I wish that my own “coming out” didn’t so much resemble Harper’s. At 22, I kissed my first to-be girl- friend one summer night, sitting on the sidewalk in front of my mom’s house, in front of that sprawling rosemary bush. I was staying with my mom as she was recovering from surgery (which didn’t stop her from coming out to check up on us). No sooner was I back inside than I was peppered with questions, admonitions, warnings. I don’t know why I tried to be honest with her then, when I could barely be so with myself. Whatever process I had was cir- cumspect, held in that container of relationship but never presented as an absolute fact. Later that sum- mer, I moved to Okinawa, not far from where my father grew up. I never introduced my visiting girlfriend as such to anyone apart from my close friends, and eventu- ally some trusted co-workers. I unquestioningly assumed that to make home here, to find close- ness with my relatives, meant that it was essential to obscure this one vital truth. Yet this young queerness found quiet shelter in Okinawa, too. My first “butch” haircut was a signal hidden in plain sight among all the high school girls I taught who had the same one. My work wardrobe slowly filled with colorful men’s kariyushi shirts. I grew devoted to Gu Ju Ryu karate, joined my neigh- borhood triathlon team. Movement was my way of finding home as I learned Japanese. I smiled when one of my obasan joked over how much more sense it would make if I were a man (or at least that’s what I thought she said). After moving back home, mov- ing away, moving back again, seeing The Big Reveal marked a new kind of homecoming. It left me with an
urgent desire to express beyond lan- guage in the way I saw those danc- ers could. My younger sister told me about Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, and I called the next day to see if I could enroll in Robin Nasatir’s Introduction to Modern series, though it had already begun the week prior. After the first class, I was enraptured, almost to the point of fear. How would I steward this newfound love? Would my body cooperate? Was it too late to commit to this thing I couldn’t yet fully name, but that I now felt so lucidly I was always supposed to? Not long after I started coming to classes at Shawl-Anderson, Frank Shawl, co-founder of the studio with his partner Victor Anderson, passed away. Though I had never met him, I went to his overflowing memo- rial, wanting to witness his spiritual imprint. Robin urged me to leave a video message in the booth set up for remembrances. I rambled on over how grateful I felt to him and Victor, for being partners in a time when it was so hard to be so, and for making that house into a dancing home for so many. “I have arrived, I am home.” This is a meditation offered in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village tradition, an invitation to return to the home we can always access: our bodies and breath. I think this is a dancer’s prac- tice, too, with one crucial amendment: if the still body does not offer home, the moving body might make it so. Early on in the pandemic, alongside so many of us, I lurched into danc- ing at home. At first, it was fun – I sent my family jokey dance videos, organized my grad school classmates for a home Zoom rendition of Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece , following the instructions the company gave in the New York Times. I opened an instagram account so I could take live Cunningham classes (but never actually did).
Fearful, flailing through important decisions, I soon fell into a depression. It felt like my inner world mirrored the mounting crises so apparent during that first pandemic summer, like I’d flung my body down an unending cav- ern, the last of some potential energy draining away. I lost any will to dance, found computer choreography impos- sible to follow, never felt still enough in my own skin to surrender to move- ment. The sense memory of bodies dancing together in space felt totally lost. Something I wouldn’t touch, even if I could. Marching, masked, through downtown Oakland, was the last time I would move with so many others for months and months. Trying to ease back into my body, I joined Suzanne Beahrs’ three-week online improvisational “playshop” in the early weeks of 2021. We tried Steve Paxton’s “small dance,” stand- ing in one place, noting all the min- ute protections the body offers to keep itself upright. William Forsythe’s room writing, tracing the architecture of a space with our limbs. Something started opening again in me, wayfin- ding in the textures and geometry of home. Once, I lost track of time on a walk and called in from the Rockridge BART parking lot, the din of passing traffic above a stochastic score. Suzanne said that many of her improvisations are inspired by teach- ing small children, and lent me a book, which I used to make a move- ment class for my housemate’s young daughter and her homeschool kinder- garten classmates while we sheltered in place. We made sculpture gar- dens out of our bodies, learned some movement language– heavy, light; soft, hard; slow, fast – and tested out the terms. They talked readily about safety, death, the stories they saw in each other. They grew taller. After getting to know people who have been dancing for much longer, I recognize the gift of beginning when
I did. To be sure, it takes me a while to figure out new choreogra- phy, and then to stop pantomim- ing. Enthusiasm is no substitute for skill, as much as I wish it were. But this late start spared me the expec- tation of dancing as a little girl. I am lucky to experience this practice as a chiefly liberatory one. What marks the end of a begin- ning? I worry some at the risk of announcing my love of this practice here, pinning it to language, stirring this seed too soon. All the unknown futures in which it flourishes and falters will shelter together here on the page. I suppose I chose to write, to accept this invitation, because I believe that everyone’s most ordi- nary stories are worth telling. I wanted to write to someone who finds themselves coming into this practice for the first time, or after a long time, feeling like it’s too late: there is a home waiting here. Per- haps I am also writing a missive to some future self, worn-down: you can begin again (you can always be beginning). Perhaps above all I am writing to everyone who sustains this practice – past, present, future: thank you. As shelter-in-place began to ease, I leapt at the chance to dance in Shaunna Vella’s first in-person class at Shawl-Anderson, on May 4, 2021. It all felt tentative, reverent. We wondered at how safe we were, giddy to move together in the newly unfamiliar Studio 1. Shaunna’s class was the last I’d taken before Shawl closed, and returning to it the first of many bittersweet sym- metries that would unspool in this re-emergent time. Now, I rattle my bike up to Shawl-Anderson most days, relieved to find a practice rhythm, to find joy in dancing again. Yet I notice the ways that joy can both quiet and expose awaiting pain. How do
“I have arrived, I am home.” This is a meditation offered in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village tradition, an invitation to return to the home we can always access: our bodies and breath
After moving back home, moving away, moving back again, seeing The Big Reveal marked a new kind of homecoming.
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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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