CONVERSATION WITH SELF #384

What is dance to you, for you?

Good question; want the long or short answer?

Short, please.

Dance is messy, and
complicated, dependent,
productive, vast, world-
building, meaning-making,
war-torn, political, personal,
public, and private. It exists
on irradiated soil, on long-
haul flights with endless
plastic cups, on unceded
land, on promises of failure
entangled with productivity.
Dance tries to be reliable and
reproduce-able. Dance is not
always reliable or reproduce-
able. Dance is bound by
circumstances of form
(physiologies) but it works to,
and can, and does shove past
these forms. We are delightful
cyborgs, reach extended
by the technology of dancing.
A dance will sell if it is ‘the
same’ tomorrow. Dance is
perceived (mythologized) as
being consistent. Dance does
not feel consistent. I’m too
clumsy to be consistent.

Thank you.

CONVERSATION WITH SELF #1549

How do you feel about dance lately?

I don’t mind it. It’s fun. Like,
I can play around with different
futures, better pleasures, and
even anticipatory relations.
Even if it’s, you know, always
on an edge of legibility, I think
there’s a lot of room to explore
and unspool. It’s a good
material, dance.

CONVERSATION WITH SELF #9210

What is dance?

That’s awfully broad…

Take it as it is.

Dance is eroticism on the
edge, edging, entangled limbs
and lips just missing. It is the
potential disappointment
of erotics. The alien bodies
of untouchable others
intensifying. It is an amorous
exorcism and a possession.
It is the simultaneous
annihilation and utilization
of hard-to-handle practices
(and values). Dance is not
ahistorical. The history of
dance exists partially because
the bodies that keep dance
alive and pass it on change
and disintegrate and are
erased. Dance is forgetful.
And forgetful of those it’s
evicted and appropriated.
Dance forgets what it’s doing
(me too). Dance can dismantle
itself, can disconnect its
depersonalized appendages
to recreate itself in a gentler,
less problematic form. Dance
is where opinions can be
explored. Dance must be
that tough space of working
through an opinion. An open
space of asking hard questions.
Dance fears the rebuttal of
asking hard questions, showing
unformed opinions. Dance
works against a dooming
potential of being wrong, of
saying the wrong thing. It still
says a lot of wrong things.