Bruises too filled him with curiosity. / I could not meet this need, / I hear she did.i
What I mean to say is I attempted self-mutilation for a very long time and I simply do not have the constitution for it. What I mean to say is I think the central question of dance is, what are you willing to give? My answer, finally, is not enough.
Desire doubled is love. Love doubled is madness.ii
What are you willing to give? Dance requires you to give yourself over. It necessitates abandonment.
Not just of free time, hobbies, parties... It demands you abandon yourself. That slippery, elusive thing seems to require madness. Obsession.
It’s like touching dry ice. Slimy and fishlike and burning cold. You can’t ever really hold it in your hands.
Ella and I were talking about Anne Sexton’s suicide. How strange it is that people speak of it as if it was inevitable. Like that is the price she paid for Greatness. The price all poets pay to commune with the sublime.
I will never be a poet. I have always been ashamed to be seen wanting things I can’t have.
I've been opened and undressed. / I have no arms or legs, / I'm all one skin like a fish.iii
The Normandy therapist asked me about the hole. If I’d tried to fill it. She didn’t seem to get it. It’s not a hole, I said, it’s more like a space. A hole is a carving out of what had been. I don’t think there was anything there to begin with.
Isn’t a space a something? She asked. I didn’t like her. Too philosophical. I don’t know but I’d like to make it smaller, I said. She really wanted to interpret that as I’d like to make myself smaller.
I think the ideal dancer’s body would end up being quite horrifying — this long, extended mass of limbs, jointless and stretched beyond proportion. Hollow, bird-like bones and a fluid, eerie grace. And underneath that papery skin only hard, smooth muscle, sinewy and pulsing, jerking in rhythm with the bass like a second heartbeat.
I learned a Forsythe piece once at the studio in the Marais. We spent four hours a day in rehearsal for three weeks and we couldn’t even perform it. Choreographic copyright law prevents you from publicly performing, distributing, adapting, or reproducing a piece. You can learn it from someone with the rights, generally a 1st or 2nd generation Forsythe alum, but it can never leave the studio. Not until you can inhabit it the way his original dancers did.
My teachers always told us we stand on the backs of Greats. We inherit their technique and their pieces, jealously guarded as they are. They also told us that to be great, to be worthy of that inheritance, you need to be an individual. That never really made sense to me, not when so much of dance is stripping down your individuality. No colorful makeup, no dyed hair, no jewelry, no nail polish. No warmups, no clothes outside the class leotard, no moving an inch out of synchrony.
My teachers always told us we stand on the backs of Greats. Somehow I always interpreted that as cowering at their feet. Someone said models are the saddest creatures in the world. It’s like that — like how models aren’t anything until you put clothes on them.
We are blank spaces to be filled in.
We have this deep sadness between us and it spells so habitual I / can’t / tell it from loveiv
It seems like all the Great writers wrote letters. To whom I don’t know. Plath said I am more myself in letters. It seems like the content is more important than the subject.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong about it all. Isn’t every letter a love letter, in some way? Or a letter of passion? You can’t write a letter without passion. Not a good one anyway. So the content can’t really exist without the subject — only the themes, the abstract, shapeless, misty edges of a feeling. Isn’t that all a reader can get from a letter, ultimately? The chasm between what we mean and what we say, much less what is heard, is so wide. A gaping valley. A singularity.
From,
Loving Correspondent
Betrayer
Apostate
Reverent Devotee
To,
Liar
Sadist
Lover
Stranger
Dear Dance,
Save me. Teach me how to save myself. I have never wanted something as desperately as I want you. I have never been able to make myself need you.
Some can. It’s like you’re in their DNA. It’s those girls that improv in their kitchens and do choreographic side projects for fun. It’s those girls that cross-train on the weekends and willingly come into the studio on off days. It’s like God taught them to dance in the womb so they were born screaming, aching, chasing a longing only you can satiate.
They don’t have to abandon themselves for you. You inhabit them. And yet I’ve carved myself out for you but never received that peculiar sacrament of possession. A page left blank, dull pen nib, dust accumulates on the inkwell.
Sometimes I think I was born with a hole in me. All the longing and none of the satisfaction. Every shiny gold trophy, every stuck pirouette, every big and small accomplishment feels good for about half a second before that longing returns. A cycle of not good enough not good enough not good enough. You taught me that. That’s a lie. You didn’t. I’m sorry. You see what you make me do in the heat of the moment?
Sometimes I think I’m a terrible person. I realized very young that as much as I love you, you will never love me back. I realized very late that that isn't universal. You want curling feet and hyperextended legs, long limbs short torso hard muscle soft bone. No hips no breasts no ribcage. You want a clean life I live a dirty one old story.v My ballet teacher used to tell me his grandma had two broken hips and could still dance better than me. You’d still love her better than me.
That’s a lie. You wouldn’t love her either you aren’t capable of love. I’m sorry. I don’t know. I think I’m describing it all wrong. It was so good for a while. It was almost Great. But there’s a point in any relationship where you start to ask yourself when it became nothing more than a series of calculations — a weighing of good and bad days to break down the love into parts you won’t choke on.
My mother loves you. I meant to give this to her when she asked why I quit you. All I said was, I just don’t think I love it anymore.
Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is / to watch the year repeat its days. / It is as if I could dip my hand down / into time and scoop up / blue and green lozenges of April heat / a year ago in another country. vi
This past December was my first time not performing in my studio’s Nutcracker. I spent six straight years as a party girl before I was cast as one of Clara’s friends on pointe. It took another two to play Clara. It was December of 2020. We couldn’t perform on stage due to COVID regulations, so we recorded the show in-house, masks and fluorescent lighting and all.
Of course, we shot it in Livermore. Our branch of the studio was in South San Francisco, but almost every weekend, we’d drive an hour and a half up to the Livermore studio to rehearse with them. Natalia was the Livermore Clara. Cesar dropped me during the battle scene and I cried for an hour in my mom’s car. They reshot Natalia’s take because she forgot a step, but we didn’t have time to fix mine.
Most of my dance experiences are like that. Fierce joy and even fiercer disappointment. Glitter and terror.
This past December, I watched Dorrance Dance’s tap nutcracker, my second time seeing the company live. For some reason, instead of the dancers, I couldn’t take my eye off the shiny tinsel backdrop. There was a blurry square in the corner of my vision where the edge met the curtains.
It was as if I could see a flaw in the weave of reality, a loose thread of frayed tinsel. And if yanked at it hard enough I could make a hole big enough to step through, back to that first time, a year ago in a different country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape.vii
Not much use to you without you am I. / I still love you. / You make me cry.viii
A grocery list of ways to say I don’t know who I am without you. Here is what I want:
Pointe shoes that don’t hurt
A real Nutcracker
Ariadne’s string
A dispatcher to the sublime
To erase the word “ballet” from my lexicon
To remember everything, always
My mother calls me every day and asks if I’m going back to you. We both know the answer.