I like stories. I like to listen to stories, and I like to tell stories. One thing about Alvin Ailey and his choreography is it always tells a story. Whether that is the story of sin and redemption played out in Revelations or the story of suffering and triumph in Cry, Ailey always knew how to construct a moving narrative without speaking a single word. One of the reasons why Ailey shows continue to draw large audiences is because of this story telling—the characters draw the patrons in, and they return again and again to watch those stories unfold. As someone who grew up idolizing these dancers, characters, and narratives, I am humbled by the opportunity to explore these stories, and tell them as my own to our audiences in April.

 

It follows, then, that for me the most enjoyable aspect of this process so far has been developing the characters in our pieces. We are currently learning a section from Ailey’s classic Blues Suite, and I have loved the journey of finding and connecting to the women we are portraying. During each class session, I feel as if I have made a new discovery: how to use my gaze to express longing, how to use my outstretched arms to express desperation, how to show complacency with a tilt of my chin. Most recently, I began to explore how to “move as if your clavicle is smiling.” Under the tutelage of Renee, I can feel myself growing as both a dancer and as a storyteller. I cannot wait to see how I will grow in the final two months before our performance.

 

Working with Matthew was an incredible experience, mostly for having the opportunity to watch him craft a beautiful piece of choreography in front of our eyes. Despite the beauty that I found in his work, I did occasionally struggle with segments of the dance at the beginning of our time together. It is only with hindsight that I can begin to understand why this happened. I believe that I allowed myself to become too focused on the steps and the technique, and I didn’t allow time to find the soul within the piece. It wasn’t until one of our later rehearsals with Matthew, where we all sat for an hour and spoke about what heritage, diversity, love, and beauty meant to us, that I realized how noticeable it is when those things are missing. I won’t attempt to define these four words here, as that discussion could spawn several books, but once I began to search for those words in Matthew’s choreography, it began to make more sense both in my body and in my heart. I am interested to apply the character work that we’ve been doing with Renee to Matthew’s piece and to see how my interpretation of his movements changes.

When I learn a new dance technique, I feel as though I’ve been transported into a new body, and am learning to walk all over again. I’ve always had two legs, but now I suddenly have three. I have to figure out how to use what is now an awkward third leg. But once I figure it out, that third leg can be put to good use. The learning process may not be pretty—it often isn’t—but the lessons are so valuable.
In our classes and rehearsals, Renee Robinson and Matthew Rushing have urged me to “stay in my body.” A correction made more evident by learning a new technique. Who would have thought that I would need reminding for such a seemingly simple notion? But then, I stopped to think, as I usually do… because I am a philosophy major… In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul while facing his own impending death. Socrates doesn’t fear death because he argues that when we die, the soul separates itself from the body. When someone devotes their life to practicing philosophy, they are also devoting their life to separating the soul from the body. Philosophers aim to see past their bodies. Just because my vision tells me that there is an external world, doesn’t prove the existence of the external world. To find an answer to this question, instead of picking up my pencil and saying,“HERE! Here is your external world!” I sit down in what is hopefully a comfortable armchair and think. I separate myself from my body.
Upon realizing this, my correction to “stay in my body” becomes ever more poignant. I do love philosophy. I find joy in abstraction. But in the dance studio, I’m doing a different kind of work. Ultimately I hope to be able to convey something to another person with my dancing. Communication—either to myself or with someone else—requires tangibility. Even metaphors require tangibility. Otherwise they would lose their power. An intangible metaphor wouldn’t communicate anything. In my philosophy classes I practice separation from my body, and in my rehearsals with Renee Robinson and Mathew Rushing, I practice finding my body again.
It seems that Ailey dancers are masters of the paradox of abstraction whilst maintaining tangibility. Their dancing moves me. As both Matthew Rushing and Renee Robinson have described to us in our discussions, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater holds up a mirror to their audience with their performance. One might wonder how on earth these superhuman dancers can be a reflection of what I am? I’m no superhero. What is it about their dancing that gives me that impression? I suspect it is the tangibility—or as Renee Robinson has described it, the vulnerability—of their performance that gives me that impression. They are superheroes that stay in their bodies so that they can meet and communicate with us.

HERITAGE:

I’ve been thinking a lot about heritage—and what heritage I have the right to claim.

I was born with Mexican blood. Throughout my life, I’ve taken pride in that fact, as if I somehow earned it. I celebrate my Mexican butt; I brag that I tan—and never burn; I cherish my thick, dark hair, my big, brown eyes. But my right to be Mexican ends there: in blood. To inherit a culture, to inherit an identity, you need a point of access—and I was never given a key. My father, the bearer of my Mexican blood, actively disengaged from his Latino identity. Maybe it was a choice or maybe it wasn’t. Perhaps he too was deprived his point of entry into a culture he didn’t know…(I never asked). But if my father didn’t pass me the key, who would? Who could? 

Most people don’t see the tan, the butt, the hair, in which I take so much pride. They don’t see my roots, dug deep into the ground. They can’t see my heritage. 

DIVERSITY:

There’s a definition of diversity that calls “identity” its antonym. There are mathematical, philosophical ways to validate this claim. But I can’t support it. 

My identity is diverse. I am Mexican. I am Jewish. I am Eastern European. I am a dancer, a farmer, and a woman. I’m a four-year-old child, goofy, curious, and joyful as can be. I’m a daughter (to my mother) and a mother (to my friends). I’m an eighty-four-year-old woman, slow in my pace and woefully out of touch with current technology. I’m a performer and an introvert…yet also an extrovert. I’m a twelve-year-old boy, quick to laugh at fart jokes and anything about sex. I’m a talker, a listener, and a big-bellied laugher. 

I am all these things and more. 

LOVE:

I identify myself very closely with love. I love puppies. I love people. I love vegetables, rivers, and hillsides. 

I love deeply and I love often. 

So what is love?

For me, it is the sharing and giving of one’s self. It’s the opening of one’s spirit…to an experience, a place, a person. 

BEAUTY:

In the studio, as we all work together to create this new work, I feel lucky to partake in our collective beauty. 

 *****

The dance Matthew is creating is about all these things. Dance (and music) allow visceral and intimate access to a person’s heritage. When we truly perform a dance, we open a window into our souls, where each of us can be all the people we are. Matthew’s dance abounds in love: the sharing of each of ourselves with one another. Matthew’s dance abounds in beauty. 

Thank you Matthew and Renee for allowing us to realize and share our collective beauty. 

When I do the choreography right, I feel full.  But I’m simultaneously making more and more space.  Because the space grows forever, full can never be reached, and yet that’s the goal. 

According to the gas laws of concentration, the more space that one dancer’s individual energy fills, the more dilute and wavering that energy should be.  Instead, as the space expands and energy spreads and fills to the edges, it gets stronger.

 If the space isn’t filled, my movement is false – it’s the shell of the dance and I’m not present and it’s not right.  It can’t possibly look right like that.  Like a paper mâché’d balloon with a hole in it: the layers of glue and newspaper support the balloon’s frame despite the substance flowing out of the puncture.  But it’s hollow and the air inside is now “flippant” if it can be, flippant because air ambles in and out with no necessity, no fight, no strength, no purpose.  A raw balloon blown up and tied, that balloon is full.  Poking it causes it to morph; the air inside sustains outward pressure and focuses on maintaining the life of the balloon – all of the molecules working with the same intention.  There’s strength and also fragility.  Don’t pop it. The fresh balloon has a lifespan.  Unlike the paper mâché balloon, which is set, quite literally, the fresh balloon might wither without perfect conditions or full cooperation of every molecule inside.

That’s Matthew’s movement for me. 

I feel sometimes, especially when it’s first given without any repetition, like the paper mâché balloon.  I am dancing the choreography but my energy doesn’t fill the space.  My energy is constant and I make the outlines or the carcass of the dance. But over time, I aim to release what’s in my head and let it flow into a fresh new balloon and blow it up, hold it up, fill it. 

 

dearest rachel,

 

i am so sorry you didn’t get my last (first) letter.

 

there are so many reasons why it makes sense for me to think of you in relation to the ailey company. my presence in your country of birth and your presence in mine, as quebec media has published, over the last two weeks, a series of pieces defending blackface, always generates in me a deep sense of humility.

 

the letter i wrote was about a sense of possibility.

 

humility because our sense of what is possible is always contingent on hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses, but it is also determined by what our bodies have learned. last week, on the last day of our two weeks of intensive rehearsals, I was so tired my legs were shaking and my arms were sore before the end of the warm up, which we did sitting, in part, i imagine, to better feel the movement of our torsos.

 

there is so much i have taught my body not to want.

 

i can’t really express how much dance has meant to me. it might be that the near totality of my sense of my own beauty is due to ballet and modern dance. and nina simone!  perhaps some tango, despite everything. working with renee robinson has been an unexpected exploration of my body’s relationship to beauty and love.

 

these past few months have prompted a second reflection on the relationship between my dancing body and my walking-in-the-world body.

 

this is the first time in my dance (non)career that i have so consistently experienced a new sense of possibility. allow me to explain. as you know, there is this tension in dance between creating beauty with your body and loving your body. by love I mean acceptance, support, care, preservation. with renee’s body work, the love, the care, takes you to the beauty. the longest extensions are reached by releasing joints and muscles and movement is enhanced by perfecting cooperation in the body, namely through opposition.

 

my resolution this year is to let go of fear and grief.

 

one bright moment last week came about two hours after the very work out that had my legs trembling. renee informed me that my weight was a bit backwards, on my heels, and though she had mentioned this at least twice before, this was the first time my body understood what that meant. i stretched my spine and reached my body higher, arms up and shoulders relaxed, and as i did, i felt my body go forward slightly before renee’s approving gaze.

 

i am grateful for this feeling of possibility and even hope.

 

what possibilies exist for a black body in quebec? my sense of what possibilites might someday be created, through constant work, have never been greater than since i met you. renée speaks of dancing with the body you “organized” (aligned, extended, balanced) during the warm up and i can’t help but connecting that notion to your investigation of somatics your call for us to practice radical politics in all areas of our lives starting with our intimate lives.

 

here’s to dancing with the bodies we organized –

 

nathalie

There are a lot of things about this project that make me feel frightened, uneasy, inadequate, and apprehensive. I will not talk about any of them right now. What makes this project different? What about it has made me feel this way—has made me feel at all? This isn’t like a lot of other things that make me feel, because a lot of other things that make me feel are bad. Nothing makes me angrier than someone else making me do something. I hate being made to do things, and I hate that my response to it is hatred. It doesn’t matter if what I thought was just a nondescript slab of indifference before because the act of argument pricks and prods my truth to life until it is the truth as far as I can tell. And I need to make you see that I’m right, even once right and wrong cease to be relevant, when they cannot be at all because we are answering different questions by now, or expressing the same truths in terms that are different, personal, idiosyncratic and (unacceptable?). Argument drags us far away from the truth, creates dissonance where there is none inherently and that cannot be sustained. Departure from equilibrium. Over time, even the tiniest shift requires immense energy to maintain. And the energy might not even be yours, but its expenditure wounds you like it is. I wonder if the cure is more empathy, more perspective, if this asphyxia might be the inability to breathe with another’s lungs. But it’s true that if I could just breathe better on my own then I maybe wouldn’t need that to begin with, and I could stop gasping and hating you for stealing my air. Security. Practice: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Not a breath wasted for dissonance. Sometimes in rehearsal, I feel like I can breathe better. The corrections we get here are special, bequeathed unto each of us individually, so that we may reach our most beautiful. We become the movements, and they are still the same movements, but each of us touches beauty in a different place—the one is many and the many are one. No worrying over “what types of movement look good on me,” for movement craves ownership. Make it yours, stop doubting and just do. And the space that we create when we just do is where beauty moves in. The corps that we are creating—and it literally feels like one body sometimes—is a world away from the corps of ballet bots I once so desired to disappear into. I would have crumbled my body and soul into sparkles and sprinkled them on every starched white tutu in the world for a chance to be part of that beauty, and it would have been beautiful, but it would no longer have been me. Now I know how to make myself beautiful, and it brings me ineffable joy. I never believed that dance could really create joy, but I do now. I’m glad that Ailey works are referred to as “ballets”—to me the association seems to breathe lightness into a sublime art weighed down for years with every imaginable form of human oppression. Another breath of air, and Redemption. Perhaps we are redeemed through compassion and nothing more. I want to ask, How can compassion be, when we cannot know each other—cannot know how another body feels when it dances, how another mind twitches and writhes as it reaches for truth? Maybe compassion is not knowledge or understanding, but celebration of the individual. Maybe compassion sometimes means trusting another when you don’t believe them, and believing that they trust you too. Maybe compassion is the opposite of fear. Learn to not fear the truth we’re not telling, forget there ever was the truth, celebrate your truth and my truth, for each is powerful. Forget what we thought we thought. What is left? People breathing together, and there is beauty in the rhythm.

After the initial thrill of being told our project would be with Ailey this year, there came over me a nagging tide of unease. This initially light lapping of worry at my ankles swelled, in the months that followed, into a fearsome wave, which consumed me. This is a company founded on a culture, on an identity, I thought to myself, that is not only not my own, but which has been wronged by people of my identity all throughout history. This is a body of work about pain and suffering at the hands of white-skinned America, and about triumph over such pain and suffering; having white-skinned hands, I feel by definition excluded, and justly so, from Ailey’s heritage. And until this project, I have been content to be excluded; to quietly support those around me, some of whom are my dearest friends, in their relationship to the culture which fuels artists like Ailey, while accepting what I thought was my own historical role: stepping back and letting other voices be heard.

The Ailey project has wrenched me from this quiet avenue and forced me to confront my dis-ease: I am dancing what I deeply believed to be not mine to dance. How to proceed? I could continue in my detachment, tread ignorantly about the issues the project raises for me in terms of my own race and its history. (What will it look like, anyway, for a white girl to be dancing Ailey choreography?) I’ve decided to approach the material in a way which I am finding painful, but also the more honest and more fruitful: to discover my relationship with Ailey’s heritage by dancing his work.

Today in ‘Stomping the Blues’, the Yale College class taught by visiting Professor Constance Valis Hill as a companion course to YDT’s Ailey project, I watched Blues Suite for the first time. The section that YDT will be learning, ‘House of the Rising Sun,’ has rekindled my discomfort with my own race and culture. And I am frankly horrified at transitioning from Matthew Rushing’s choreography, into which I have found points of access beyond racial or cultural ties, to Ailey’s performative grappling with African American despair and subjection. Instead of the tenets of love, beauty, diversity, inheritance, which to some extent I can claim for my own, here lies before me an expression of a culture I fear disrespecting by even just engaging with it.

Now, I am engaging.

I’m thankful for Matthew and Renée, because they have created an opening for me – Blues Suite will be less daunting for their guidance. Now, what remains, is the actual discovery. I need to trust my body, and trust the choreography, to lead me through my unease, into a more grounded relationship with the culture it contains.

June 2010.  China.  I hear the stiff intonations of Mandarin peck at my inner ear as I am engulfed in a crowd of Chinese people that resembles a spew of volcanic ash being puked from the Boeing 777-200ER.  For the first time in my life, I look like those who surround me.  In front of me stands Raven Hair, behind me Saffron Skin, right next to Chocolate Eyes, and Almond Lids.  Tina steers me though all these could-have-been-familiar faces as I try my best to keep focused and not get lost in place or mind.  Before I realize what has happened, I am sitting in the backseat of a car listening to the smiles and watching the frantic words of love and happiness exchanged between thin lips and small ears of mother and daughter, reunited after months of separation. 

Tina is an international student who lives in China.  I, like the other local day students, am a “day-walker,” affectionately called so by the boarding students. Tina and I met about ten months ago during one of the first few days of our junior year at a New England boarding school, an ivy-covered bubble nestled between stonewalls and grassy fields.  We both were surprised to learn that we were born in the same city.  Tina spent the Christmas holidays that December at my home.  She helped add tinsel to the tree, ate gołąbki and pierogi with my family on Christmas Eve, played with our kitties, and met my cousins, whose hair color matches their fiery personalities. She had gotten her dose of culture, and I was ready for mine.

I stare out the window at a sky of slate and listen to the bubble-gum pop music seeping through the radio.  “I love you,” “baby,” “we,” plopped throughout the Mandarin melodies.  My brain is too fried to try and catch any familiar words that Chinese II might have prepared me with.  It is my first time back in this city since 1994, when I was only seven months old, and I have no idea if anything has changed.

Throughout my childhood I had fantasized this trip many times. This journey would allow me to finally understand what kind of life I might have had if not for my abandonment and subsequent adoption into an American household as an infant.  I imagined walking the fisherman’s path where I may have or may have not been left swaddled with a thin red paper blotched with my supposed birthday.  I imagined looking into the eyes of passersby to find warmth and common history.  I imagined returning to the orphanage, where little old Asian women would smile at me and cry and pinch my cheeks.  They would say through the softness of their touch and wrinkled up faces, “We remember your chicken-leg thighs, your dumpling cheeks, the way you sucked your tongue.  My, how much you have grown.”   

Growing up I strongly believed that I was very much both Chinese and American, and God bless you if you tried to challenge me.  Many peers, and even strangers, tried to contest my culture and heritage.  Some would debate my American-ness with a slight tug at the corner of their eyes, others with a passing song of  “ching, chang, chong.”  Still, others tried to undermine my Chinese roots.  “You are American, and only American.  Your birth parents are not parents, only your adopted parents are.” What really bothered me, however, was not what they said or did, but the suggestion that they knew more about me than I did – that they could decide who my “real” parents were, what was considered my “real” hometown, if my sister was my “real” sister, and which race, culture, and ethnicity that I “really” belonged to.

***

It’s been a few days since I arrived back to my birth town.  My stomach rejected the duck tongue and jellyfish, and I am really craving a juicy barbequed burger.  My clothes melt to my skin, and I am still not used to the horns, exhaust, smoke, and stenches this city breathes.  I miss the chirping crickets, freshly mowed grass, and air conditioning of my rural home in the States.  Tina’s mom hangs up the phone and tells us that today is the day.  She cannot promise anything, but she is hopeful.

The sky is steel, the car ride is long, and I am anxious.  We have left the speeding buses, the curt voice blaring exercises to the school children, the innumerable threads of windows and doors, windows and doors, the metal clicks of bicycle chains, and the clouds of cigarette smoke.  We have left it all behind.  I, sitting in the back seat of a car on my way to the orphanage, am watching trees slide across my window and do not quite know what to think or how to feel. Tina and her mother are in the front seat.  Since I do not understand their rapid Chinese exchanges, I pass the time in thought.  My mother warned that the chances of actually getting in were low; she had talked to many peers who’d failed. Think rationally, I tell myself.  However, feelings of hopefulness bubble to the surface of my mind.  I’m with a native.   Surely she can argue our way in.

I leave the safety of the car, feet hitting the worn down pavement.  The searing molasses air intermingles with my sweat, and I am reminded of the two pouches that I keep hidden; one filled with paper money featuring Mao Zedong and Benjamin Franklin under my pink and purple plaid shorts, the other under my gray tank top with any official written document of my being: passport, birth certificate, the like.   From the latter, I supply Tina’s mother with pictures and documentation.

There is an official looking man sitting behind a window in his dirty uniform.  I study the powder blue painted acid-rinsed gates.  At their prime they may have looked nice, but now the metal’s tears of rust leave them weathered.  The two round painted flowers, one on each dilapidated door, mimic the hardened eyes of the government-paid guard.  Tina’s mother tries to reason with this man but her attempts are futile.  Although the orphanage has relocated, I am allowed no further than a couple feet within the gate to this abandoned building.  I see only the dull outline of a concrete structure somewhere on the horizon, concealed by misty gray fog, a fog I can’t seem to escape. 

We crawl back into the car, and the radio sighs “I love you,” “baby,” “we.”  As we drive to the new location of the orphanage, I try to decide if I will be disappointed if I can’t get in.  I was never present at this place as a baby.  The staff had probably all changed.  Would anyone remember me?  How would I feel looking upon the sweaty foreheads of unfamiliar babies, who like myself, are probably products of China’s one-child policy?  

We approach the newly built gate, and I can see at the end of the paved road a cutout Mickey Mouse, calling me in.  I snap a picture of myself standing beside a bilingual sign that reads “Children’s Welfare Institute.”  As I smile for the camera, I realize the could-have-beens and would-have-beens that I taste in duck tongues, hear in bicycle chains, and see in Tina and her mother are simply snapshots fluttering in the breeze.  I can chase these photos, maybe even catch a few, but they will never be a motion picture.  Half-knowing what’s to come, I walk behind Tina’s mother to approach the guard.  My eyes finally meet with his and I can hear the whirring in his brain, his eyes shifting across my face as he reads what everyone seems to read: “Foreigner.”

I have a mother, who sleeps and gardens

and reads the newspaper, a mother who eats

and swims and reads novellas, a mother who

listens and worries and cares. But sometimes

I feel like a motherless child, only I can’t say so

without punching a hole in her lungs—and the hole

is not even clean, and when she shows it to a doctor,

flesh hanging off flesh, he is not even sure what

to count. Love v. gore. When I was six my mother

told me to eat my lettuce because lettuce, she

said, makes you beautiful. Or maybe lettuce

is beautiful, is what she said, but lettuce doesn’t

make you tough and she never told me what

did. But now I am a long way from child, and we

both know dad’s not getting better, and I want to ask

is it wrong to wrap your arms around a corpse? To

hold the hand of a dead man? A fatherless adult

is not a thing, in the classical sense, but here’s where

hip hop comes in, and Cassandra, who told me once

that everyone has a weird dad and that doesn’t make

you special, and after twenty years I learned

that it isn’t lettuce heads that are beautiful, but hearts

of palm, and when father used to hold our hearts

in his palms. Only now I’m a long way from

home and I’m not sure I can go much further

and I’m not saying to put the tea on yet, but soon.

Matthew Rushing’s presence has sparked conversations of beauty, pain, suffering, and community. For the first semester of rehearsals there was not one Saturday I did not tear up. The studio, bodies, voices, and energy of the dancers and creators around me was so overwhelming because of the beauty that surrounded me. Beauty to me, after our conversations, is when a void in your heart, mind, and/or spirit is filled.

Each rehearsal was beautiful; a void in my spirit was filled that I didn’t even know needed filling. At the first rehearsal Matthew Rushing told us he was honored to be working with us and then fellow dancers began to sing with their gorgeous sound bouncing off the walls of the studio. Suddenly the tears came, and I couldn’t hold them back. It seemed as if my entire dance career thus far had all been building up to this moment, something I did not realize until cheeks were wet. With more rehearsals came more tears; the songs, movement, seeing my fellow dancers’ tremendous performances were all creating a large ball of energy that sustained me throughout the week until our next rehearsal.

Now we have returned from the long break, the phrases we have learned are about to be formed into a dance. Renee has been preparing our bodies to be able to harness the energy of the room and project it out to the audience. Matthew and Renee have been beautiful for me. They have filled my spirit with sustaining energy. Their intentions and instructions have made me a better dancer, but more importantly a more aware human being. I am conscious of my body in the space in relation to those around me and of the energy I am releasing into my surroundings that is ultimately picked up by my peers. I imagine BRL is radiating such an intense energy during our rehearsals that the city, for at least two hours, is also able to feel a similar type of beauty that I am able to witness.  I’m looking forward to seeing what an incredible and powerful piece will be produced in April, and what energy we as performers will be able to send out to the audience.