SO MANY PEOPLE IN SO MANY COMMUNITIES LIVE AMIDST HARM, DAILY OPPRESSION, VIOLENCE, BUT WHAT GETS FORGED OUT OF THAT IS JOY, RESILIENCE, AWESOMENESS, SASS, BEAUTY.
AIDS epidemic, and then 500 hours editing it down to a sound score, all before the movement creation. My current process—I don’t know where it will end up. I look forward to get- ting back into the studio because grand-scale costumes had also been driving our movement creation. Now they’re in storage at Dance Mission, these huge gowns with 6-foot trains. SB: Thinking about Tim Curry’s deli- cious embodiment in Rocky Horror , how do we get people to understand the material sensations and plea- sures of embodiment as processes and practices that exist on a nonthreaten- ing continuum of embodiments? Are we getting closer to that? How can dance artists help audiences develop an awareness that their embodiments are these rich amazing things that are being limited by social norms? SD: As an artist and activist I’ve learned that the crucible, the trans- formation happens through personal, shared, felt experience. It’s a butts in seats thing, getting people in the the- ater, or into the conversation, or into the workshop, or into the online expe- rience. Whether we’re watching a dance film online, or watching dancers on stage, that experience, that witnessing gives us an embodied visceral experi- ence. It involves our breath, our heart, our muscles contracting in empathic reaction. There’s something magical about when the lights go down and your guard is dropped, your heart and mind are open in a different way. The magic and change happen there. Visit freshmeatproductions.org/ programs for information about the 20th anniversary offerings and about FMP’s collaborators on The Lost Art of Dreaming. SIMA BELMAR, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Depart- ment of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is ODC Writer in Residence and host of the new podcast Dance Cast. To keep up with Sima’s writing please subscribe to tinyletter.com/simabelmar.
resiliency of trans and gender-non- conforming people and artists. I love trans people and I love trans artists. When I’m in our workshop spaces, our audiences, our community forums, I’m so blissed out. There’s so much creativity and depth and shim- mery, sparkly creativity. That’s what drives us—our beauty and our gifts. So many people in so many commu- nities live amidst harm, daily oppres- sion, violence, but what gets forged out of that is joy, resilience, awesome- ness, sass, beauty. Part of the agoniz- ing frustration, anger, and sadness I feel is so much because all of these cisgender dance leaders and funders are totally missing out on all of this community’s incredible work, innova- tion, and beauty. SB: I called you a trans ambassa- dor, a moniker you accepted and that also frustrated you to some extent because of the way it erased your identity and work as an artist. SD: I’m so proud to be trans and love being an ambassador, but there is a profound level of exhaustion I’ve worked myself into. So much travel- ing and speaking and advocacy, and teaching and touring, prior to the pandemic, I’d totally worked myself into the ground. I will keep advo- cating and fighting for intersectional trans equity, but I also have to stop and find a balance for Sean the artist. When I think back to 20 years ago and how I brought some folks together to put on this “one-time” Fresh Meat Festival, it was about the fact that at that time almost nobody was putting trans artists on stages with high production values, and nobody was paying us for our art. Probably for the next 8-10 years, if I had press interviews as Sean Dorsey and Sean Dorsey Dance, writers would hyper-focus on my trans iden- tity and ask me Trans 101 questions. Nobody was like, “Tell me about your craft.” It was years before I got to talk about that in interviews.
So what feels very important at the 20th anniversary mark, is to remem- ber how 20 years ago almost no one was doing this, and now, every week, I have young nonbinary or trans aspir- ing dancers reaching out to me from all across the country. I came of age having no peers in the dance world and it’s so exciting to witness so many gender expansive folks. It’s also frus- trating that so little has changed, how few trans dance educators we see, we don’t see trans artists being presented, trans folks given residencies, on staff, on boards of directors, in leadership and decision-making power at foun- dations or funding agencies. The val- ues and friendliness are there, but the action is not. Like all the white folks in leadership claiming to have anti-white-supremacist values, with little to no action. SB: Let’s talk about your craft. Your theater, music, and writing background clarifies for me how dance appears in your work, as one communicative piece of a puzzle. In the AT-HOME season videos, which are beautifully made, I noticed a repetition of gesture that had a lot to do with two fingers pulling away from and towards the body. Tell me about those choices. SD: I’m calling this new series of dance films “video postcards.” In them, we’re exploring movement research for our new project The Lost Art Of Dreaming . The idea is that we can be doing movement investigation or play and create tendrils that may end up in the staged work down the road. The Lost Art Of Dreaming is rooted in imagining and creating expansive Futures, so the idea of starting here [Sean moves his hands towards and away from his forehead and chest], and getting to here [Sean gestures
toward the sky], connecting what’s out there, the Future, and what’s in the body. Some of that movement you saw was about that swirling cos- mos, that Future energy, and how we might connect it to our body. Me and my dancers (Nol Simonse, Will Woodward, Raul Torres-Bonilla) have been doing this “cosmic connec- tive tissue” movement research in our Zoom rehearsals 3 days a week since the beginning of the pandemic. SB: When you demonstrate and talk about these core-distal relationships, I can start to think about why one might choreograph exaggerated finger extensions and reaches toward the furthest point away from the body. Dance is a tremendously powerful and successful communicator of force and energy and emotion, but it’s a shitty communicator of ideas. Because I don’t think that’s what it was born to do. And it’s a very Western idea that viewers of dance should know what it means, should understand it, “get it,” and if they don’t know, they’re going to get anxious and pissed and dismiss it. I think it’s important for me to hear from an artist about the movement choices they make. Now I can revisit the films and think about the relation- ship between my material reality and my interiority and how far I can reach as I continue to be stuck in these pan- demic bubbles. SD: In most of the video postcards, there’s no relationship to language or text. This project is really differ- ent for me so far because I generally work with text and writing. The Miss- ing Generation (2018) started with a lot of research, a year and a half and 75 hours of oral history interviews I recorded with survivors of the early
Tinky Younger
It’s also awesome that CounterPulse intentionally planned for and built their new facility with only all-gender bathrooms, and regularly presents/ supports trans/Two-Spirit/NB artists, unlike most other Bay Area dance venues. Shawl Anderson as a home for dance has been supportive of trans/NB artists, including trans fac- ulty, producing their Queering Dance Festival—that’s so huge and amazing. This is something that I’m also proud of: because Sean Dorsey Dance’s Tech Rider requires theaters to convert all lobby and backstage bathrooms to be all-gender during our tours, I have left
behind a swath of permanently-altered all-gender restrooms in theaters across the country, from The Joyce in NYC to The Young Auditorium in highly con- servative Whitewater WI. SB: I love all of your trans love t-shirts , and your current project emphasizes trans joy, pushing back on the sort of spectacle of suffering cis folks may expect from trans artists. SD: The reason I create work and founded FMP is because of the exqui- site joy, wisdom, ebullience, radi- ance, depth of spirit, innovation of craft, and positively extraordinary
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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