Published by Dancers' Group, In Dance is discourse and dialogue to unify, strengthen, and amplify.
in dance FALL 2024 DISCOURSE + DIALOGUE TO UNIFY, STRENGTHEN + AMPLIFY
P.12 First We Laughed, Now We Act
P.16 The Approximation of Resilience
P.42 To Squat or Not To Squat
CONTENTS
WELCOME by MAURYA KERR , Guest Editor
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curation n. a curing of disease, restoration to health, a taking care, attention.
I am grateful to Dancers’ Group for the op- portunity to guest edit this fall 2024 edition of In Dance ; itfeels like a beautiful convergence of many facets of my life that I love: curat- ing, writing, and editing. As guest editor, I of course worked with and edited the articles of the writers you are about to read, but more importantly, I curated the voices I wanted to hear more from, voices I feel we, as a commu- nity, need to listen to. Just as I consider my
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work as ODC Theater’s Resident Curator to be political, I consider it a political act (and a privilege) to gather these twelve writers, together, at this time. I am, and always will be, committed to centering and normalizing racially minoritized voices, to offer them care and attention in an effort to restore ALL of us. The alternative high school I attended in Seattle allowed me a lot of agency in my education; when I proposed that I not read or study any literature from the white male canon, my teachers agreed. While I’m sure those writings have value, as a fifteen-year- old black girl, I felt I needed to take that stance to protect my imagination, my hope for what could be. I knew, even then, that I’d experienced more than enough white supremacist patriarchy. And here we are today. Will this curated assemblage ‘cure’ anyone or anything? Probably not, but it is one of the ways I know to protest, one of my praxes of resistance. To all the writers who contributed, thank you—for your vulnerability, your trust, the work you are doing in the world. Sarah Chou and Stella Jacobs share about the ongoing racism they experienced during their dance training; Alex Ketley on his important work with Bill Clark (currently incarcerated on San Quentin’s Death Row); Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, a brilliant activ- ist (who was formerly incarcerated), on the horrors of another Trump presidency and the concomitant necessity of, in our two-party reality, voting for Harris; Sima Belmar and Leila Mire on the cruciality of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) move- ment and backlash to Mire’s activism; Randee Paufve on her latest work, Sisters , driven in part by a great aunt without access to safe abortion—women dying just because they’re women; Shruti Abhishek on her upcoming premiere and dance-diverse expe- rience in Pauvfe’s process; Gregory King on the detriment wrought by racist, culturally ignorant dance critics; Eric Garcia & Kat Gorospe Cole, co-directors of Detour Produc- tions, on their shift to immersive theater; and Lisa Giannone (who has helped me rehab all of my injuries/surgeries for the last 18+ years) on how to keep our bodies strong. Oppressive entities count on our overwhelm and apathy. Please don’t relent— VOTE. Believe in ‘the what could be.’ Boycott companies profiting from the genocides in Palestine, and Congo, Sudan, Haiti… Let’s get ready.
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32/ Embracing the Journey: Trust, Tradition, and Transformati on in Dance by Shruti Abhishek 34/ The Double Bind: Blackness in Dance and the Biases of Criticism by Gregory King 38/ A Prism with Endless Endings by Eric Garcia and Kat Gorospe Cole 42/ To Squat or Not To Squat by Lisa Giannone
12 /First We Laughed, Now We Act
Dancers’ Group gratefully acknowledges the support of Bernard Osher Foundation, California Arts Council, Fleishhacker Foundation, Grants for the Arts, JB Berland Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Koret Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and generous individuals.
by Stella Jacobs and Sarah Chou
DANCERS’ GROUP Artist Administrator Wayne Hazzard General Manager Kat Koenemann Community Resource Manager Shellie Jew Administrative Assistant
16 / An Approximation of Resilience by Alex Ketley 20 / The 2024 Election and Artistic Freedom by Emile Suotonye DeWeaver 24 / Dance and Soft Power
A Conversation Between Leila Mire and Sima Belmar
Danielle Vigil
Program Assistant Abigail Hinson Bookkeeper Michele Simon Design Sharon Anderson
28/ Sistercraft
by Randee Paufve
Offering all of us a taking care, of ourselves and our communities, near and far. —Maurya
Cover photo by Stephen Texeira
Photo by Warren Franklin
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Improving every part of your daily work: • Fundraising • Marketing • Training • Teaching Solutions start at $950 Learn more at chromadiverse.org
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EVOLUTION OF MOVEMENT
D E A R
Stanford Live’s 2024-25 season thematically explores the evolution of movement delving into the relationship between music, dance, and technology. Tickets available at live.stanford.edu
Residencies for Northern California Early to Mid-Career Time-Based Artists theater | performance ■ dance | movement music | sound art | instrument invention collaboration | interdisciplinary work
Yang Liping & Peacock Contemporary Dance Rite of Spring Fri–Sun, Dec 6–8 Memorial Auditorium Chinese dance legend Yang Liping brings her stunning reimagining of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to Stanford Live in its U.S premiere. The production creates a distinctive universe where time, space, and life coexist in endless reincarnation.
Conrad Tao & Caleb Teicher Counterpoint Wed, Apr 9 at 7:30 PM Bing Concert Hall
In this collaboration choreographer and tap dancer Caleb Teicher’s dazzling steps are matched to diverse music played by composer and pianist Conrad Tao including Bach, Gershwin, Tatum, an ironic take on the Viennese waltz, and more.
Applications for 2025/26 Residencies Deadline ■ November 15, 2024 (11:59 PM) DRESHERENSEMBLE.ORG/DEAR RSVP FOR ONE OF OUR INFO SESSIONS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DEAR PROGRAM DRESHERENSEMBLE.ORG/DEAR-INFO-SESSION-RSVP TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024 ■ 7 PM ■ ZOOM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2024 ■ 11 AM ■ IN-PERSON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2024 ■ 7 PM ■ ZOOM
DEAR awards 6 residencies annually to emerging and early mid-career individual artists or to groups of emerging and early mid-career artists collaborating on a single project. Each Residency Provides
AXIS Dance Company and Dr. Catie Cuan Robotics Showcase Wed, May 21 at 7:30 PM Bing Concert Hall
New Century Chamber Orchestra DANCE! Sun, May 4 at 2:30 PM Bing Concert Hall
Full-time access ( 24/7 ) of 1 to 4 weeks to rehearsal studio (40’ x 42” sprung dance floor with Marley floor covering with 20’ ceilings and two 9-foot concert grand pianos) and fabrication shop. Residency weeks may be contiguous or spread out over a period of months. Access to state of the art equipment (sound, lighting, projection, and recording) A production stipend (currently up to $1500) Technical, financial, marketing, and managerial consultations Fiscal sponsorship (if needed) Performance opportunities (50% of Box Office)
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AXIS Dance Company, an acclaimed ensemble of disabled and nondisabled performers, and Dr. Catie Cuan, a choreographer and roboticist, intertwine human creativity with mechanical precision, not only transforming the artistic landscape but also influencing the world of disability.
Together with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Hope takes listeners on a journey through centuries of music history and explores the rhythms that have set bodies in motion and lifted hearts since time began. The performance will feature works by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Handel, and more.
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While we get this comment a lot, and it’s an inside joke that we get to use, we couldn’t be more differ- ent. We are both Chinese-American, but the similar- ities stop there. Sarah stands at 5’5” with jet-black, straight, sleek hair and an aversion to floorwork. Stella is inches shorter, has wavy hair, a darker com- plexion, and moves completely opposite of Sarah, but somehow we are interchangeable and seen as carbon copies of each other. While we laugh at the fact that we feel obligated to provide descriptions of ourselves and shouldn’t need to explain who we are or what we look like, it proves the point that this common phrase isn’t a surface-level comment that should be brushed aside. “Wow, you two look so similar!”
FIRST WE LAUGHED, NOW WE ACT
BY STELLA JACOBS AND SARAH CHOU
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ness and attention than necessary, trying so hard to convince us that he changed. We didn’t ask for special treatment; we wanted the respect that every white person inherently is given. The offending party’s resistance is often met with feelings of guilt in those on the receiving end of the harm. We each respectively wondered, “Is this my fault in any way? Is it because our names really are so simi- lar?” In the minutes that followed the incident, there was a constant ques- tioning of if we cared too much, if our
“It’s just so hard for me” is com- monly said by a person who mixes up people of color’s names with indifference. The automatic defen- siveness and shifting of blame away from themselves, and in turn towards the individual(s) incor- rectly addressed, is of course remi- niscent of reactions towards point- ing out a racially charged (even if done unconsciously) comment: “I’m not racist; how could you say that I am?” Centering their own feelings in the aftermath of name-swapping reveals an inabil- ity to take personal responsibility. And what happens when the indi- vidual is at the front of the room, exploiting their position of power, affecting your ability to learn or even book a job? How does one approach conversations with igno- rant people without sounding com- bative? How do we stand up for ourselves in spaces where we don’t feel safe to question anyone? It’s common to make a mis- take, especially when first meet- ing someone. The issue is how long we have known the various people who can’t seem to view us as individuals. When the two of us trained together, teachers who had us for an entire year on Zoom (with access to our names on their screens!) swapped or used one name for both of us. This bled into the second year of our train- ing in person, still being mistaken as one despite knowing us for a year, particularly with one teacher who consistently failed to call us by our correct names. In one instance, after mixing our names up yet again, he kicked us, the only two Asian people in the studio, out. Our presence in the rehearsal was mentally “too much” for him. To quickly cover his tracks, he proceeded to randomly make others leave the room. While we were both still in shock, our peers brought this up to our school direc- tor, who forced him to apologize.
there are few, if any, spaces that offer dancers of color a true sense of belong- ing. The reality, in 2024, of being one of the few and sometimes the only dancer of Asian descent in the room only validates the fact that there is lit- tle to no investment in DEI “efforts” to make these traditionally white spaces available and welcoming to everyone. There are a lot of promises, but prom- ises at this point mean nothing; if any- thing they’re just lazy words masquer- ading as actual efforts toward change. The work around antiracism needs to be action-oriented and not static, and the experiences of people of color need to be heard and believed; we must be open to honest conversations. SARAH CHOU is originally from San Diego, CA, and received her early training at Southern California Ballet and Danceology. She is a graduate of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program, under the direction of Karah Abiog. She has performed works by Edward Clug, Laura O’Malley, Yue Yin, Helen Pickett, Gregory Dawson, David Harvey, and Chuck Wilt, among others. She has danced with ODC/Dance Company and is currently in her third season with SFDanceworks. Sarah graduated Cum Laude from Wellesley College in 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in Econom- ics. Her most recent choreographic work, there’s a chance we may change , was commissioned by Harvard Ballet Company in 2023. In addition to her performance career, Sarah brings her passion for creativity, change, and equity as part of the Finance team at Intersection for the Arts. STELLA JACOBS (she/her), originally from Boston, has danced with a variety of companies as a free- lance artist in NYC, including The Moving Forward Collective by Madi Hicks, Obremski/Works under Jesse Obremski, Liony Garcia, Rachael Lieblein-Jur- bala, and kNoname Artist–Roderick George. While in NYC, Stella trained with GibneyPRO, where she worked with Peter Chu, Ana Maria Lucaciu, Laja Field, Adam Barruch, Lea Ved, and Sidra Bell. She performed for two seasons with SFDanceworks in San Francisco, under Dana Genshaft, and with Gregory Dawson’s DawsonDanceSF. While training at The Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program, she worked with David Harvey, Alex Ketley, Chuck Wilt, and others, then apprenticed for BODYTRAF- FIC in Los Angeles. Stella is thrilled to be a company member with Whim W’Him Seattle Contemporary Dance for their 2024/25 season. Maurya encourages you to also read Leslie Cuyjet and Angie Pittman are not the same dancer.
solo shot from a recent event, only to discover that it’s a photo of our Asian colleague. At what point do we get to stop checking to ensure the correct person is tagged, and why does the mistake keep happen- ing? Or when, after a performance, someone tells either of us how great we were in a certain piece, one we just so happened to not be in at all, all we can do is laugh because it happens all too often. But behind the laughter are of course deeper feelings of anger and frustration.
WE KNOW THAT IN ANY DANCE SPACE WE WILL BE COMPARED TO ANY OTHER ASIAN PRESENT; THE BOX OF RACIAL INCLUSION IS ALREADY LAID OUT FOR US TO SHARE, AND THE BOX IS TINY.
expectations that he call us by our names were misplaced, and what we could do to rectify the situation. In the days that followed, and even per- haps now, residual feelings of whether or not we overreacted piled on. We didn’t immediately bring this issue of name-swapping up to our director until this specific incident and only did after, in large part, because of internal- ized and sensitive feelings regarding our own racial identities. Decades of feeling like you have changed yourself to fit the mold that is expected of you doesn’t evaporate as soon as you learn what a microaggression is. The fear of being perceived as “the same as” underscores nearly all of our experiences, even if the percep- tion isn’t expressed verbally. We know that in any dance space we will be compared to any other Asian present; the box of racial inclusion is already laid out for us to share, and the box is tiny. It manifests itself at auditions, where the thought of quotas is always a constant, wondering if, by luck and chance, there will be a spot for both of us. This fear is justified when one of us opens Instagram and sees that we are tagged in a photo, such as a
Dancers of color should not have to think about how to differentiate themselves from others in order to be seen as individuals. These experiences allow one, too often not by choice, to be intro- spective on previous experiences in dance spaces: at a young age, Stella was told she wasn’t able to wear false eyelashes during performances because her eyes were “too small.” She was also described as seduc- tive and exotic— when she was fourteen. There was a time when Sarah was told that she and three other Asian dancers of smaller stat- ure were clones of each other; nick- names such as “China” or “geisha” are very real (and lacking in creativ- ity one might add). And it’s hard to forget that someone assumed Sarah was stretched at a young age to be more flexible because “that’s what the Asians do.” All of these childhood examples that were skimmed over at the time are deeply ingrained in us, and the thought of them still leaves an unpleasant taste in our mouths. In an industry that actively benefits from white supremacy and intention- ally upholds racist structural barriers,
Sarah Chou & Stella Jacobs
Instead of taking responsibility, he asked us why it was important to call us by our correct names and said that he did not see it as a plau- sible concern. He lacked any type of understanding of the larger racial and historical issues involved, heav-
ily played his white male victim card, and blamed what happened on his difficulty in remembering names. What we asked of him was simple: to correct his mistake and move on. Instead, in the studio, he overcompensated with more kind-
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An Approximation of Resilience
BY ALEX KETLEY
Anne Huang
Ja’Moon Jones in An Approximation of Resilience
DURING THE YEARS I spent caring for my dying father, I was struck that if he had not had my family he would have been alone in this final transition. From that awareness I became a hospice volunteer and was about to embark on a performance project called Still Witness , which had the intention of exploring our country’s com- plicated relationship with dying. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, our planet was struck by a global pandemic and I found myself quarantined at home. I still felt the need to work, and this concern around people’s loneliness was still
deeply in me. I have also long been concerned about our carceral system, so taking those two together, in the mid- dle of the night I went on the website Write-A-Prisoner and began looking through the profiles. I came across the pro- file of Bill Clark, an artist and death row inmate who con- veyed that his writing practice was the salvation from what he described as a soul-crushing loneliness. For the individu- als on death row at San Quentin, they are only allowed out of their 4-foot by 9-foot cells for 12 hours a week. I awk- wardly wrote a one-page letter to Bill saying hello, and two
weeks later received a beautiful eight-page handwritten let- ter in response. That began a friendship that has been one of the most impacting of my life, and a collaborative rela- tionship that has changed me immeasurably. For dance to feel necessary, I need to place my body in direct relationship with the communities I am concerned about. My friendship with Bill has given me a window into incarceration no amount of reading could compare with. At San Quentin, Bill and I met weekly in what can only be described as a glorified dog kennel. We were both
locked in a tiny cage for three hours while being circled by guards. San Quentin is also like a medieval castle set against the most beautiful views of the San Francisco Bay, views that the inmates can’t see because the win- dows have never been cleaned so nearly no light shines through them. Bill has not seen moonlight in the span of his 33 years of incarceration. He also shared that if you care about an article of personal clothing you wash it in your toilet, otherwise it will be stolen by the general population’s laundry service. And despite how horrific
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we know about something becomes more complicated. We think of prisons as terrible places, and they absolutely are, but I have also seen staggering expressions of love within those walls: children visiting with their fathers, inmates having brief moments to say hello to each other through the bars, or Bill’s 25+ year friendship with fel- low inmate and artist Steve Champion. Inequity is statistically rife within our judicial system, and, by extension, as members of society, we each play a part in how the machinations of soci- ety function. Many people blind them- selves to our inmate population, but this project uses performance as the vehicle to stir an audience’s conscience and make it clear and visible that inmates are truly part of our commu- nity family. Things can change when a society cares about all its people, incarcerated or not. Apathy only per- petuates injustice. As Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said, “I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice is how we treat the poor, the disfa- vored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We are all impli- cated when we allow other people to be mistreated.” Our stages are an ideal way to challenge misconceptions, and with Resilience I hope to play a part in bringing a broader awareness to an individual I have come to care very deeply about, and who I believe has transformative knowledge to share. ALEX KETLEY is a choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry. He has re- ceived acknowledgment from the Hubbard Street National Choreographic Competition, the Choo-San Goh Award, the Princess Grace Award for Choreography, four MANCC Residencies, the Eben Demarest Award, the National Chore- ographic Initiative Residency, a Kenneth Rainin Foundation New and Experimental Works Grant, and the Artistry Award from the Superfest Dis- ability Film Festival. His pieces have also been awarded Isadora Duncan Awards for outstanding achievement in the categories of Choreography, Company, & Ensemble. In 2020 he became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and in 2025 he received a Nation- al Dance Project Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Bill Clark and Alex Ketley at San Quentin
death row is, Bill is one of the most beautifully optimistic people I have ever met. He tells me often that this is intentional: to survive in one of the darkest situations anyone could ever be placed in, you have to become a vibrant generator of your own light. He is deeply aware how awful his
dancers, filmmakers, musicians, writ- ers, animators, directors, and actors, we had a weekly two-hour conver- sation with Bill. All the students, except for one, had never been directly affected by our carceral system, so the class profoundly influenced their thinking around incarceration and
AT SAN QUENTIN, BILL AND I MET WEEKLY IN WHAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS A GLORIFIED DOG KENNEL.
circumstance is but is radiant as an act of defiance to a country that has deemed his body not even worthy of being lived. It is an example that beauty exists everywhere, even in the forgotten depths of prison. I feel like societal change is possible when unlikely communities collide. On the surface, Bill and I are certainly unlikely friends, but we have met in a space that feels pretty pure: our shared love of artistic practice. I wanted to expose others to this vibrant space, so I invited Bill to be my guest in a Stan- ford University class called DanceA- cution: Performance Practice, Death Row, and the Evolution of Cultural Reform. In a room filled with student
their own individual art-making pro- cess. To metaphorically stand with one foot at Stanford and one foot at San Quentin is the kind of collision I find so ripe with the possibility of real change in terms of how communi- ties view each other. The students and Bill bonded deeply with one another, and the final projects felt important because the content underlying the class was so clearly consequential. Bill and I are now embarking on a new evening-length project called An Approximation of Resilience , which is set to premiere in the spring of 2025 and then tour throughout the country. What interests me in this piece is the interstitial space where what we think
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stands the urgent need to break the two-party monopoly on U.S. politics, and the common thread in the third camp has become a popular meme on social media: “Burn it all down.” I’m a formerly incarcerated, Black progressive leftist. I’m also an artist, and I believe the progressive left can stave off a conservative dictatorship if we incorporate a lesson from the creative arts. When I write a book or a short story, I have a vision that will ultimately become a product for an audience, but I don’t focus directly on producing the end goal. I focus on perfecting a process that will pro- duce the end goal. Process for writers is outline, characterization, sentence transitions; it’s dialogue, scene devel- opment, and revision. Perfect these moving parts, and together they’ll churn out your masterpiece. People voting independent this year don’t seem to acknowledge that they’ve yet to refine a process that can produce a third party – that takes time that we don’t have between now and November. Everyone is tired of hearing that change takes time, including me, but we have to take accountability for what we haven’t been doing with our time over the past ten years. We haven’t prioritized instituting the rank-choice voting we’d likely need to establish a third party over our respective pet proj- ects (prison and immigration reform, climate change, poverty, education). We haven’t prioritized mobilizing millennials and gen-z to vote in mid- term elections so we can replace cen- trist senators with progressive ones. According to the Center for Informa- tion and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 87 percent of youth
eligible to vote in the 2022 mid-term elections didn’t. People who won’t vote because it’s time to “burn it down” are so focused on the possibilities they hope will arise once our current white supremacist system collapses – they don’t realize that we have been successfully burning this system down for decades. Burning down is a process, and though our current processes have deep inefficiencies, they have produced voting rights for women and people of color, LGBTQ+ rights, prison reform, housing rights, and workers’ rights. Yes, conservatives are rolling back these rights at a terrifying speed, but their current ferocity is a reaction to our successes. In Project 2025—a 900-page plan for the next conservative president to transform the U.S. into a de facto one-party, white nationalist state— conservatives argue that they must rescue their children (from trans people), reclaim American culture (read “reclaim white male domi- nance”), and defeat the anti-Amer- ican left. Their reference point for the crisis they’re experiencing today is the 1970s. What was happen- ing around the 70s? Political power was shifting in the country because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimina- tion in voting. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 gave women the right to sue employers for pay discrimination. The Equal Employment Oppor- tunity Act of 1972 gave people of color the right to sue employers for discrimination. The Black Panthers and other anti-racist groups rose in prominence. Although these events
Project 2025 closes the door for artists to make a living if they create any content that doesn’t perpetuate white cultural hegemony.
PHOTO BY HECTOR ZAVALA I ’ve been listening to the change, and people who don’t believe voting matters because it’s impossible to get justice in the current two-party system. The common thread in the first camp is that although the Dem- ocratic party may fail to bring mean- ingful change, it’s possible to organize communities around progressive poli- cies with the Democrats. It’ll be almost impossible to organize for anything but more white nationalist power if Trump becomes the first overt dictator of the United States. The second camp under- discourse around the 2024 Presidential Election. Three camps emerge on the left: people voting for Kamala Harris to avoid a Trump Dictatorship, people voting independent because they’ve lost faith in the Demo- cratic party’s willingness to support meaningful social
didn’t transform our white suprem- acist country into a beacon of equality, they did represent struc- tural and cultural change. Conservatives in the 70s responded with a Mandate for Leadership, a 3,000-page plan for the next conservative president, Ronald Reagan, to unify the right and “rescue” white America from equal rights. According to one author of Project 2025, 60 percent of the Mandate for Leadership’s recommendations became policies in a year. The Heritage Founda- tion wrote Mandate for Leadership; they also produced Project 2025. The progressive left talk on the news and in podcasts about the rights they fear we’ll lose or the vio- lence the U.S. will commit against immigrants or the climate crisis Trump will exacerbate. I wish more people talked about the processes Project 2025 will create to achieve these outcomes. Trump will issue executive orders that enable him
THE 2024 ELECTION & ARTISTIC FREEDOM
BY EMILE SUOTONYE DEWEAVER PHOTO BY GORDON ALLEN
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According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 87 PERCENT of youth eligible to vote in the 2022 mid-term elections DIDN’T.
to fire all federal employees and fill their empty positions with MAGA supporters trained by the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Adminis- tration Academy. He will do an end- run around Senate confirmations for his political appointees by appointing acting heads of federal agencies like the Department of Justice, who will remain in office long enough for him to execute Project 2025. In my upcoming book, Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine , I talk about white cultural hegemony, the process by which rulers take control of culture, producing institutions like schools, media, and churches in order to control the ideologies of popula- tions. As a result of this hegemony, I grew up believing lies like “healthy families must be nuclear, heteronor- mative families.” Today, after decades dismantling white supremacist ideol- ogies, we know that healthy families exist in multiple configurations; that budding wisdom in our country rep- resents a rupture of white cultural hegemony, as do DEI efforts. The goal of Project 2025 is to “repair” those growing ruptures, and the one- party white nationalist state it will create will suffocate artistic practice. Project 2025 takes control of school’s accreditation processes to control what artists can learn and debate. It puts federal grant-mak- ing directly in Trump’s hands and weaponizes the government’s power to give or revoke non-profit sta- tus to control artists’ fund- ing streams. It regulates media to control what artists can publish and frames social justice issues as a national security threat that the Department of Justice can criminal- ize. Project 2025 closes the door for artists to make a living if they create any content that doesn’t perpetuate white cultural hegemony. And it can get much worse. Trump will also immunize law enforcement from prosecution and expand the Secret Service’s law enforcement powers from the White House to
all of Washington, D.C. Imagine the Republican House introduces legisla- tion that criminalizes activism, orga- nizations, and any community that doesn’t align with Trump’s vision for white America. On the morning of voting day, Trump sends the Secret Service to arrest half of the dissent- ing House representatives. When a person, even a congressperson, is arrested, there’s nothing they can do about it in the moment. They can be held without being charged with a crime for days, long enough for a Republican House to establish a quo- rum and vote through the legislation. The Supreme Court granted presi- dents immunity from prosecution, so Trump could rinse and repeat the same process when it comes time for the Senate to vote. This machine, these processes, will transform the U.S. into a super- charged white nationalist state with exponentially more power to destroy opposition to white hegemony. These are the stakes of the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t support the Dem- ocratic Party, and I despise Kamala Harris’ centrist politics. But I am vot- ing for Harris, not because the Demo- cratic Party is going to hand us justice but because I’m an artist. I under- stand that we need more time to per- fect the processes that will produce our end goal of justice for people of color, for LGBTQ+ people, for Pales- tinian people, for us all. EMILE SUOTONYE DEWEAVER is a formerly incarcerated activist, widely published essayist, owner of Re: Frame LLC, and a 2022 Soros Jus- tice Fellow. California’s Governor Brown com- muted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He has written for publications including the San Francisco Chron- icle, San Jose Mercury News, Colorlines, The Appeal, The Rumpus, and Seventh Wave . He lives in Oakland, California. DeWeaver’s debut book, Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolition- ist Future , is forthcoming with New Press in May 2025 and is available for pre-order at bookshop.org. You can find his monthly essays on Substack’s re:frame reads and his upcom- ing content on the elections on TikTok at @ emiledeweaver
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Leila: I attribute that to a couple of things. One is that the broader com- munity wants to see modern dance as something that’s “free.” Acknowl- edging how racism is foundational to modern dance—that it has been orien- talist and complicit in US exceptional- ism and state-building projects, as well as appropriative of Black and Indigenous dances—gets in the way of that logic. SIMA: I’d love people to understand the difference between facing appro- priating practices inside modern dance and appreciating how those practices can feel individually liberating. Dance writer Wendy Perron mentioned this in her Instagram comment on the clip of your speech. She wrote, “[W]hat I objected to in Leila’s lecture is that she seems to ignore the experience of Gra- ham technique and Gaga as art prac- tice and look at them ONLY as pawns in colonialism/imperialism. It’s possibly [sic] to be aware of both functions.” Leila: Does it help that I took Graham from age 6-18? Sima: Right. In my mind, there’s no rea- son we can’t face problematic histories within dance forms while also acknowl- edging and embracing the liberatory potential within an individual’s particu- lar dance experience. Leila: Plus, it’s a distraction from what’s important. This is a genocide. Dance was used to normalize Israel. And now it’s used to erase what Israel is doing.
Just days after October 7th, 2023, Leila Mire, a PhD student in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, delivered a talk on Zionism in mod- ern dance for Sima Belmar’s “Dance in American Cultures” class. After a brief clip was posted online, it went viral, sparking both enthusiastic support and harsh criticism. Now, nearly ten months into the genocide, Sima and Leila have come together to reflect on that conversation. In doing so, they explore the dance community’s aversion to the boy- cott of dance artists, analyzing what this reluctance says about how dance is depoliticized and exceptionalized in the context of Palestine.
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN LEILA MIRE AND SIMA BELMAR POWER DANCE AND SOFT
Sima Belmar: Looking back, I’m astonished you gave your talk mere days after October 7. Leila Mire: I was nervous about that. I thought you were going to ask me to censor it, but instead, you were like, “What kind of slides are we working with?” And I was like, oh… this is a tech question. Sima: It didn’t occur to me that giving that talk could be risky. Perhaps you can explain what your argument was about? Leila: I walked through how Israel and the United States use dance as a soft power. I looked at the history of modern dance in relation to Isra- el’s conception and normalization. I also examined case studies of Israeli dances and choreographers, address- ing the appropriation of Palestinian dance. I concluded by explaining BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) and how it might be applied in a dance context. Sima: After your talk was posted it was accused of misinformation, usually by folks who only heard a 30-second snippet on Instagram. Leila: Yeah, I’ve gotten used to that. Strangers presume I don’t know what
I’m talking about, as if this isn’t the culmination of my work and expe- riences. They also don’t know how thorough I am. I screenshot everything before facts are erased. I’m a junior scholar, and I make $34,000 a year, yet famous choreographers and senior scholars can’t wait to drag my name through the mud, claiming that I do this out of personal vendettas or for career mobility. I don’t care to engage with that narcissism. I have already lost multiple jobs because of my sup- port for Palestine. That’s not why I do this. I do this because it’s what’s right and because if I love dance, it’s my responsibility to criticize it. Sima: Well, certainly there is tre- mendous resistance to critiquing Israeli dance or choreographers like Ohad Naharin (and Batsheva), not only from Zionists (Jewish or other- wise) who equate anti-Israel rhet- oric with antisemitism, but also from dance folks across the US who feel like dance, especially modern dance, should never be criticized at all because of its perceived second class citizenship among the arts and its very real lack of funding here. So, many are loath to call out bad Israeli actors for fear of being perceived as antisemitic, or “bad choreographies” for fear of kicking an art form when it’s down.
Sima: Say more about soft power.
Leila: Soft power is around us all the time. The Cold War is just where the term became popularized. In the Cold War, modern dance’s supposed democ- racy and freedom were meant to jux- tapose the USSR’s ballet, which the US painted as being stiff, menacing, and oppressive. Dance became the arena for a geopolitical pissing contest.
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modern/contemporary dance compa- nies. Like if Wim Vandekeybus’ Ultima Vez comes to the US, I don’t receive them as Belgian. Or Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas, I don’t receive them as Dutch because of the way modern dance operates transnation- ally with a rhetoric of universality, eluding national attachments when it tours. I think Batsheva is received that way. Its attachments to the state of Israel are invisibilized. Those outraged by the idea of boycotting Batsheva in the US want the company both to be Israeli and universal, both associated with the state and apolitical. Leila: And that’s tied to privilege and relation to Empire. Universality still falls under “First World” or “Third World” baggage as affiliated polit- ical projects. If a company is from Cuba, it’s Cuban. If it’s from Rus- sia (or another country we’re afraid of), it’s tied to national origin. Other times it’s tokenized to advance state interests (e.g. Shen Yun criticizing China or Ukrainian allyship with the US). Modern dance is ideal because you can argue both subjectivity and abstraction. It can mean nothing and everything so the state can use it. Sima: Yeah, a lot of the anti-BDS rhetoric centers on the individual artist and how unjust it is that they should suffer just because their state is committing war crimes. Even hearing myself say that, it’s bonkers. However, this response sug- gests a complete misunderstanding of what BDS is. This is about oppos- ing state-sponsored violence, an illegal occupation—ask the Inter- national Court of Justice. So even though Batsheva and Naharin become collateral damage, it’s not personal. Plus, it’s minor in compari- son to what’s happening in Palestine. I can’t help but feel that the anti-BDS folks are spitting in the face of actual material suffering of Jews, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, historically and today.
And, I’m certain this will be an unpopular opinion, but I’m not moved by arguments like, “Oh no, this artwork will never be seen!” As you said earlier, who knows how many of the children murdered by state violence would have become artists with amazing work to share? Leila: Exactly. Dance is resistance. It can be liberatory. But that doesn’t mean it always is. It can be co-opted, and it’s on us to maintain its integ- rity and to criticize it to ensure that it goes where we need it to. It isn’t devoid of politics. It is politics. We’re watching a genocide. As artists, we cannot fall under some naive assump- tion that the arts are above the real- ities of that or that seeing a dance piece is more important than the lives of Gazans. We have a responsi- bility to this movement. Disappoint- ment over missing a hypothetical new work shouldn’t be something we’re willing to think much less voice. These are lives we’re talking about. We need to get some perspective here. We must do everything in our power to reckon with our past and be criti- cal of our work. Dance is potent and it’s about time we act like it. SIMA BELMAR, PHD, is a Lecturer in the Depart- ment of Theater, Dance, & Performance Stud- ies at UC Berkeley. She has been a member of the Bay Area dance community since the early 1990s as a dance critic, columnist, podcaster, educator, choreographer, and dancer. From 2019-2022, Sima was writer-in-residence at ODC where she created and hosted the ODC pod- cast Dance Cast. Her writing has been featured in a variety of local, national, and international newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. She currently dances for Andrew Merrell’s Slack Dance and works as an editor and writing coach for students and artists. LEILA MIRE (she/her) is a researcher, perform- er, choreographer, community organizer, and educator. She is a current PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in the Theatre, Dance, Performance Studies Program and is an alumni of New York University and George Mason University. Her research looks at how dance is co-opted, appropriated, and performed for state and an- ti-imperial interests, particularly as it pertains to Palestine and its occupation.
Beyond combatting the threat of communism, dance was used for national state-building projects and normalization.
Sima: How does BDS subvert that imperial soft power?
Leila: In 2020, I wrote two pieces in Thinking Dance , where I touched on what we could do to progress BDS forward in dance. BDS has already named certain organizations and companies like Batsheva, and Ohad Naharin opposes BDS, saying it won’t accomplish anything. But BDS has proven quite successful. It’s a nonviolent method to cease interna- tional support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and to pressure Israel to comply with international law. The arts may not have the same profit margins as corporations, but its influence serves the state. But when I say that, people are offended. They think it’s suppressing the arts. They fear the work of great artists won’t be seen. But if they want to use that argument, they should think about all the Palestinians whose lives were prematurely stolen from them. They could have been artists, scholars, etc. An artist like Naharin is called a “genius.” But what conditions allowed him to get where he is? I’m at Berkeley, a school with some of the “best and brightest.” But as I sit through classes I have to wonder if we’re the best and brightest or if we’re just the ones given the chance, the ones willing to sit squarely in the confines of respectability politics. BDS simply says that we won’t sup- port artists who accept money from Israel. In response, people often say, ‘well, then, why don’t you boycott the US?’ But this argument doesn’t hold because the US doesn’t fund its arts like Israel does. The vast major- ity of us are not getting state money, and if we are, it’s usually symbolic. SIMA: It’s also interesting the way nationality does and doesn’t attach to
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SISTERCRAFT Craft is the breath of my work. I collaborate with dancers to generate and rigorously fine-tune move- ment vocabularies specific to each dance, drafting and redrafting, crafting and recrafting until there is nothing extra or unnecessary. BY RANDEE PAUFVE | PHOTOS BY STEPHEN TEXEIRA
My latest project, Sisters , is an anthol- ogy of dances regarding sisterhood, motherhood, pregnancy, birth, abor- tion, and death. Created in collabo- ration with eleven women who span borders of dance forms and life expe- riences, Sisters reclaims feminism as a celebration of the resilience and power of women, of femininity, of any gen- der expression; and as a progression toward freedom of choice, identity, and bodily autonomy.
I invite dancers from a variety of back- grounds to explore a different or fresh relationship to our respective formative genres, and to more deeply inhabit the forms we have in common. In this way, I think of craft as empowerment, as our work together is fundamentally co-cre- ative, supporting dancer agency, placing the burden of communication on move- ment, and imagining an audience that craves the sort of expression only dance can provide.
Maurya Kerr and Molly Levy in Sisters
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Working with these phrases as a base, we designed a spa- tial pattern taking Eli and Shruti downstage center, forg- ing a runway path toward the audience. Once they reach the audience, they split apart, circling back to where they started. Shruti and Eli dance this sequence in unison, meet- ing again and again upstage center to start a new pass. Dance critic Heather Desaulniers wrote that for her, this reflected an act of treading water; indeed, our intention was to reflect ideas about mothers holding it down, cool moms at the park making it look easy and lovely while barely containing the inner churn, the fears, frustrations, and craziness of early motherhood. I rarely use text in my work, but early in the process I began feeling strongly that we needed to hear from Shruti, who has an amazing voice but had never worked with spoken text in dance. Shruti went for it, and her first improvised monologue became the words we used in the dance— the ten-year struggle to obtain a visa for her mother, during which time Shruti gave birth, followed by a more than two-year delay before Shruti’s daughter met her grandmother for the first time. We later added text for Eli, who describes her son’s birth like a shopping list: five days in labor, three visits to the hospital, two shots of mor- phine, seven days in NICU. The choreography in this duet explores how bodies hold the fraught, often extreme spaces of early motherhood—a difficult birth and caring for an infant, the greatest love of your life and the greatest challenge—and for many, in a new country and home, without family support, and how birth changes women’s bodies and relationships with the world. As a choreographer and dancer in my sixties I have learned that I can only move in this body, in this moment, offering intimate presence as connection and valuing dance as critical to our survival. I come seeking the dance that needs to be made, asking who we are in this place together. To me dance is rooted in hope, the work of small transformations. This is not about me as a dance artist; this is about dance, about the work of our work, knowing ourselves better, evolving, so we can better relate to each other and to the world. Sisters premiered at ODC Theater as part of their State of Play series, August 2024. RANDEE PAUFVE, artistic director of Paufve Dance, is a 2019 Fulbright-Neh- ru Senior Scholar. She has been a featured artist on NPR’s “All Things Con- sidered” and was named one of San Francisco Magazine’s 2017 “100 Artists Putting the East Bay On The Map.” Randee received the 2015 Isadora Dun- can Dance Award for Outstanding Individual Performance and the inaugural Della Davidson Prize for Innovations in Dance-Theater. She was nominated for the Theatre Bay Area Choreography award for her work with San Francis- co’s Cutting Ball Theater and is a two-time recipient of the E.E. Ford Award for dance research. Randee has taught on the faculties of UC Davis, Reed College, Lewis & Clark College, University of San Francisco, Cal State East Bay, St. Mary’s College of California, Cal State Sacramento, Marin Academy, and, since 1993, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. paufvedance.org
Irene Hsi in Sisters
Shruti Abhishek and Elizabeth Zepeda in Sisters
folklórico /modern dancer Elizabeth (Eli) Zepeda. I’ve worked with Eli since she was a teenager, and I know Shruti from when we danced together in a 2019 duet cho- reographed by Nadhi Thekkek. Though we began by writ- ing about sisterly relationships, the conversation quickly turned to what was really on Shruti and Eli’s minds—their birth stories and early motherhood. I am not a mother, and while sometimes I feel sad about that, I’ve never felt evolved enough or secure enough to have a child. I’ve seen beautiful mothering, but also moth- erhood that looked grim. And the pain of childbirth; I’ve had endometriosis since I was a teen and know the excru- ciating pain of endometrial cysts bursting in my ova- ries. Pregnancy was recommended to thwart the endome- triosis, but I couldn’t accept the idea of pregnancy as a cure for anything. I didn’t feel I could make a dance reflecting something I’ve not experienced, but birth and motherhood kept sur- facing as the main thematic presences in the room, so I let go of my concerns and bowed to the dance, conscious of the challenge of honoring intimate stories that do not belong to me and translating them into choreography and performance without falling into a pit of literalism.
Shruti and Eli’s duet begins with all eleven women rush- ing toward the audience, a wild, space-eating phrase cre- ated in response to the question, “what is the movement of a pregnant woman’s water breaking?” In unison, the danc- ers hurtle forward while maintaining a tight cluster; they careen back and forth across the floor, as if on a ship in a storm. The sequence culminates abruptly with the dancers landing on one leg in a skydiving/flock of birds formation. They struggle, wobble and hop, reaching out to touch a nearby arm, foot, back, stilling themselves, finding bal- ance, and breathing together in community; Shruti and Eli emerge as a duo while the others melt away. Early on, Eli and Shruti expressed a desire to learn more about each other’s forms, so we devoted several rehearsals to their teaching each other Bharatanatyam and baile folk- lórico skills and steps. These sessions helped us expand on a repetitive sidestep devised in an earlier rehearsal, a foot pattern that speaks to dance traditions and human move- ment across the globe. We layered gestures—complicated, meticulous upper body phrases drawn from our stories of sisterhood/birth/motherhood—on top of the stepping pat- tern, working with a simple 4/4-time structure, no other sound but their light feet tapping time.
In the summer of 2022, as Roe v. Wade was overturned, my family learned that our ancestor Justine, who emi- grated from Sweden to Brooklyn in the mid-1800s, died at seventeen not, as we believed, of influenza, but of sepsis from a self-induced abortion. A series of newspaper arti- cles investigating her death revealed two things: one, that Justine, upon her deathbed, told her sister Johanna (our great-grandmother) the name of the father, and two, that Johanna vowed to carry this secret to her grave. Using Justine’s story as a base, the dancers and I began by writing and talking about our sororal relationships and the whisper networks of women. I COME SEEKING THE DANCE THAT NEEDS TO BE MADE, ASKING WHO WE ARE IN THIS PLACE TOGETHER.
by ZACKARY FORCUM | photos by ROBBIE SWEENY Sisters is composed of solos, duets, a trio and group sections all woven together into a cohesive perfor- mance. For this article I’ll focus on a duet created with Bharatanatyam dancer Shruti Abhishek and baile
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