“The practice of writing, as described in Genet’s novels, is a mode of destabilization and disruption, a means by which to render conventional narrative forms and representational economies strange…” Elizabeth Stephens in Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Genet’s Fiction

St. Genet’s Paradisiacal Rites is a lavishly macabre, ultra-sensory opus of sound, theater, comedy, conceptual art, sculptural installation, video projection, dance and opera that was presented by On the Boards May 17-19, 2013.  It is a sprawling, two-hour-plus extravaganza of dramatic spectacle. And it may or may not have any interest in taking place in front of an engaged audience.

Despite elements of showmanship, the punishing process for the performers of getting through Rites does, in many ways, fulfill the purpose of the work.  The context of the stage enables the performers to put on heightened personas, to get rampantly inebriated, to anesthetize through nitrous oxide—and it provides an acceptable platform to behave in ways that would be reprehensible in other situations.  As players in a created universe, spitting wine in your colleague’s eyes is dehumanizing and degrading, yes.  It’s also ritualized disorientation—the individual making way for process.  And at the core of St. Genet is the belief that the creative act is a process of expressing pain and desperation as the only alternative to complete annihilation.

Photo by Dan Hawkins

Setting the scene

The room is filled with a sound like zillions of electrons colliding. This sound is trance-inducing and creates a sense of never ending anxiety. Headless quails endlessly spin on meat hooks like disembodied dervishes.  A wheat field gently waves vertically instead of side-to-side, as if there is a wind, a movement of ghosts from underneath the ground. It is at once pastoral and horrified, like stalks like hair standing up on the end of crawling skin.  A fresh grave to the side is quiet and as looming as a memento mori from Renaissance-era paintings.  Next to it little cubes of earth undulate and glow.  In video contoured figures that “stalk” back and forth are anonymous voids that vigilantly stare out into more void.  The tone is sinister and surreal, escalating the heartbeat.

Peopled in this landscape are the elaborately costumed, over-the-top, Mathew Barney-esque characters of this play.  They exist in a more grounded state than the dreamlike landscape, but feel less authentic, brimming with a kind of forced gravitas.  A brooding, drinking Harlequin-type sulks amid the wheat field, where beings with spiky, metallic spheres for heads move in orbit, their hands scanning the grain tops like supernatural healers.  A carny with his belly exposed inflates and deflates a balloon filled with nitrous oxide, a double hit of hyperventilation and gaseous lightheadedness that makes him shake uncontrollably.  A saintlike figure sits docilely inside a votive niche, ornately carved and richly adorned in bowers, as a woman in an old-fashioned currier uniform douses her in flour, wine, and honey.  Front and center is Ryan Mitchell, the “Creator” of this work and this alternate universe, sitting in a wicker chair and antiquated Victorian dress, officiating with a pastor’s raised palm and stern voice.  Someone combs his hair for him.  He drinks from goblets and is distressed.  The histrionics are thick, and the piece hasn’t officially started yet.

Textual filter

There is no narrative through-line, but there is a protagonist figure in the Harlequin, played by Darren Dewse.  This dandified boy has memorized a list of Academy Award winners throughout history but has also witnessed his lover beaten to the point of urinating himself.  “His face was covered in a veil of spit, blood, and mucous, sitting in a potpourri of piss.”  In this way the subject matter heavily identifies itself with the homoerotic themes of novelist Jean Genet, his crude and violent aesthetic sensibilities as developed from his life as a hard-on-his-luck orphan-turned-criminal.

Textually, the work clearly operates within a post-structural framework drawing specifically from writings about Genet’s work by famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.  In the book St. Genet, he purports that Genet’s early childhood trauma compels his writing to function as a means to pick up the shattered pieces of his life.  The creative act is a journey towards catharsis, though perhaps not one that is ever reached.

For Mitchell violence and beauty are inseparable and constantly shifting.  A raging party of drinking from punctured beer cans and grinding on each other devolves further into repeatedly depantsing the protagonist in an increasingly cruel manner; but the same world contains the haunting, abstracted grace of dancers in transparent white shifts spinning themselves into ecstasy.  It’s a physical embodiment of the way Sartre’s contemporaries Jaques Derrida and Roland Barthes destabilized conceptions of language by questioning the authority of concrete meanings that could be derived from language structures.  The many modes of Rites is, in a sense, less about its enigmatic spectacle and more about its inability to trust in the authority of any single medium to preside over heavy, sometimes grandiose, ideas about religious death rites, the origin of divinity, our human capacity for violence, and fatalism in the face of the inevitable conclusion of life.

Visual/visceral filter

Visually, the work has the sumptuousness of films like those by Bill Viola—moments slowed way down so that they exist neither as theatrical action nor as tableaux vivants, but some ether space between.  I was reminded, in Dewse’s fragile protagonist, specifically of Viola’s piece Emergence, which depicts Jesus’ resurrection as a reverse drowning.  He is elegantly and meticulously birthed out of the fountain into the arms of the two Marys—who lovingly and alarmedly reach to cradle him.  It magnifies a scene of grief, disparity and disjunction by couching it in ornate scenery and graceful procession.  One of these kinds of stunning moments in Rites happened during the second “knee” interlude.

Still from Bill Viola’s Emergence

This was also an interlude that operated as an intermission for the audience, when many audience members weren’t present, and many others weren’t observing the action on the stage.  The wheat field was being torn down by the crew and harvested in canvas by the auxiliary cast, as the dancers pitter-pattered onstage in ornate masks.  With an aching slowness and pristine clarity, they plowed through the remaining pathways of wheat as cast and crew followed at their heels with industrial brooms to clear away the clay pods and crushed, broken stalks. For me this moment melded the ambivalence of suspended disbelief and revealed artifice, meticulous ritual practice and ordinary, tedious task, transcendence with a requirement snapping in half, detailed ornamentation with rough, itchy grass.

The physical presence of the work fluctuates between this kind of exaltation of embodied beauty and gruesomely destructive scenarios that test the performers’ pain threshold, equilibrium and stamina.  There are repeated slaps in the face with a handful of honey.  There is balancing on one foot atop a thin pole with necks in nooses.  There is an extended dance section with dancers and non-dancers hopping in attitude en dehors that goes on so long it bleeds into another “knee” when, again, many people stopped watching and left the room.   These tests owe much to the performance art of the 1970s, such as Marina Abramović’s self-harming Rhythm series.  I was also reminded of Breathing In/Breathing Out, in which Abramović  and companion Ulay breathed repeatedly into each other’s mouths until they passed out.  (Incidently, Abramović was recently under intense criticism for her treatment of performers for a recent retrospective of some of these works.  What we ask of ourselves for art cannot, it seems, be the same that we ask of others.)

Another specific source, of course, is Chris Burden, whose piece Shoot Mitchell recreated vigilante-style in Carkeek Park the day of the final performance.

Marina Abramović and Ulay in Breathing In/Breathing Out  

Author and audience

Because Rites is constantly building up and undermining its visual splendor, simultaneously associating death and violence with the sublime, intensely laboring inside divinity and demonism—the audience must exhaustingly contend with the unending presence of this polarity, which accounts for the extreme responses I have seen in the community.  Either the audience has the ability to endure the constant friction of the two ends of the spectrum or it doesn’t.

Here I must quote again from St. Genet.  Sartre writes that “Genet treats his readers as a means.  He uses them all to talk to himself about himself, and this peculiarity may alienate readers.”  Mitchell, too, ultimately has a minimal interest in engaging his audience.  The intermissions (during which many audience members milled about the house chatting or left to get drinks) didn’t disturb the performance from continuing.  Stirring violin solos were performed to the oblivious, and dancers dizzying themselves into almost vomit-inducing dervishes went largely unnoticed.  Many watched half-heartedly from the aisles and hallway during the final scene, in which the exquisitely skeletal Alan Sutherland emerged from a mound of earth—after having laid there for almost two hours—and then delivered a heart-wrenching monologue of purring love for a frail ghost and a radical beseeching to be relieved of his life.  “Let’s get on with it!”  he yelled as the protagonist repeated his words in deadpan.

This moment, showing Mitchell’s clearest affiliation with Genet’s aesthetic, confirmed the artist/jester/protagonist as an individual operating under a normalcy of torment.  Subsequently, he subjects the audience to the extreme monotony of that experience.  Eventually, if there is no relief from incredible highs (in both senses of the word) and devastating lows, the result is numbness.  An inability to experience either.  It’s very demanding to expect an audience member to dive into that level of trauma with the same amount of rigor and stamina that was demonstrated so well by the performers.  And, as graphic as some of this piece is, because of the element of put-on characters, I didn’t always feel the impact of the action.  This—and not the violence itself—became increasingly disturbing to me in the aftermath of experiencing this work.

In discussing this reaction with fellow artist Vanessa DeWolf, we asked ourselves some tough questions.  What is the responsibility of the audience to endure work that causes pain or injury to its performers?  Why is it so easy for an art audience to either dismiss with disdain or have a blasé reaction to this kind of work?  Does it trivialize the experience of the performers?  Does it make the audience an accomplice?  Is there a reason audiences should watch a work that isn’t ultimately intended for them?

In lieu of trying to provide inadequate answers, I can only posit these far-reaching questions against the caveat that, very often, our encounters in the world are as consumers of products, news, information, status updates, insanely cute pictures of cats, etc.  I think that even smart and sophisticated audiences like those found in Seattle may have an expectation that art will, in some way, be consumable.  Paradisiacal Rites does little to cater to this desire, which is off-putting, discomforting and disorienting.  And who wants to go through that?  But we do, in fact, need works like this just as much as Mitchell needs this work to toe the line of shock in order to get to the meat of his content.  We need to be challenged in order for art to do what it should: break a pattern of viewing, bring in a new perspective of seeing and elucidate the human experience.

Resources for the reader:

A film by Jean Genet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHgb9_1LkWo

A Description of Marina Abramović and Ulay’s piece Breathing In/Breathing Out from 1977: http://catalogue.nimk.nl/site/?page=%2Fsite%2Fart.php%3Fid%3D18363

A piece with similar elements from 1978: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAIfLnQ26JY

Well-written article summarizing key components of Sartre’s depiction of the writer in St. Genet: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/160272-saint-genet-actor-and-martyr-by-jean-paul-sartre/

A download of Elizabeth Stephen’s research article on Genet and homo-eroticism: http://www.academia.edu/172469/Queer_Writing_Homoeroticism_in_Jean_Genets_Fiction

Nobody knows Christin Call the dancer/choreographer/poet/artist, explainable by part-existential, part-marketing reasons.  As a fairweather critic she has written articles for F5, Kansas City Review, The Ulrich Museum, SeattleDances, and now, happily, STANCE. Her poems have appeared in the lively journals Boston Review, Eastwesterly Review, KNOCK, and Anemone Sidecar.  The Mountain? The Mountain., her self-published book of poems, is available through Lulupress.com. 

After watching Ezra’s Mother for You I Made This a few weeks later, I spent a long time being silent, thinking about the way I had perceived the piece and how others—especially the unintended audience—reacted to it. One question I kept returning to: how can society treat people who see so much in such a terrible way? This question is deeply embedded in the last section of Ezra’s performance, in which he descends a staircase wearing the mask of a blue dinosaur-like creature. In that moment I felt a true appreciation for all that the mind can do. Who cares if it’s “real” or not? People who spend their lives seeing more than what may or may not be “real” should not be chastised for that sight. There used to be a place for people with mental illness in society. In some cultures there is still a place, as seers and shamans or wise men and women. Whatever the title, cultures made a place for them and accepted them. Right now there are few places in our culture for the mentally ill, and many of them end up on the street.

Ezra has done a brave thing by starting this conversation. The way his mother has been treated reflects a major flaw in our society. So far I haven’t been able to walk downtown without considering these issues, and every time I see someone curled up on the street I have to wonder why they’re there. The awareness that Ezra has created is palpable, and this conversation deserves continuation. How can we come to the aid of all those who need help?

This post is a response to Ezra Dickinson’s Mother for you I made this, a performance produced through Velocity Dance Center’s Made in Seattle program.

Lexi Hamill is Velocity Dance Center’s Dramaturgical Intern. As student  at Cornish College of the Arts, she is pursuing a degree in Theater with an emphasis in Original Works and Dramaturgy. Along with her studies she is also an active member of The Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.

STANCE directs you to a CityArts photo essay by Nate Watters of Velocity’s Made in Seattle presentation: Ezra Dickinson’s Mother for you I made this (2013). See the photo essay here.

Photo Nate Watters

Hunger is pressure. It is not soft. Only perhaps at first. Give it time, and it will consume.Hunger has the power to destroy, but we can harness it, too.

Hunger is gravity on the organismal level. Dancers and performers resist and yield to gravity with bodies they nourish and starve. Hunger pangs demand our attention. Still, up to a point, we are free to choose our response.

For what do you hunger? Which pangs do you heed? Which do you ignore?

 — Jan Trumbauer + Tyler P. Wardwell, Co-editors

What you are calling hunger I think is the same as what I call Bitchmuse. Let me introduce you to Bitchmuse.

I’ve known her all my life in her many guises.

We used to have a volatile, on-again, off-again relationship. I courted her, she demurred. She pursued me, I balked. The reunions were blissful, but often brief. Since I became “serious” about making art, she hasn’t left me.

I would never go so far as to say I want her to leave me. For one thing, I don’t want her to leave me; she’s my destiny, my hope. She makes life worth living. She gets me out of bed no matter how much less painful it might be to snooze.

But also, & mostly, Bitchmuse is a huge, relentless, monomaniacal pain in my ass.

Bitchmuse yanks me out of bed to write down a series of words or images. Bitchmuse torments me on the cushion, when I am working hard at letting go of working hard. I haven’t got through a shower in years without Bitchmuse deciding this is the perfect time to deliver the key to whichever door I have been pounding my tiny fists against. I can’t go on a walk without stumbling over fragments of a poem Bitchmuse scattered along my path, or a physical trope that demands my attention.

Bitchmuse delicately lifts her crinolines & shits copiously on the easy, pleasant piece I am close to finishing, then abducts me to the surface of the sun & demands: EAT THIS.

Bitchmuse never lets me forget that the pile of sand at the bottom of the hourglass is big & that the small pile at the top is dwindling & that the whole damn thing is too heavy for me to turn it over & that Bitchmuse can but she jolly well won’t.

Bitchmuse ignores safewords. I don’t even bother with such feeble devices any more.

Bitchmuse does not care what I have done. She is only interested in what I am doing, what I haven’t done yet, what I have always said I could not or would not do.

Nothing, including & especially nothing itself, is immune from Bitchmuse’s notice. A bowl of rice or a waterfall, the morning commute or a devastating industrial accident, Higgs Boson or fall fashions — Bitchmuse is there, yanking at my wrist,insistent.

Bitchmuse & I are a scrappy, long-term, nonmonogamous team. My work is her food. Her hunger is my food. Together we are a self-sufficient maw, like a Mayan god that manifests as a gape, which must be fed the blood of royalty to provide the stage upon which visions appear, visions that need to be seen more than I, apparently, need to sleep.

TYPES OF HUNGER

1. I have food to eat. I choose not to eat it because I want to experience hunger.

2. I can pass a test about physics. I still need to know what gravity is.

3. I made a performance. People knew when to clap & they did. Now I can work on the heart of the artichoke.

4. I have food to eat. I refuse to eat it for political, religious, or emotional reasons.

5. Meet Bitchmuse. She travels with me. She whispers to me all through my long commute. By the time I get home I am trembling with hunger.

6. I look into the well-stocked refrigerator until the door-open alarm sounds but I can’t see anything I want to eat. I look at page after page of dictionaries & I look at all the books & files full of words but I can’t find the one word I need.

7. I watch the dancers moving. My muscles remember moving like that. I wiggle my foot, which I had tucked under me. It reminds me of all the hurts.

8. I have food to eat. I know if I eat it, the consequence will be physically painful. So I will not eat it.

9. There’s a difference between horny & hungry. What is the difference, again?

10. My ghost womb longs for the burden of a baby.

11. I have food to eat. I eat it, even though I know my hunger is for something else that I cannot or will not get.

12. Tick tick tick tick TICK TICK tick tick tick TICK TICK TICK tick. How long? Will the next cancer go rogue? When? How long? Tick TICK tick TICK TICK.

13. I came this far. I set myself a goal to come this far even though it was hard & no one else cared if I came here. I got here. There is nothing to eat here except the certainty that there is more.

Photo by S. M. Selby.

Lydia Swartz’s motto is solvitur ambulando. Her poem was recently set to a piece for Phrasings by Bellingham Repertory Dance & she read at the Spring 2013 Greenwood Litcrawl. Swartz’s deck of shuffle poems comes out in fall 2013 from Minor Arcana Press. Find Lydia & the Seattle Spoken Word Calendar at zenpropaganda.com.

As an only child, I had no idea that I was being raised by a schizophrenic mother. I was loved and raised by her, but I also provided a stable base for her to live in this world. She wasn’t diagnosed until I grew older and had moved away, but looking back, I can see now that she was suffering from schizophrenia. She was a great mother to me, but she lacked the assistance from our society to properly deal with her mental illness.

I’m inspired by the power of dialogue. In reaching out to my community, I felt empowered by the sense that I was emerging from a place of aloneness into a web of support. It showed me that if we can just gather the strength to reach out, we can find a pathway to help. I was shown resources that I didn’t know existed, resources that now enable me to play a part—for the first time—in the care that my mother receives, or at the very least have conversations with her healthcare providers.

This raises the question: why don’t we don’t talk more about mental illness? How can we even begin to talk about mental illness? A point was made during the Speakeasy conversation that when we find out that a friend or loved one has been diagnosed with cancer, we respond with unequivocal support, even running races to raise money for the cause. But when a loved one is diagnosed with a mental illness, we may, in a sense, turn our backs, because we don’t know how to respond to mental illness. As a society, why don’t we do a better job of rallying behind the mentally ill? Why aren’t there more initiatives to raise money to support those living with mental illness?

RESOURCES

NAMI Washington National Alliance on Mental Illness
Providing local free education, support and advocacy for children and adults affected by mental illness. Find links to local + national resources on the website. Based in Seattle. namiwa.org

Stand Up for Mental Health
Teaching stand up comedy to people with mental illness as a way of building their confidence and fighting public stigma, prejudice and discrimination. Based in British Colombia. standupformentalhealth.com

Psychosis Sucks
Fraser Health Early Psychosis Intervention (EPI) Program website promotes early detection, educates about psychosis and provides direction for seeking help. The main objectives of the EPI Program are to increase understanding of psychosis, decrease stigma associated with having this disorder and provide direct treatment. psychosissucks.ca

EZRA DICKINSON began dancing at the age of four, going on to study at Pacific Northwest Ballet for twelve years on full scholarship. Ezra earned his BFA in Dance with an emphasis in choreography from Cornish College of The Arts. While at Cornish, Ezra was the recipient of The Merce Cunningham Scholarship, The Kreielshimer Scholarship, and The President’s Scholarship in Dance. Ezra’s work in choreography and movement installations have been on display at On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival, ACT Theater, Moore Inside Out, Heathrow Airport, Henry Art Gallery, 911 media arts center, Velocity’s Next Fest Northwest, Zocalo Mexico City, Spectrum Dance Theater, and The Northwest Film Forum as well as many others. Along with being co-artistic director of The Offshore Project and Actually Really, Ezra is also a member of The Maureen Whiting Company. Recently Ezra has been collaborating with composers to create micro-compositions for a collection of short stop-motion animations. Ezra is also currently working on a multimedia performance using motion censor technology blending mural painting with performance. ezradickinson.com

Photo Oliver Sharp

“Pretend Pretension” is a robotic, semi-academic musing on why anybody dances in the first place. Its a rather unusual thing to train the human body to move in unusual ways. Friendly android Peter attempts to clarify what exactly is so imperative that a human would train their body so unusually to do something so drastically strange.

Peter speaks with Ryan Corriston, Wilson Mendieta, and Ilana Goldman, all Dance MFA candidates at the University of Washington. They are all in the class of 2013.

You can download or stream the podcast on soundcloud.

Samples derived from the following users on freesound.org:
benboncan
bruno
bullockjs
ch0cchi
corsica
hammerklavier
dj cronos
dobride
timbre

Other samples from: Paul Hindemith’s “Cholerisch” and Astrud Gilberto’s “Bim Bom”

Dylan Ward is a performer and performance creator from Denver, CO. He likes to dance.

Kaitlin McCarthy’s “There’s No Id in Team.” Photo by Kate Hailey

How did Hot Mess happen?

Rachel:

I have to give Kaitlin all the credit on this one: she decided to just make this show happen, and we were all swept along by her energy and determination and organizational skills and refusal to take “no” for an answer.  She was the glue that kept us all together.

Jenny:

I feel like 2012 was a huge year of transformation for me. For much of it, I spent a good amount of time dancing for other people. There’s something really fulfilling in getting the opportunity to help nurture someone else’s vision—and you, as a performer end up being what people see—you are the conduit for that vision. But I felt like in a lot of circumstances, I would distance myself from the actual work. It was a splitting of self—of being a person with a performative investment, but not an artistic investment. I think there are often very few dance/performative opportunities where you really get to be first and foremost a human being.

Also, I turned 30 this year, and felt that it was high time to grow up and take some artistic risks. I’ve been working in the visual art realm with photography for a while now, and feel a certain amount of confidence in my ability to generate visual material. But choreography was definitely something I wasn’t comfortable with at all. And what better way to become comfortable than to force yourself to do what scares you?

Kaitlin was very much the impetus for Hot Mess, and I felt like her enthusiasm was a great opportunity to have support in doing what terrified me the most. When she asked me to be a co-producer/choreographer, I accepted with much trepidation. I think even the title Hot Mess came from our initial meeting in which there was some flippancy about what the show would actually end up being like. In many ways, I rode on the confidence of Kaitlin and Rachel (and Annie McGhee) to get over the hump of having to make something and take full responsibility for the outcome.

Kaitlin:

Since moving to Seattle, I had been wanting to choreograph and had applied for a number of opportunities that didn’t pan out. I was tired of not exploring concepts for pieces that I felt excited about, and felt that I couldn’t depend on receiving a grant in order to make work. I think it is easy to say, “If I made work it would be x,y and z,” but you really can’t say that unless you’re making work. The decision to self-produce came out of the knowledge that the most important thing as an artist is to make work, and that I was the only person keeping myself from doing that.

I asked Jenny and Rachel to split the bill with me because I wanted creative support for this endeavor. I had worked with Jenny as part of Khambatta dance company and had seen her photography. I knew that she was an artist with a lot of skill and vision. And I had danced for Rachel and Annie in a piece for Evoke Productions’ Full Tilt last year. I really enjoyed their process—they taught me a lot of strategies for working from improvisation. I felt that all of us were on the same page artistically, and that our aesthetics spoke to each other. I desired the kind of environment I had in college where my peers and I were constantly talking about art. That kind of dialogue is so important. You can’t make work in a vacuum.

I think the impetus for the show also came from my frustrations with being a dancer. I understand that part of being a dancer is enabling other people’s visions, but I felt that in most cases there was very little room for dancers’ input. I think dancers have a unique “inside” view of pieces, and should be used as a resource to help choreographers. I was rarely given permission to say, “hey, this isn’t working for me” or “I have this impulse to do this here, can we try it?”

Rachel Grant’s “The Marshmallow Test.” Photo by Kate Hailey

How was Hot Mess important to you as an artist?

Rachel:

Kaitlin’s decision to self-produce this show came at a good time for me: I had some momentum after showing work in last year’s Bridge Project and then Full Tilt (collaborating with Annie McGhee), but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.  I think if I were sticking around in Seattle for longer I would have entered the cycle of grant applications, but I knew from pretty early this year that moving away was a possibility, and I wanted to just do something celebratory and fun that would feel like a grand exit.  I felt like I was done trying to “prove myself” as an artist and just wanted to make something that was interesting for me and the dancers and hopefully the audience as well.

I found this show to be an opportunity to synthesize a lot of the themes that I’ve been marinating on throughout the duration of my time in Seattle: I’ve been working as a Montessori teacher for three years, and have been interested in making a dance that explored early childhood development and sourced movement from the dancers’ memories and experiences but was NOT a dance where adults pretend to be children.  I’ve also been very interested in creating sound/music for dance, and this piece gave me an opportunity to create my most complex sound score to date.

Jenny:

To be honest, I’m kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to art making and my process. I think I’ve always avoided relying on art-making for any practical purpose (to make a living, as a source of identity and self confidence, etc.) because I simply enjoy creating things too much and I don’t want to sully that. Maybe this is cowardly—I don’t know. What was most satisfying about this process is that producing a show independently means you get to call the shots. Sure, you are also taking on the financial burden, the threat of failure, and all of the other responsibilities. But it felt so relieving to know that with enough moxie, anything is possible. I had a moment—literally in the middle of the show—where I realized I was doing EXACTLY what I wanted to be doing. I think there’s nothing more powerful or validating as an artist than that.

Kaitlin:

When you put dancers on stage, they are more than bodies. They are people. You are putting their whole lives up there. I wanted to acknowledge and use that. I wanted to make a piece where my dancers had that permission, both to collaborate on material, and then to have freedom to explore creatively within that. I told them that if they were doing something that didn’t make sense to them, then it wouldn’t make sense to the audience either. In making “There’s No Id in Team” I tried to create an open dialogue about what we were making together. In return, I asked my performers to be unconditionally positive and open to trying anything.

This idea of enabling the performer also led into ideas about why we perform, and the desires that we have in performing. I think in the final piece this translated into the different evolutions of self my dancers performed. The magical liminal state of the theater that allows us to be anyone, and do anything. I also wanted to find alter-egos inside of my performers, and ask those alter-egos to come out and play. For instance, I told Rachel that she had an inner diva, and then asked her to her act like she knew she was hot shit. Which she is, by the way. I think it’s considered immodest for people to want to act like that, but because I told her to do it, she gets to experience that and still keep her modesty. Same goes for Jenny, who I made act like a total gross creeper.

Kaitlin McCarthy’s “Lovesick.” Photo by Kate Hailey

What difficulties did you run into?

Rachel:

Oh, I think we were all terrified pretty much the entire time we were preparing for this show.  We covered it up pretty well, but there were points for all of us where even our dancers could feel our stress and it affected everybody in different ways.  We were all making these bold choreographic choices, and I think each of us was worried that our work was going to flop.  We entered into this process with the desire to take risks, but it turns out that risk-taking is fucking scary!

Another difficulty was that I ended up in the middle of a cross-country move about halfway through the choreographic process.  It was challenging to hold my life together, living on a different coast from my partner but still deeply invested in my Seattle home.  This ended up being a mixed blessing, because rehearsing for the show turned into a bit of a refuge—the only place in my life that wasn’t completely turned upside down during this time of transition.

Jenny:

Gratefully, because Kaitlin was so on the ball with everything, there weren’t a ton of practical difficulties. For me, the main difficulties were overcoming my own lack of confidence and trusting in the initial vision and intention for my dance, “Twinsies.” Of course, there are always little things like managing time, figuring out how to pay for rehearsal space, and negotiating the timeline of developing the piece (how much time can we spend generating material before we have to start editing and putting things together?).

I think what ended up being the most helpful for me psychologically was realizing that I literally had no idea what I was doing. And there is something very freeing in that—if you don’t know what you are doing, you can give yourself license to go with your impulses and stick with what is interesting to you, rather than what you think you SHOULD be doing, or what SHOULD be interesting. I knew that I wanted to create something believably emotional, but also humorous. Kaitlin talked about the boundaries and subtleties involved in humor, and I love it when I see a work that makes me laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time. I think as human beings, we are in that space more than we care to realize. Life can be really tragic and sad, but there are takeaways from that that are hilarious. Laugh or die.

Annie McGhee was very helpful in this process in many ways. She really brought herself emotionally to the table, and we explored some of the less flattering sides of our adolescence together. At one point, we both brought in notes we had saved from late middle school—7th and 8th grade—and we read them aloud together. From this we learned that our experiences had more in common than we realized, and this was instrumental in keeping us on the same page throughout the process. It felt important to me to really examine the internal landscape of the work’s intention, instead of just blindly making up movement. I think above all, it was important to me to make something that felt wholly honest, and I feel good that that ended up coming through.

Kaitlin:

The choreography in the piece was created almost entirely by my dancers. I would give them improvisational scores, and what came out was magic. They were always blowing me away.

I then did a lot of editing and directing. It’s not the same as if I had created the choreography myself, but I still think it is very indicative of my current interests. I’m interested in dancers as people, in awkwardness, in comedy. Things are the most poignant to me when I am unsure whether to laugh or cry. Comedy is so delicate. It’s all about timing that is very precise, but is hard to prescribe. You kinda just have to have a feel for it.

The piece didn’t really come together until opening night, because that was the first time we had a real audience. It changed so dramatically. It came alive. We really only had two runs of the piece and those were the two performances. And it was amazing, the different reactions with different audiences. I think with more runs we would learn where the sweet spot was—the median funny—but my dancers were feeling it out and making some great decisions on the fly. I had to trust them.

Seeing it with an audience also highlighted for me things that didn’t work. Things that should have been funny but weren’t. Moments that felt like punch lines rather than the kind of nervous, nuanced humor I was going for.

I think the hardest thing about putting together this show, and probably the hardest thing about being an artist, is the ambiguity of art. In any other field you know where you stand, you know if you are doing good work, if you are doing things correctly. In art, a masterpiece and a piece of shit are not very far apart. In this process I wanted to give myself room to not worry about what is “good” and think more about what is interesting and believe that it will come together. But it was very hard to take that risk.

The second piece I choreographed, “Lovesick,” was sort of an insurance policy for me. Since I haven’t had a lot of exposure before in Seattle, I knew it was important for me to come out of this show in a positive light. I was worried that my one piece would flop (which it didn’t, thank God) or that I would be pigeon-holed as someone who makes such-and-such kind of work, which is why I wanted to show range with two pieces. I also knew it would be accessible, which I hoped would ground the show for new-comers to dance. I think watching dance can be enjoyable and entertaining and still intelligent. What I didn’t expect was that “Lovesick” would kind of become a star of its own, but that’s what happens when you cast great performers. I also wanted to dance in my work, and I needed to be outside of my longer piece, so “Lovesick” was a little bit selfish in that way.

There are definitely days when your work is hard to justify. More often than not, I was terrified of failure and ready to throw in the towel, get a 9 to 5 and lead a simpler life. Making a show leads to so many esoteric questions about why you are even doing this and who told you that you matter enough to subject a whole bunch of people to your crazy ideas?!? In the end though I think being part of a larger culture that makes art is so important because that is the culture that is constantly questioning society. The world needs as many engaged people as it can get.

Jenny Peterson’s “Twinsies.” Photo by Kate Hailey

How was Hot Mess important to you as an artist?

Rachel:

Looking forward, this has been important to me because now I know it can be done.  I think artistic collaboration can be found anywhere, and I have to believe that I can create that kind of community for myself in my new home.  I am also inspired to maintain the connections I’ve made in the Pacific Northwest and continue to foster a creative dialogue with artists in Seattle.  I am looking into ways to potentially bring Seattle artists to Virginia, and am definitely planning to return to Seattle and work with my friends and peers on projects in the future. I feel like, in this era of increasingly global communication, the idea of cross-country collaboration is more feasible than ever. I’m certainly not done with Seattle and I look forward to seeing how the roots I planted there over the past few years continue to grow and deepen and take on a whole new character in the future.

Jenny:

I was truly blown away by the support from the community. Blown away. I think we are all really lucky to have had the opportunity to make work in Seattle. The quality of work here is high, but there is also such a sense of support. And people are doing really different things—the community is small enough to feel comfortable, but big enough to find your niche. I look forward to doing much, much more.

Kaitlin:

After the show, Tonya Lockyer told me that it was a feminist show. It wasn’t that we set out to do that, or that we had any overtly feminist concepts, but I think it was feminist and I’m not surprised. Jenny, Rachel and I are all very aware of the kind of sexism that is still very ingrained in our culture. I think we resist that, and just by being ourselves we emit and promote those attitudes.  Making this work is a little bit selfish, in that I desire to show the world that I am not some sweet, perky, blonde dancer girl, but actually a total weirdo. We all have stereotypes to escape. I have a lot of ideas and skills and I want to be taken seriously.

In making this show I got out a lot of urges. Now I have new urges. I still want to explore theatricality, but I’m also interested in incorporating more physical dance, which is something I struggle with. I really admire choreographers who push the envelope of technique, vocabulary and stamina. It takes nerve to ask dancers to go to that place because it’s physically exhausting for them. One rehearsal we were going into the studio as some other dancers where coming out and they were soaked. I thought, I want to do that! I want to sweat!

Jenny Peterson’s “Twinsies.” Photo by Kate Hailey

To Rachel: You’ve just moved to Virginia, and you’ve mentioned that you want to apply your experiences in Seattle to building a creative community in your new home. What do you think is most important for building a supportive creative community? What draws people closer to each other?

Oh man, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.  In my experience, building a supportive community has a lot to do with the work that you as an individual are willing to put in.  Some artistic communities are larger and more established, like the one in Seattle.  Others, like the one I’m encountering in the New River Valley, are more spread out, with fewer collaborators and resources.  But even when there is a thriving scene like Seattle’s, the individual movers and shakers still have to do the work to make it grow. I think a big part of building a supportive community is just having the courage to put the work out there, and then trusting that people will respond to it in some way: to borrow a line from the inimitable Kevin Costner, “if you build it, they will come.”

Something I realized about myself during my time in Seattle is that I really thrive in the “building” stage of creating community.  I think the ability to sustain an artistic community, to keep the momentum of that initial explosion of energy—that is the difficult part.  And honestly, in my adult life, I’ve never lived in a place long enough to know what that sustenance looks like.  Maybe I’ll get the chance in Virginia, I don’t know.  I’ll get back to you and let you know what I find out.

=============================================================

Artists’ Bios:

Rachel Grant. Photo by Jenny Peterson

Rachel Grant is a dancer, teacher, mover and shaker.  She received a BA in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2008, and relocated to the Pacific Northwest a year later.  She was lucky enough to be an active member of the vibrant Seattle dance scene for a little over three years, and has recently relocated with her fiance to Blacksburg, VA.  Rachel’s choreography has been produced in Velocity Dance Center’s Bridge Project 2012, the Seattle International Dance Festival, Evoke Productions’ Full Tilt (in collaboration with Annie McGhee) and in various other venues throughout the Seattle area.  Most recently, Rachel choreographed for and helped to produce Hot Mess, which was embraced by sold-out audiences and was one of the most gratifying experiences she’s ever had.  Please keep in touch: www.rachelrughdance.com

Kaitlin McCarthy likes dance. She likes to make it, see it, direct it, think about it, talk about it and write about it. She started dancing in her hometown of Ann Arbor, MI before attending Mt. Holyoke College where she graduated summa cum laude in 2009. In Seattle she has worked with a dozen local choreographers as a dancer, created two pieces that were selected for 12 Minutes Max at On the Boards, and produced/choreographed for the show Hot Mess at Velocity Dance Center. She will be making a new work for Full Tilt 2013, May 10th and 11th. Kaitlin also writes critical reviews for the blog SeattleDances.

For more information please visit kaitlinmccarthy.com

Jenny Peterson grew up in the Chicago suburbs, spending much of her youth as a competitive gymnast. She began dancing in college, receiving a B.A. in Dance and Visual Arts from the University of California, Irvine. Jenny has danced professionally in San Diego and Seattle, performing with the Pat Graney Company, Khambatta Dance Company, and in works by Aiko Kinoshita, Wade Madsen, Amy O’Neal and Lucia Neare’s Theatrical Wonders. Jenny steadies her time working as a licensed massage therapist and fine art photographer. Her work can be viewed at jennypeterson.com

Interviewer Joyce Liao is a dance-based artist currently living in Seattle. She is interested in exploring the relationship between dance, movement, text, sound, music, rhythms, emotions, sensations and stories. She practices dance and choreographs solo pieces at home and in various spaces, and considers this practice to be the foundation of her art form. Joyce is proud to be a 2013 Flower Season Artist-in-Residence at Studio Current. She recently showed a short dance film at Velocity’s THE BRIDGE PROJECT 2013. 

The following material originally appeared in Steven Gomez’s blog, Theatrical Experimentation, in February 2013. The first is a response to a writing prompt (“Who do you create your work for, and how does this influence your creative process?”) at the STANCE gathering on February 18th. The second is an independent blog post of Steven’s.

We chose to publish these two pieces in conjunction because we feel they provide a multidimensional perspective on one community member’s thinking about audience engagement—the first from the angle of the artist, and the second from the angle of the audience member. Spirited discussions around audience engagement and the audience member’s and artist’s relationship to criticism (among other topics) emerged from Culturebot‘s Everyone’s a Critic at On the Boards on March 7th, and we’d like to keep the discussion going:

1. Who do you create your work for? How does this influence your creative process?

2. How would you characterize your relationship to criticism, as an artist or audience member? Does it influence your process, or the way you respond to work?

3. What kinds of critical conversations are occurring in your community? What—if anything—do you think is missing?

 I. Who do I create my work for, and how does it influence my creative process?

I find it dismaying when artists focus more on creating work for their own fulfillment than on their connection with their audience. Focus on fulfillment is well and good, if your work’s ultimate audience is private, without cost. However, once I charge an audience admission to witness my work, I consider it a personal responsibility to communicate with value to my audience.

Value is not selling out. It is an exchange of meaningful substance.

Any work you present to your audience is subject to their scrutiny. You ask of them some degree of sacrifice (their money, time and attention), and in return you sacrifice the leverage of control over perception of your work. The moment you begin presenting for a witness, judgment of your work is passed to your witnesses, your audience.

No matter how personal my motivations for making work, I ultimately create work for the general public—often people I don’t know and whose mindsets I possibly don’t understand—but to whom I must communicate the work I have cultivated for them to see.

While most artists give little thought to audience perception in the process of creating work, I find it to be an important consideration as I craft my ideas into a cohesive piece. I am ultimately communicating, and if I’m not understood in a meaningful way, my effort to communicate is for naught.

II. On our local culture’s aversion to real criticism

We’re afraid to openly, honestly and constructively criticize each other because we’ve created a culture in which people are culturally taught to attack and ostracize anyone who takes significant or fundamental issue with their work, e.g. long stretches are boring, it lacks identity, it’s not compelling, whether as a whole or in significant parts…real problems that impact whether or not the public is willing to pay $10-20 or more and invest 1-3 hours of their limited free time to see it.

We need to recalibrate our culture so that it’s acceptable to be constructively blunt. Tact is an excuse not to tell the truth out of a belief that the truth would upset someone who has made the mistake of considering their own art sacred. Most people who speak up about a piece needing work do so because they care about the performer and the work and want you to succeed—not because they hate you and want to cut you down. If they wanted to cut you down or wanted you to fail, they would just ignore your work (and there are plenty of people I know in the scene who don’t like me and handle it by doing just that).

You should not be verbally/textually attacked by people or given the cold shoulder at events and shows by entire groups of friends because you spoke up about not liking a particular show or performer’s work, or said something someone doesn’t agree with. Our culture needs repair.

Steven Gomez comes from a world of theatre, clown and comedic improv. He is now studying and developing his own brand of theatrical dance.

In one of my early club moments, I was inspired by a beat I hadn’t heard before to climb up onto a black dance cube in the red, green, yellow, blue spotlights and that’s where I first heard the deep droning voice in the song that went “People are still having sex. Lust keeps on lurking… Nothing makes them stop. This AIDS thing’s not working.” This was high school, often in the evening I was having sex with men in public bathrooms but I didn’t call it that, it was a secret world, at the clubs I just wanted to smoke pot and drink cocktails and dance—I needed to get away from everything that’s what dancing was about. It wasn’t true that “All the denouncement had absolutely no effect,” but I could pretend when the floor was shaking with the bass.

That was back when you knew the drug dealer was the one with the bleached white hair and the lunchbox with smiley-face stickers on it, you didn’t really have to hide your drugs yet, not even in DC and I could just go crazy on the dance floor it was my space my place to go crazy I needed that. At the beach with my sister I played something by New Order from Technique I was showing off all my dance moves I mean I didn’t have special moves I would just go with it. My sister looked at me like I was crazy, I said that’s how people dance at clubs. And then we went out on the balcony with the boombox echoing off the cement leading out to the ocean and we danced for the echo, for the cement, for the other balconies, probably not for the ocean as much because by the time we remembered the ocean we were just dancing.

Later, after I got away, there was Cajmere’s “Brighter Days” with that track clack bringing you right into the vocal hold and then back to clack track but always building. By this point it was all about something clanky, something banging, give me some horns but mostly just that pounding bass layering drums repeating sample layering bass pounding drums yes yes please more yes. Screaming when the beat got knock-you-down overwhelming and breathe-deep soothing at the same time or that sample came at the exact moment when you couldn’t possibly handle it or just because you saw the wrong person at the right time or the right person at the wrong time or because there was something missing I mean there was nothing missing for just that moment with the sweat pouring down your face your eyes bringing the beat into your body your body taking it.

So I’m starting conversations with everyone on the way home or at least saying hi and waving. They advertised minimal techno but then it was that beat throwing me into stumbling grace, the way you watch people’s moves and build into and away from collapse like anything is possible and then at the end when that guy came up and said thanks for dancing with me. A straight guy doing the raver jock thing oh that was so sweet I mean I wasn’t exactly dancing with him except that I’m aware of the bodies in the room and how we interact until I’m not aware of anything except this breath.

But the endorphins, like I’m asleep and awake at the same time because of all the sensation in and under my skin. Then it’s the next day, and I’m sitting outside the movie theater because I can’t figure out how to sit inside without too much pain—I’ve tried moving around and even getting up to stretch, then taking off my shoes because my feet feel swollen, then even my socks because it feels too humid and stuffy in the theater. Then someone gets the person working there to tell me I can’t eat the food I brought, so I go outside and stare at literally hundreds or maybe thousands of ants crawling up six metal water fountains on the edge of what looks like a miniature sports field. It’s art, or near art anyway, and in four of the water fountains there’s pigeon shit in carefully delivered rows.

I think about eating while sitting on the toilet because the bathroom has a better cooling system than the theater anyway, but then the same employee who told me not to eat in the theater follows me into the bathroom—I’m guessing there’s no rule prohibiting me from eating in the privacy of a bathroom stall, but I feel strange and conspicuous so I go back outside. I’m sitting on the steps, but then there’s so much burning around my neck and down my shoulders so I decide to stand up. Although I don’t want to eat standing up so then I sit down again and Derek comes out, he says oh you’re eating—I was just checking to make sure you’re okay.

He goes back inside, and then I start crying because I’m not okay, I’m really not: I hate that doing something so simple as dancing brings me here to all this pain. The way the beat bends forward and back, hands up into flip twist around the floor just another platform, hands into hands so many hands into bodies another floor around bodies into eyes stretching eyes stretching light into air. And yes, this song where the light is purple, green, red winding out of the dark into all these bodies, me, on the dance floor, and I wake up thinking I should start a club except wait, I can’t even dance for more than seven minutes in my house without hurting myself, sometimes even the seven minutes hurts, I mean it usually hurts something. I can’t decide whether it’s better to do it anyway.

I’m telling Derek about how I get nervous when I decide to go out. Like yesterday I paced back and forth across the street from this one scenester bar, but there were too many people smoking outside—I couldn’t deal with walking through the crowd and what if someone wanted to talk to me, then I’d be standing in the middle of all that smoke. But sometimes I get nervous about just the idea of going out and then I keep rushing to the bathroom to shit. Or I’ll get to the door of some club and I’ll get that sinking stomach drama, well that’s always happened but there used to be more of a chance that once I got inside I could walk into the music making my eyes close and it would send me to the sky.

Tonight I’m thinking of going to this disco revival night, even though I hate disco, mostly because it’s taking place in the basement of 1015 Folsom and years ago I went to a club in that basement every Tuesday, it wasn’t like the rest of the club all fancy just a basement finished in a kind of unfinished way, with a low ceiling like maybe you’d hit your head on the pipes if you jumped too high, and everyone would dance like crazy. It was a Tuesday night so we were dedicated and I’d always get that calm rush from dancing except I remember standing outside at 4 a.m. after they closed and all these people were getting into fancy cars and I was trying to find a ride, no one would give me a ride. The club was called Together.

Then, just a few months ago, this guy on the bus asked me if I went out to clubs a lot, I used to, then it turned out he remembered me from Together—he started going on and on about how it used to be all about the dancing you could be anybody and just dance it didn’t matter whether you were straight or gay, who you knew or what you looked like, what kind of clothes you wore it was all about the dancing. And if I let my eyelids flutter a bit I can remember him too he used to spin around and jump up and down he was a straight guy who wasn’t afraid.

But then there’s that certain kind of nostalgia so specific to club life, like you can take any horrible place and suddenly it was the place where everyone got along when the drugs were great when there were no drugs when the drugs were actually fun when everyone was different when everyone was the same before the straight people the yuppies the suburbanites the tweakers the tourists took it over when the music actually built it hit you over the head it was soothing it knocked you down it was all about the vibe when the DJs actually knew how to spin when two hours was a warm-up not a whole set when DJs would play for the music not for the crowd when DJs would actually play for the crowd when DJs would actually spin records when people would actually make out when everyone wasn’t just interested in sex when there wasn’t so much attitude when there were freaks when there was attitude when people were interesting when people actually had sex when the music was actually good when it wasn’t about who you knew when everything was cheap when everything wasn’t tacky when you knew everyone when people actually dressed up when everyone wasn’t so dressed up when you could have a conversation when the music wasn’t so loud when clubs actually had good sound when people would stand in line when there wasn’t a line around the block when they didn’t frisk you when things were safer when everyone wasn’t worried about safety when people would talk to one another when people had fun when everyone got along.

But anyway I’m thinking of going to this disco revival night, even though I hate disco I like that it’s in the basement of 1015, which I’ve just heard was originally one of the big bathhouses in the ‘70s, so I’d like to look for evidence, maybe those pipes. Plus, there probably won’t be smoke, 1015’s a big club with too much to lose, they wouldn’t risk letting people smoke. A big club with only a few doors that seal like a fortress and this night is in the basement so there’s no way for everyone’s smoke from outside to get in. And even though I hate disco, I’ve heard these DJs can actually spin.

But I was talking about my nerves, so of course I’m not there yet. Derek wants to know why I get so nervous, so I think about it and it’s strange because either I can’t engage and I end up feeling claustrophobic, or I get too excited and then as soon as I’m out of the public eye I can’t function I’m just my own head caved in. I wish there was another option—Kid Koala’s on now, and when Derek goes to the bathroom I try a few moves and when he comes back out he’s looking at me with a mixture of excitement and sadness. I’m sad too because even a few spins and twirls the look in my eyes it’s that space I miss the head side to side hands flinging I mean I’m feeling it. And then, just when I’m about to joke that I’ll probably hurt something just from these few moves, I notice a pain in my side I don’t want to say anything because it’ll make me feel hopeless.

I was wrong about the music it was great. I was wrong about 1015 because everybody was smoking I mean everybody it was like no one had ever passed a law. I’m not in favor of the legal system but smoking destroys me. I wish other people would realize that, not about me just about other people but they refuse to. There’s plenty of room outside to smoke but no it was inside, everybody was smoking with excitement like they were committing an incredibly transgressive act. Years ago I used to smoke and maybe I smoked that way too. I was wrong because I stayed I mean I knew people were smoking right away there was no way not to know but I couldn’t turn around. I mean I didn’t.

The place was beautiful—they’d remodeled it so it’s a circle with booths on the sides no pipes on the ceiling now there are little lights hanging down, hundreds of them almost like glow sticks in different colors, somehow it looks elegant and everything shimmers and almost the whole place is the dance floor in the center. I even loved the music when the beats got layered like house or dissonant like broken electro except it was disco don’t get me wrong I know where house came from. People were festive on the dance floor, sure the ‘70s look was everywhere but it was more styled than usual and it’s sad that the only way queeniness trumps masculinity is when it’s high fashion damage, but I’ll take damage over masculinity any day.

Maybe I could have left if I hadn’t been so surprised—I was surprised by the space it was gorgeous like a cabaret but bigger like a crazed spaceship landing pad. I was surprised that I loved it, even with all the smoking I wanted to dance and once I started dancing I was there. On the dance floor everyone was sweat-drenched letting go I even knew some of the crazier ones and I liked that. I remembered how much I can love clubs all that concentrated energy like you’re in a different world where you can watch people watching people watch me I love looking in their eyes and dancing slow and close and fast and far and faster and closer and smiling everywhere and I knew I was wrong.

Dany was working these beautiful queeny dance moves somewhere between vogueing and disco diva and ‘90s clubkid she was in white, white in the white room so much sweat it was fun to sweat and shake then John who said I haven’t seen you in a while and we hugged in all that sweat. I kept thinking I should go before I get tired but really I didn’t get tired I just kept dancing or sometimes walking a little and trying to find the air but there wasn’t much air. Running into people and then dancing again, this one boy with scenester stubble who was maybe the hottest in the room for me I mean in the sexual way those big eyes he kept staring right at me and I stared back but I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong for staring. I wasn’t wrong because I didn’t get closer to him, I mean maybe I should have gotten closer but I was feeling that place of everywhere at once with my body moving into calculated collapse using falling to find falling apart I mean I am falling apart but not now this is what it means to dance.

I was working the sweater Steven sent me from a thrift store in LA, this gorgeous old sequined wool sweater, sequins in blue yellow purple magenta green teal diamond shapes. I hadn’t found the right event for it because wool’s usually too warm for me I mean too warm for a layer I don’t take off. Tonight was the night for this sweater because it was cold out really cold for San Francisco and I figured it would be cold at 1015 too. I almost turned a whole clashing outfit with a torn part of a prom dress around my neck but decided on the pale green corduroys and sparkly purple belt I made the right choice. Even though I was wrong, I made the right choice about my outfit. I felt like I was sparkling. too. I mean I was sparkling, but I should’ve taken one look around and walked right back outside into the fresh air, the drizzle everyone’s complaining about oh the air felt so fresh but I couldn’t turn around.

“Together” is a chapter from The End of San Francisco, published by City Lights.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of two novels and five nonfiction anthologies – and, most recently, a memoir, The End of San Francisco. The book launch for The End of San Francisco will be Friday March 29, 7pm at Elliott Bay Book Company, so please come out and say hi!!! Mattilda loves hugs, and is also the editor of Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, a Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.