moving/elaborating/hypnotizing/ lying/dazzling, anything to create a hook back into before. There was no hook. I wept. Finally. I stayed with myself. It was also around that time that arts funding had finally begun shifting more explicitly in its priorities (thank god!). Our committed and strategic program- ming of underrepresented artists, our barrage of live and written discourse engaging the inequi- ties of the field, and our bold and direct challenges to funders was all taking shape, and accordingly, many of the white male mak- ers like me were staring down a different kind of horizon. As the good news rolled out, I knew that I wasn’t going to try to con- tort myself or my work in order to outrun anything. Instead, I let myself feel the shudder of change, and then basked in the justice of the moment. It was strange and it was right, and it meant that something different was coming for all of us. The next two+ years were foggy. I stopped trying to get my work funded, worked in arts advocacy and administra- tion, danced a bit for/with my friend Sara (Shelton Mann), got divorced, and tried to make sense of how the arrival of a ter- rifying virus was somehow col- laboratting with the sociolog- ical dumpster fire of the internet to reprogram all our nervous systems forever. Also, I was still a dancer and a freak: I made swoopy and crea- ture-ish choregraphies in my live- work studio and wrote long unhinged monologues about the personalities of various shades of purple. I pinballed through days like I always had: sensi- tive and responsive to distance, prox- imity, shapes, color, and emotion, all stretched over the sacred geometry of the world around me. I was the same artist, but without an apparatus to prove it to anybody.
on certain days of the week. I got still, and stood there in my limited body : me as subject, as symbol, as politic, as story, as citizen. Up until that moment in the forum, I had worked for most of my life to make my thoughts and feelings into live art. I had shaped nearly every aspect of myself into someone – some thing !? – who was thrillingly and precisely convinced that my work knew what the world needed. And then, my tiny body standing inside that huge room, trying again to connect everything to everything, just stopped being so necessary. I had come to some kind of end. I tried to imagine myself
In the fall of 2017, I was making a choreographic work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It would turn out to be my last for a while. I remember that I was in rehearsal one day, intently whirl- ing around the YBCA forum, brain and muscles workingworkingworking. And then I stopped. Some limit of my body , previously sensed but averted, had finally elbowed its way in, all the way, past everything. This limit wasn’t so much about my physical strength or mobility, but instead, something ecological and of the whole self. It put a new skin on me; one that I had been privately trying on and taking off as of late, but that was becoming too good a fit to only wear
I wondered what it could mean to be quietly happy and helpful, to not peddle or sell or convince, but instead to just serve.
There was a day in 2020, during “lockdown,” that I was walking up Bernal Hill. I perceived myself to have very little life to stand in, aside from the guiding light of my twinkling “sen- sitivities.” I had no real home (I had moved out of the apartment that I shared with my ex-husband and was cat-sitting in exchange for an apart- ment in the Castro), no real job (my gig doing events and fundraising for CounterPulse came to an organic end), and I was still wandering through the residue of my shift away from making dance and art in a public way.
As I walked, I asked myself what I still had. The answer was quick. I had my practice. I had scores and desires and frameworks and rivers for making something useful out of the experience of being with people . I wondered about this thing that I had always been doing, and what form it could take. I wondered what it could mean to be quietly happy and helpful, to not peddle or sell or convince, but instead to just serve. I wondered about money and time and death and fear and art and grief and ease. I imagined ease.
Larry Arrington and Jesse Hewit at YBCA
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16 in dance WINTER 2025
WINTER 2025 in dance 17
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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