Give Me More... of what?

As both an avid reader and dancer, I am always thinking about how new concepts and ideas that I stumble across in my research might inform movement.

My current work, Give Me More, first emerged as a meditation on fascia or connective tissue. In the last few years, my teaching of anatomy and somatic practices has led me to dig deeply into this amazing part of our bodies. Fascia not only connects our bones, muscles, and tendons, it also plays a significant role in our nervous system. While I am excited by the versatile material itself, I’m also a fan of fascia because it dismantles mechanistic views of the body that have been at the forefront of anatomy teaching for many decades. I tend to get excited about all kinds of things that ask us to unlearn outmoded concepts, as we are presented with new ones.

The many scientists and somatic practitioners who are advocating for a more holistic view of the body are doing so at the same time that intersectional feminism has come to the fore of socio-political conversations. The current US administration has an impressively wide-reaching ability to hurt people, places, and things that I, and many in my community, care about. It occurred to me in the wake of the 2016 election, that shifting our perspective on our bodies from being a collection of disparate parts, to being a whole composed of diverse yet interrelated movements, could shed light on a helpful way to look at our society in general, and the Resistance in particular.

At the Woman’s March early in 2017, people held signs and shouted slogans for a vast range of causes. It was a moment of beautiful realization to see that our love of the environment, our need for access to healthcare, the fact that Black Lives Matter, and that immigrants make our culture richer, are ideas that connect many of us. Give Me More grew out of my meditations on connectivity both within the body and in our society.

I imagined dancers connected by a huge piece of fabric as big as the stage. Of course, I have no budget for such things. But as I toyed with the image and ways to create it, I ran across several headlines that talked about waste in the fashion industry and I realized that I could very likely get all the fabric I needed for free… I sent ONE email to the faculty, staff, and students at Marymount Manhattan College asking for donations and, in less than a month, people brought me over 200 lbs of clothing!

The epic net/quilt that is being constructed out of these clothes reflects the concept of interconnectivity, not only because of its origin in community donations and the fact that it is sewn together, but also because clothing carries so much meaning. The donated items are rich in stories of gender, size, class, age… and as the dancers interact with them, these meanings are accented and subverted in a variety of ways. I was particularly struck by the highly fashionable women’s clothing I was given that still had the tags on it – purchases that were undoubtedly made in order to make the buyer feel well adorned, but then discarded as fashions changed even faster than one can remove a price tag. This led to me to contemplate the role gender plays in our conditioned need to consume. The costumes and props that we purchase to declare our masculinity, femininity, or disregard for binaries, become invaluable aspects of our identity… right before they become landfill.

All of this contemplation on clothing led me to think a lot about drag. Drag performance has been an interest of mine since graduate school (2007-09), when I made a study of it, and even more since 2011 when I began to practice it. Drag performance reveals the fluid, performative nature of gender expression as a whole. When one begins playing with gender in our society, one is playing with power. For me as a woman, to dress as a man, I am freed from concerns of beauty and kindness. I am invited into a world where my dominance is assumed. No one stares, no one cat calls, and people stop asking me why I have not had children. As a female choreographer, my work is judged by how "good" I look performing in it, while as a male artist I am free to express, debate, and discuss ideas.

Gender inequality in the dance world has always seems to me to reflect the culture in which it is produced. As demonstrated by the #MeToo movement, our culture has some serious work to do in this arena. The fact that the dance field is primarily female while the power structure that choreographs, presents, and curates festivals is primarily male, is increasing being recognized and critiqued. Shifting this oppressive hierarchy however, means taking on a level of gender inequality that is so prevalent as to be almost invisible to many members of the dance community and its audience. The time seemed right to create a new drag character, a male choreographer in particular, who is making a piece about the “Power of Woman.” Every time in the last year, that I have mentioned this concept to a fellow dancer, their response is inevitably to roll their eyes and say, "Oh, yeah. I've been in that piece." I collected specific stories about the painful misunderstanding and misrepresentation of femininity and power from 14 dancers and wrote the male choreographer's monolog as a composite of these stories. It is an aggressively ironic and cathartic scene.

So… a piece about gender, consumption, and environmental destruction has emerged from a meditation on fascia.

Connective tissue also feels key to Give Me More because it has been supported so generously by people in my community who, despite the frustration of these trying times, still believe in the power of art to uplift the human spirit. I am incredibly thankful to all of the people who supported my successful Kickstarter campaign in order to be able to pay my collaborating artists.

When the Kickstarter launched I was attending a Dance Scholars Association conference in Ohio. It was a wonderful event, not only because it reconnected me to people from my Bill T Jones dance family, my Graham dance family, and my Seattle/Graduate School dance family, but also because I was reunited with so many folks from my family of fellow makers. In the past, academic dance conferences have drawn strict lines between makers and scholars, but it is clear that these boundaries are now breaking down. Makers are scholars, who are able to present their own research and create their own contexts. At the same time, the rich creativity of scholarship is being recognized; interconnectivity once again.

So, it seems that the ways to think about connectivity are limitless; the body, our communities, what we fight for, who we know ourselves to be, all this is a web. I look forward to sharing Give Me More, and to spinning many more connective threads with all of you.

Give Me More premieres at Theater for the New City Jan 25-27, 2018.

For Tickets... www.smarttix