September 2023: breathing

We don’t just plain die. We die in a direction.

Still from video documentation of the wasp project, performed as part of ODC’s State of Play Festival, August 2023.

I am (I claim) a recovering concert dancer. I haven’t thought in steps and phrases for some years now. I’ve had to find some other way to track the development of my practice — or, indeed, to know what my practice even is. Because I’m concerned with feeling actual in space, the skill I happen to practice most is breathing. It sustains everything I do, in a very literal and non-cutesy way. After all, I can’t carry myself or my work if I’ve never felt my own lungs grow full.

Maybe that’s why many of my recent works, including the wasp project (which I shared at ODC in San Francisco this August), tend toward the deathly. Pieces like They’re Not Corrections, They’re Changes and O Shit are slow journeys through hazard, into and out of enclosure. This includes the struggle to breathe deeply and fully, to speak and to sing. Nothing less than wind is my ambition. Lord knows how this kind of work is supposed to thrive at a dance festival. But my wounded dancer-self never asked; he demanded it. He’d mastered silence and holding his breath. He cowered under language, the kind that renders his heights and expanses as wastes, warnings.

My only recourse, I believed, was to flee. I aimed to reach somewhere before dance, literally, when in stillness I could actually feel my lungs yearn toward my diaphragm, that dome of muscle. A space I’d learned to access only with my back against a hardness. The search for healing can become a trap — hence, in these pieces, the hums and hisses, groans and gurgles, moans and cries and wails, all songs of stuckness.

Thankfully, many expressive forms were forged within enclosure. Some of them were handed down to me. the wasp project, with its roots in storytelling and sermonizing and poetry, sent me tunneling. My whole life I swore I’d never be a preacher. And wasn’t that what I’d be doing as I bore witness to my pain, denouncing the sinfulness of dancing, calling down hellfire on the field? I did all but fall to kicking and screaming, pleading with my spirits for something else, some other way to share this message. I thought the work would be a liability: too angry, too artless.

In whose voice did I hear these worries?

I swore my whole life I’d never be a preacher. So my spirits told me: well then, don’t become one.

When I say ancestral knowledge is a saving grace, I recognize it at work in the wasp project. To say I am ‘recovering’ or ‘relearning’ black vernacular expressive forms would be inaccurate, because I never forgot them. Haven given them place (however vexingly), without making them an identity, my work weaves a surface for itself. In this space, I receive with grace the impressions that alight on my great net of being, that thrum then constellate. The dancer laid to rest at last. I breathe.

One knowing I’ve inherited is that we don’t just plain die. We die in a direction. And so, as I pass away from concert dance — as I die to it — what might I be passing into? Toward what horizon do I rise and glow?

Assume there is no
where to go, no place to
be got to, be got to be
got to be
got to be

For this here gift of standing
on one spot, all poised and graceful,
I thank my indexical inheritance —
where the house is just one room
and the church is just one room
and the school is just one room,
my world, bounded
by some border or another:

the railing on the porch,
where the dirt road disappears,
the back wall of the shack,
all visible from there,
that place
the doorway

— from the wasp project

You can watch video of the wasp project, presented by ODC as part of the State of Play Festival, on ODC Connect until September 15th. Until next time, be well.