Winter 2024 In Dance

Did I also mention that I am one of the most horrible bal- let dancers that has ever existed on the face of the planet? I remember being 26 years-old and a male ballet teacher stopping me in class and said, (while I was at a barre rou- tine), “ Child, you are so far b e h i n d the others … how do you EVER expect to dance professionally?!” Two very STRONG thoughts crossed my mind at the time. 1 . Who the fuck said I wanted to “dance profession- ally”?! I was taking ballet cause like, I don’t know, I just wanted to feel pretty. And also… 2 I thought to myself, “Am I about to like, traumatize these teenage ballet dancers when I beat this dude’s ass for talking CRAZY to me?” (I went to the dressing room and cried instead.) Now cut to present day, when I say “fat and old” I don’t mean these as apologetic statements. I just have to reckon with the fact that sometime during quarantine, my knees do a nosedive, and turning 40 changed the landscape of my body. THAT SAID, Le’on had said something to me that sparked so much courage: “You just simply have to come back to class and put the geometry of ballet back in your body.” THERE. THERE WAS THE THING I NEEDED TO HEAR. I can’t explain it, but all through my 20s and 30s the physical act of dancing ballet was something I could never quite “feel”—but after a long absence, when I’m at home just playing by myself, a tendu is something I can now finally intellectually and physically connect to my entire hip (it was something I feel like I spent years just muscling through), the subtle invisible line that ballet sets to poet- ically integrate into one’s body is DEFINITELY THERE. It’s like the years of language is finally catching up to me as my body system seems to go the other way. But I do think all those years of struggle with ballet did this thing: when I said “I took ballet to ‘feel pretty’” it was actually a prayer for my future self—that it taught me how to lift myself gracefully but more so, how to fall with grace. I think of two versions of this. The plan is to work with Le’on on a recreation of the original but sometime around next year a Brontez Purnell Dance Company version of “The Rite of Spring” to be set in Paris next October- near fashion week- with costuming by Collin Strata NYC. Now let me be clear here, I have NO CLUE what I’m doing. There even feels something kind of antagonistic about calling it “a ballet.” In all my movement work I have always worked in a deconstructionist mode of dance. When I started Brontez Purnell Dance Company with Sophia Wang in 2009 we were described as mixing “punk

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rock subversion with free jazz improvisation” – I say to you with great humility that my branding has always felt both blessing and curse to me, but I digress. I do think there comes a point, where for a dancer like myself, mounting “The Rite of Spring” is a gradua- tion, or a homecoming of sorts — like a Silver Anniver- sary of myself starting a journey with dance. I do, as I return to the barre, hold a kind of excitement. Remem- ber: I am from that crunchy granola school of Bay Area dance, that in the mission statement was always “dance is NOT about how you look, but about how you FEEL.” And for this dance what I FEEL like doing is privileging my love and unlearning of a form, the bad knees be damned. BRONTEZ PURNELL is an American writer, musician, dancer and director based out of Oakland, California. He is the author of several books, including Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017) and Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger (2015). He is the frontman for the punk band The Younger Lover and founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Purnell received the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for his latest novel 100 Boyfriends (2021). His upcoming poetry volume 10 Bridges I’ve Burned comes out on MCDxFSG in February.

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