Move one part of your body with another
to establish causality between your gesture and something outside you
stand by a window, cupping elbow with hand, and pour the clouds inside out
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To look at dance, as to move, is to engage in a process of diffusion: You let a little bit of the you that’s in you out into the you that’s out of you, and then you see what fills you back in
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In his capacity as dance critic, Edwin Denby writes, “What one enjoys most in reading is the illusion of being present”
In the presence of dance, I experience the sense that I am dancing (a friend says Denby liked to practice the moves he saw when he got home after a performance), whether or not I’m capable of the physical movement before me
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We watch an audience move as a mass, following each other to follow dancers rolling into the ocean
I have, with pains, made it to a makeshift rock seat at the Beach Sessions (missed a stair, sprained an ankle) and can’t keep up, so we are audience only to the form of the audience
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As the audience, we are engaged in the construction of an interior: a huddle, an ear leaning in for a whisper, a privacy, a space of repetition
Standing behind us, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi sets the conditions for being in the room:
The audience may remain only if we are inside the project of insisting on a new world and defending the Palestinian right to resistance against the world-ending project of Zionism
If we were to lie, he tells us, too ashamed to stand and leave, he will know, and we will know, and we will face our own secret rot in our sleep
This audience stays seated. Knowing that our being here is predicated on the conditions for liberation, I come back into phase with an arts public for the first time in a year
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Dance being the time and space between bodies, grief being the endurance of attention to loss—the length of it is the rest of our lives
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The rest of our lives:
The lover walks up in little shorts with a bowl of rice water, singsonging “Who’s thirsty?” and heads past me to the houseplants
The blockade stops time on a bridge. One of us washes piss off the boots of another. We pass out water bottles and missives into the blocked cars, toss clementines into outstretched hands obstructing the street
How wet, the scholar of romance wonders, can one’s pussy really be before it becomes impossible to decently attend a gala?
The obscenicist says, of his promiscuous forms, “I was refreshing them as they were refreshing me”
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St. Mark’s again, where three dancers perform a duet, forming unstable pairs. Becoming the third leaves one open to assume the role of DJ, or the role of audience (becoming us) so that we watch ourselves watching as everybody gets their ass smacked; everybody gets to put on a song
Pick up a dusty bunny and hand it to the audience, stroking their face. The club is a bedroom; the bedroom is a club, where you make giddy piles with friends, the people you imagine, and the people you meet
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On the dance floor, sounds sound like each other: What’s that from? It’s from itself, happening again. As our diva Sylvester says, “There weren’t a lot of words, but they said exactly what was going on: to dance and sweat and cruise and go home and carry on and how a person feels.” Dancing to music produced for the dance floor is an activity that describes its own conditions
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Conditions are permeable: “There are moments in which we are free. The question is, how do we stay free.” The bilna’es collective describes sound drifting over a checkpoint: a love song becomes a sound of resistance, then turns back into a love song
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On occasion you are the same size as yourself
Tilting the floor up until you slip into the present
Into the quality of linear sameness, the introduction of the prance, the near-smile
The woman one row ahead checks her phone every eight minutes
In the audience, I am thinking of what the audience will say, and so
I participate in the future public tense
In loops the world apart from this continues elsewhere
Outside, my friends will savor their complaints
and I am an ignoramus who loves everything (Bless)