from the sea.
Remembering we have the same hands as whales.
Remembering the gifts from our ancestors.
Remembering these hands are gifts.
Lying there I wonder, what will we do with these gifts?
Can we become good ancestors ?
Can my body stay this soft, vulnerable enough to remember that when we hear about species loss and extinction, we are hearing about our own death?
They say this loss is not the result of our actions. They say it’s natural. They say it’s happened before. They say the science is unreliable. They say it’s a political tool. They say there’s nothing we can do. They say climate action is bad for the economy, that it will cost jobs, that people will suffer. They say it’s God’s will. It is not as simple as some want us to think, a matter of us and them, one's loss and another's gain. We are losing. It is our death. This ritual is preparing me to hold this truth. This ritual is a pause, I am letting go of the momentum. It is a ritual in preparing to remember and rise in our shared body, to be in our humanity, to rise in our We.
Dancing trains me to remember the We—to live, act, behave, and make as if We were a gift. The wisdom in this dance connects me to this. I won’t forget again, and if I do, I will have a way back. I will dance my way back. Dancing puts me back into a relationship with everything. When I dance I have a relationship with city streets and forest floors, with trees, rocks, and birds. Dancing brings these things back into the scope of my life. When I dance I remember we are a part of everything, that we are not moving alone. The gifts of our ancestors are moving with and through us, reminding us that we dance on because we love the world.
I am home this fall. This time marks the longest period in my adult life that I have not traveled. Covid has grounded us. The hours I am not behind my computer staying connected to family, teaching, and working towards a new future with Dance Exchange and the field at large; I am outside with my son Silas. We’ve found a place we like to visit each day in the field across from our house next to the nursing home. We can spend hours here. From this place we see Aster and Goldenrod, Red Maple and Magnolia, Grey Fox, Wood Thrush, and Burrowing Owl. We see families visiting loved ones, on either side of glass doors they still may not be able to cross for months to come. We see a new banner celebrating the essential workers caring for those inside. Some days, we hear sirens—we are not the same. We are looking for new and returning rituals to help us remember, recognizing this moment holds the opportunity, if we choose it, to be in our humanity, to rise in our We—to live, act, behave, and dance as though We were a gift.