dancing close to home
MY MOM LIVES ALONE, about a thirty minute drive away, in the condo complex where my two sisters and I grew up. There’s a sprawling rose- mary bush out front, planted the Easter after I turned two, kept neatly shorn where it meets the sidewalk. When our phone calls started fill- ing with concerns – about her com- puter’s anti-virus software update, changing the smoke alarm battery, the new electricity bill – I asked my mom if she might start keeping a list, so I could come spend a Sunday afternoon each month helping check everything off. A promise I have kept, mostly. On a recent visit, I idly asked her if I seemed taller. This was a silly question, given that I’m now in my thirties. Why did I feel such illusory largeness inside my childhood home? Why did I test our conversation with a question about my body? Of course, here, perhaps more than anywhere else, my senses are shaped by the imprint of memory. Some- times, home feels like a place where I need to give account, be measured. If these visits are a check on how cred- ible my performance of adulthood might be, I usually fail by one mea- sure or another: when I collapse on the couch, when I stuff myself too full, when I give in to bickering. But these acts make a ridiculous rubric.
despite my best efforts, I will always be a child. But if I remember the gifts of childhood – boundless play and curiosity, a way of teach- ing those tutored in disillusionment to see differently – this helps me weather those feelings of fraud- ulence, vulnerability, and those sometimes bigger emotions than a body can manage. I remember that growing up is not finding a way to outrun failure, but finding a home in one’s body. In The Happiest Season (2020) a closeted lesbian (Harper, played by Mackenzie Davis) brings her girlfriend (Abby, Kristen Stewart) home for Christmas, but insists on keeping their relationship a secret. (Harper treats Abby horribly; their secret gets out; Abby stays with her in the end). The film didn’t garner much critical praise, and earned especially literal criticism from viewers yearning for the promised feel-good queer holiday classic. I wondered if the screenplay – con- ceived by Clea DuVall, based on her own life’s events – was suggest- ing that to be queer is to be intrin- sically disinterested in things being easy. Or perhaps the movie was quietly encouraging viewers to finally break up with whatever ver- sion of Harper had been lingering in their own lives.
I want to learn to love this nearness, and all the things that it reveals. My older and younger sisters now both live on the east coast, and the last several months are the first time I’ve been the only one of us close to home. My mom is from Maryland, my stepmom is from Kansas, and my dad is from Okinawa, Japan. I grew up in Novato, sheltered by my par- ents’ choices to leave their childhood homes – steeped in the suggestion that the place where you grow up is not where you become who you are meant to be. I suspect that my parents attach some prestige to my sisters being far away, even if (or perhaps because) it means shelving some fears about their own mortality. Fears I try to empa- thize with even as I gingerly plumb the possibility of caring for them as they age: who will tend to me when my body starts to fail? In Fog Beast’s The Big Reveal (2019) – a lush, playfully dystopian dance theater reimagination of the corporate conference vernacular, a tech company (with the motto “SYN-ER-GY: SYNERGY!”) reveals their latest innovation: The Wailana (performed by Wailana Simcock), an immortal android in the Com- panion Series, outfitted with ambiguous ethnicity, fluent in over one hundred languages, and
programmed for perfect empathy. A more-than-human solution for all-too-human alienation. Seeing that show was a gift of coincidence. I passed by the Asian Art Museum every day on my way home from work, and one Thurs- day I remembered that it was prob- ably open late. Something felt fated when I arrived – just in time for the opening ritual, incantations echoing in the atrium, naming our ancestors and their places, knitting together eternal questions about human his- tory, migration, and belonging. I had recently moved back from a year in Colorado, tacking between heartbreaks and jobs. In that eve- ning, so much of my inner search- ing was gently reflected, stilled. In Wailana Simcock’s talk about gen- der, language, and land. In dance and music giving form to the exqui- site contradictions our bodies endure in modern work. It all sug- gested that there existed some for- giving, tender network undulating through this Bay Area home-place and beyond, a place I knew, but had not always felt known to. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lin- gered here as someone who feels they have something to prove. Have I come back because it’s easy? Because it’s hard? Some- times home feels like a place where,
gestures by Randee Paufve
story + photos by Emma Tome
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in dance SPRING 2022 26
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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
44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
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