When I dance, I am making and inhabiting a world, however ephemerally, that is not this one—and I am invit- ing you to join it. Where I, and you, get to release from the rules and beliefs of this world, and perhaps even (or rather, therefore) the rules and beliefs that are knotted up within us. Where we get to be and move in a different time, released from the fascism of the clock. And in this different world and different time, we get to be a different nervous system, a different mind, a different body. We can relate differently. We can create something different. When we change shape, we shape change. Dance is an act of prefiguration: creating the world we want, right now. This is our practice of freedom, together. BELINDA JU (she/her) is a coach, writer, dancer, and convener of a meditation community. As a dancer, she has performed, including original work, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Judson Memorial Church, Dixon Place, and Bates Dance Festival. As a writer, she has shared her writing at readings around New York City, including at Carnegie Hall, and is currently completing her memoir. When not pursuing artistic endeavors, she coaches founders and leaders in tech and runs a meditation community she started in early 2018. You can learn more about her and say hello at belinda.io . 1 Tronto, Joan. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (3/13/13 ed.). NYU Press, 2013. Pages 22-23. 2 Pirate Care, a syllabus . https://syllabus.pirate.care . 3 Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow, Translated by Robert Hurley and others, The New Press, 1994. Pages 283-284. 4 Schulz, Kathryn. “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau.” The New Yorker , 12 October 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum . 5 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. C are Work: Dreaming Disability Justice . Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018. Page 32. 6 Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid . Verso Books, 2020. Page 7. 7 Malatino, Hil. Trans Care . University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Page 2. 8 gallacher, romham pádraig. “what happens when we can’t live interdependency all the time?” radi- cal access mapping projec t, 9 November 2015, https://radicalaccessiblecommunities.wordpress. com/2015/11/09/what-happens-when-it-feels-like-we-cant-live-interdependency-all-the-time/ .
wait for ‘everyone’ to choose to live in non-statist, non-capitalist relationships, or we will very likely wait forever. Nor can we force socialism on anyone.… Hence there is no choice for those of us who desire to live dif- ferently but to begin to do so ourselves.” 19 Opposed to any form of coercive authority—and thus refusing to recognize state power, anarchists exercise the “defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” 20 Like the Dakota concept of “making kin,” anarchism’s prefiguration feels so obvious that I wonder why I’ve never thought of it before. And the answer I arrive at is that I have internalized the oppression and control. Our primary limitation in ushering forth liberation is, in some ways, simply a lack of imagination. It requires us to uproot the forces of oppression we have unwittingly harbored, so that we may create a new way of being and relating and worlding. Both anarchist theorist Gustav Landauer and philoso- pher Michel Foucault wrote about the humble relation- ship between two people as the front lines for changing large, institutional forces. Landauer writes that the state is the relationship between people, and to destroy the state is to behave differently 21 —specifically, to acknowl- edge the humanity in each person. 22 Foucault writes that power is not an object to be owned, but exists in rela- tionship whenever one person tries to control another. Power is everywhere — and so too, is its counterpart, resistance. 23 Landauer argues that the revolution must be conducted within ourselves and in our relationships. Foucault empowers us to exercise resistance in our everyday relationships, not only in service of dismantling large, institutional forces. I began my research with what felt like an unsolvable paradox: how can we get there when we’re here ? It seems impossible. And yet, it’s not. The there is embedded in the here — we have, indeed, all the ingredients we need to transmute here into there. Like alchemy, there is magic involved. But it’s not the magic of chimera: it’s the magic of activating our imagination for what is possible. It’s the magic of refuting rules that do not serve us and rewriting new ones. It’s the magic of believing we are already free in our glorious humanity and luminous goodness. Changing Shape, Shaping Change To dance is to care. When I dance, I am caring for my body: giving it the permission to move as it would like to move, rest as it would like to rest, touch as it would like to be touched. When I dance, I am caring for my spirit: letting myself feel whatever it is I’m feel- ing, be however it is I already am. When I dance, I am caring not only for myself: I am caring for any fel- low dancers who are with me, caring for anyone who might witness, caring for anyone who doesn’t witness but knows me, caring for anyone who knows whoever knows me.
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9 Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure . Duke University Press, 2011. Page 2. 10 Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life . Duke University Press, 2017. Page 240. 11 Malatino, Hil. Trans Care . The University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pages 1-2
12 Baker, Aryn. “Greek Anarchists Are Finding Space for Refugees in Abandoned Hotels.” Time , 3 November 2016, https://time.com/4501017/greek-anarchists-are-finding-space-for-refugees-in- abandoned-hotels/ . 13 Tsavdaroglou, Charalampos, et. al. “Acts for Refugees’ Right to the City and Commoning Practic- es of Care-tizenship in Athens, Mytilene and Thessaloniki.” Social Inclusion , volume 7, issue 4, 2019, pp. 119-130, https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v7i4.2332 . 14 Ibid. 15 The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence . Verso Books, 2020. Page 39. 16 Maharawal, Manissa McCleave. “Occupy Wall Street and a Radical Politics of Inclusion.” The Sociological Quarterly , volume 54, issue 2, 2013, pp. 177-181, https://doi.org/10.1111/tsq.12021 . 17 Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance . Verso Books, 2019. Page 252. 18 TallBear, Kim. “The US-Dakota War and Failed Settler Kinship.” Anthropology News , volume 57, issue 9, September 2016, pp. e92-e95, https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.137 . 19 Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements . Pluto Press, 2005. Page 126. 20 Graeber, David. “Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots.” Al Jazeera , 30 November 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/11/30/occupy-wall-streets-anarchist-roots/ . 21 White, Stuart. “Making anarchism respectable? The social philosophy of Col- in Ward.” Journal of Political Ideologies , volume 12, issue 1, 2007, pp. 11-28, https://doi. org/10.1080/13569310601095580 . 22 Kuhn, Gabriel. “The State as a Social Relationship: Gustav Landauer Revived.” Interview by Dov Neumann. PM Press , 25 June 2010, https://blog.pmpress.org/2019/07/13/the-state-as-a-social- relationship-gustav-landauer-revived/ . 23 Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth . Edited by Paul Rabinow, Translated by Robert Hurley and others, The New Press, 1994. Page 292.
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