Archives for May 2019

In recent years the body positive movement has gone mainstream. From television to huge billboards you can find more representation of diverse bodies and the term “body positivity.” Companies like Dove and JCPenny have launched major beauty campaigns like Real Beauty and Here I am that celebrate plus size bodies. Even Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan magazine featured Plus-size model Ashley Graham on the cover, signifying a shift in traditional Western beauty standards. Despite major gains in the body positive movement the dance world “still has a long way to go” says Co-artistic directors of Big Moves Dance Company Matilda St. John and Jessica Judd in a candid interview.

Embracing Fat
The dance world is historically known for its harsh norms of body shaming and rigid standards for “acceptable dancing bodies.” In the dance industry, size 6 and up can be considered fat depending on which dance studio you go to. Dancers with larger bodies especially, size 14 and up are not afforded the same opportunities to train in studios, residences that are weight neutral, or take class without someone criticizing their body. Jessica and Matilda shared similar stories of the moment where they realized dance was no longer accessible or a safe space for their body type. Matilda recalls the inability of dance teachers to recognize form and alignment in larger bodies. “My Ballet teacher would actively discourage me by not providing feedback and later suggested to my parents I enroll in Jazz.” On the other hand, Jessica danced throughout her youth and remembers ordering her own costumes when she gained more weight. Either the dance teacher would order too small or not order her size at all. The constant humiliation and body critique force many passionate dancers to leave the studio as a means of self-preservation. It wasn’t until Matilda and Jessica encountered the dancers of Big Moves on stage having fun, in vibrant form-fitting costumes and confidently moving what society viewed as an “unsightly body,” did they find the confidence to return to dance.

In 2000, Big Moves founder Marina Wolf Ahmad set out to disrupt harmful dance culture by embracing the word “fat” and creating a single day-long dance clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area for self-identified fat dancers. The success of the dance clinic lead to Marina forming Big Moves dedicated to creating a safe, warm, body-positive atmosphere where people of all shapes and sizes can train in dance technique and perform onstage as part of a dance company. She later created Jazz-based dance company emFATic DANCE (formerly the Phat Fly Girls). The dance company was successful in breaking barriers and showing that fat dancers could master dance techniques and put on a good show. At one point, emFATic DANCE had branches on the east and west coast. Big Moves hosted classes in everything from burlesque to aerial dancing.  Members were featured in photo essays and major media outlets such as NPR, PBS, and Entertainment Tonight. The success of Big Moves also came with unintended harm to its dancers who were constantly tokenized, asked inappropriate questions about their bodies and condescendingly praised for their “bravery.” This realization led to a major organizational shift, from proving to the dance world fat people can dance to creating relevant art for fat people. Since 2006, Big Moves has focused on training fat dancers at all levels and producing numerous shows featuring multiple plus-sized dance companies, singers and performers.

On a mission for Fat liberation
Over time, Big Moves has evolved along with traditional beauty standards but has remained committed to the principles of fat liberation. Co-directors praised the body positive movement for “getting more diverse bodies in different places while acknowledging it has failed to embrace the ideas of fat liberation,” says Jessica. The Fat Liberation movement also known as “fat acceptance” and “Fat Pride” was born out of the civil rights and women’s suffrage movement of the ’60s and has led to what we now know as the “Body Positive Movement.” The Fat Liberation movement raised awareness about fat biases and pushed for change in social attitudes around obesity and overweight bodies. The mainstreaming of the Body Positive movement has marginalized many within the Fat Liberation movement by upholding ableism, hailing acceptable fat body shapes, and its lack of intersectionality.

All bodies are acceptable
Moreover, body positivity values individual liberation over collective liberation which has resulted in certain body shapes being praised while other bodies are condemned. “In the body positive movement you don’t see the same enthusiasm for a size 26 and up as you do for a size 14. Larger bodies with hourglass or the pear shapes are viewed as acceptable fat bodies. While disabled bodies, apple and barrel shapes are looked down upon. With Fat Liberation, all bodies are good bodies worthy of celebration!” says Jessica. At a Big Moves performance you are likely to see a cast of size diverse performers. In recent years core members have grappled with clearly defining the criteria of fat and question if they should have a size requirement for membership. After long debates and conversations, the group settled on opening its dance classes and workshops to all body types with the only criteria being comfortable in a group of dancers that self-identify as fat. Even with this openness to all body types, Big Moves has yet to see anyone under a size 12 participate in any of its programming. Revealing there is still a stigma associated with the word fat. Matilda also pointed out the body positive movement has yet to recognize systemic oppression and how racism, sexism and homophobia affects how fat bodies are experienced in the world. Jessica also raised concerns of ableism and healthism within the Body positive movement. Notably, pointing out plus size people are praised “when they display they can do everything that thin bodies can do. Health does not define your humanity. There are fat bodies that won’t be able to dance or walk just as some thin bodies will not be able to.”

Humanizing all bodies through dance
emFATic DANCE performances present a vision of a world transformed, where exciting performances can and do come from artists who resist the narrow dance-world norms. For over a decade Big Moves has produced and co-produced dozens of events and concerts that provide a platform for dancers who have limited opportunities to perform. When the co-directors were asked what they hope audiences will take away from a show? Their answers were simple yet profound; to entertain and humanize all bodies through dance. Matilda hopes audience members will feel “joy and an increased possibility of the human body. To experience their bodies in new ways and their perception of other bodies, soften.” Jessica echoed the sentiment of dignifying all bodies. “I want people in the audience to feel represented; to see themselves, their child, parent or relative on stage. For self-identified fat folks in the audience I not only want them to be inspired to dance but to go on a vacation, wear a swimsuit, go to the public pool or eat alone without the anxiety of how people will react to their fatness.”

Big Moves remains committed to centering marginalized fat bodies in the dance world. It doesn’t matter where someone is starting from, whether with or without prior dance training, they will work with you. Big Moves holds gender inclusive open rehearsals with emFatic DANCE on the first and third Sunday in Berkeley. In open rehearsals there is a strict no-diet-talk policy and never pressures dancers to perform. And there are multiple opportunities to engage with Big Moves and emFATic DANCE coming up this Summer and Fall.

This article appeared in the June 2019 issue of In Dance.

My hairdresser is obsessed with tracking Mountain Lion sightings in the Santa Cruz mountains. She follows locals on instagram who live along the lion’s territorial maps and also the online  Santa Cruz Puma Project tracking system. I understand the appeal. There is something about these majestic, elusive creatures that pulls our imagination. Perhaps it is the tingle of possibility that comes from thinking about a being that sets its own trajectories within an organic relationship to ecological principles that operates outside of our constrained territorial grids and power lines. It is incredible that something so wild, so powerful, so mysterious lives so close. A sighting feels both magical and sacred. That is how I feel about Fog Beast.

The first Fog Beast duet I saw was in a bar in May 2011. Your Favorite Game was a striking combination of a tavern song and a christening ceremony. Or maybe it was a wedding? Co-directors Melecio Estrella and Andrew Ward emerged from the crowd with beer mugs raised, their bodies vibrating with a focused magnetic resonance. Is it a ritual? A story? A dance? Are they summoning the Evangelical Rapture that was predicted to happen that month?

Fog Beast evades definition and so as I track them through the years it is an alchemical quality along, with a refreshing irreverence towards expected narratives, that leads me closer. Much like my hairdresser, my obsession has led me to connect with those others that live in process with, and near, the Fog Beast. This connection has helped gain insights and glimpses into the making of their new work, The Big Reveal, a performance-as conference-as ritual, to be held at the Asian Art Museum in mid July. Fog Beast is unpacking and spreading out the ragged vestiges of our colonial inheritances and the contemporary corporate narratives that shape our patterns of belonging or not belonging. As they work together, they invite each performer to bring themselves and their histories into the creative process.

Melecio Estrella shares “I’m really interested these days in lineage. Where we find ourselves is a result of strands of lineage on so many levels braided together – biological or familial lineage, our dance and performance lineage, our social governmental lineages, so much of the way we live and think is inherited from who and what came before. As collaborators we show up in the room with all these lineages… and in this way we are so rich with material embedded in our dancing bodies and emotional topographies. What we do with our time together, what we choose to pass on through our work of embodied storytelling, is one way our lineages may continue through us to future generations. We are not looking to hire dancers. We are looking to gather a sensitive, funny and skillful group of kind humans to play with these entwined fibers of lineage.”

Hearing from some of the performers in The Big Reveal is particularly poignant given that Fog Beast is building the piece collaboratively and drawing from the performer’s personal experiences and identities. Below are excerpts of conversations with Patricia West, Danny Nguyen, and Wailana Simcock. Also performing in The Big Reveal will be Melissa Lewis, Janine Cayla Trinidad and Katie Faulkner.

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Fog Beast performer Patricia West (pictured above) holds a central role in their productions. The depth and nuance of her performance practice reflects the Fog Beast values in transcending traditional delineations. In He is One of Us (2017), Patricia’s personae as the corporate CEO commanded our attention immediately upon her entry. Her amplified armor was shed and dissolved throughout the piece until we rediscover her in a transformed state engaged in a pivotal, powerfully sacred solo that energetically ricocheted through the room. We are transfixed and maybe even a bit healed as we experience the personae slip away and Patricia emerged in a fully embodied and revealed state. As she and Fog Beast were making that solo, the emphasis was on her ancestors. Through her dancing (and later in song) she was both welcoming them and honoring them.

Damara: How do you experience yourself as part of Fog Beast? How would you describe your experience as a collaborator so far?

Patricia: If you are in the room, you are part of the Beast. I feel that as a collaborator of Fog Beast, they embrace the individual as part of the whole. I feel that my voice is heard and responded to. My curiosities and intrigues oftentimes become those of the group. And we all share the value of process. And Fog Beast doesn’t avoid the uncomfortable, they don’t fear saying or doing something that speaks a truth.

Damara: Do you have any thoughts/reflections about the content of the new piece so far that you would be willing to share? What are you curious about?

Patricia: Recently, I’ve thought about the “conference culture” in our society today. Conferences fulfill various needs. Sometimes, it’s a simple check mark needed for work or a promotion. Other times, it is an opportunity to stop, take a breath, reassess and reflect. Our Fog Beast piece is a conference “for the people.” I’m curious about what “people” need and want in a conference? As performers, what can we call on for the audience to engage in, both in the performance context but also after they leave that space. What is our collective responsibility?

Damara: You have performed all over with Fog Beast. And context is always important to their work and its content. Do you have any thoughts about performing in the context of the Asian Art Museum?

Patricia: I do feel that us performing in the Asian Art Museum (and the fact that one of the Fog Beast founders is of Asian descent as are several of the other performers) places an emphasis on race and those that identify with being Asian-American. I’m curious how this will play out in the piece. I know and hope we will be mindful of all the possible interpretations this may bring forth. Also, by performing in a museum, I feel we are committing to making our piece pertinent to history, culture and community.

I have long admired Fog Beast artist Danny Nguyen and his capacity to entice the audience into laughter with a blend of dry humor and absurd physical comedy. In our chat, Danny offered resonant reflections on how humor has enriched his experience being a part of the Beast and how he is bringing his personal explorations about identity into the process of building The Big Reveal.

Damara: What motivates you to contribute your artistry in the creative process with Fog Beast? What draws you in? What keeps you coming back?

Danny: I think the humor that comes out of it. I’m really not into a lot of dance shows because it gets so serious and I just can’t get into it. So we do dance moves like everybody else because you know it’s dance but within all of it comes out funny stuff for me and so I like that.

Damara: At the December Joshua Tree retreat with Fog Beast [to] I noticed that people shared parts of themselves that they might not have in a rehearsal studio. Like, I’m not sure people knew you were a bad-ass musician and could play the saxophone and also fix everyone’s electronics. And I learned you like to cook and ride a bike super fast, and that you grew up in Palm Springs which is an hour away from Joshua Tree. There are so many dimensions to who you are, which might never be revealed in the context of that blank rehearsal space. Do you feel like that’s a benefit to the work that Melecio and Andrew are trying to do with The Big Reveal?

Danny: Yes totally because dancing and doing this kind of work where we are trying to get into deeper subjects, it’s easy to share some surface layer stuff and get to know each other that way so when we come in here (rehearsal) we can go to the deep place but it feels ok because we’ve already established a surface level relationship. Because we are all so complicated and three dimensional in who we are – just seeing the dance side of the person is so flat.

Damara: How are they drawing from your personal experiences as they construct The Big Reveal?

Danny:  I think a big part of me went into the section we just built. I work four days a week at Apple and have been doing that for two years… A section that I just built with Fog Beast, and performed at the last 8X8X8, was about a reveal of a new product and I thought “oh this is exactly like what Apple does every year.”

Damara: You recently performed an excerpt of The Big Reveal in a bar in Oakland. How do feel about performing the work in a museum and specifically the Asian Art Museum?

Danny: Yeah. I mean. I don’t really know. So my first thought is that I guess I should have feelings about it and my second thought which is related to my first thought is I don’t fully identify as an Asian person. Or I don’t feel it as much as people viewing my body feel it. Right, they see me and they are like “Asian man ok cool.” I grew up in the suburbs and have always participated in things that have had more privilege and so more white people and … my circles happened to be mostly white and never really had Asian friends or even Vietnamese friends really so not a huge sense of connection to that side of me which is fully real because both my parents are Vietnamese. In me looking out as I traverse the world I don’t see myself as an Asian person [until] I’ve gotten feedback that reminds me that I am.

The complexity of identity, who we are in the world and how we are with one another is the melodic underbelly of the Beast. In opening rehearsal circles for The Big Reveal Melecio requests that the artists bring their full selves into the room with them. There is an acknowledgment that each of us has complex lives, identities and personal trajectories.

Fog Beast artist Wailana Simcock’s presence in rehearsals and performances draws us deep past the surface and we are so willing to follow him wherever he wants to take us. In our conversation we spoke about the context of Fog Beast as a place where the whole person is invited.

Damara: The other day we were talking about how it is not just your ‘dancer body’ being invited into the Fog Beast work, it’s you in a more dimensional capacity. Like your lineage, your immigration story, your family’s history, your identity and your languages. You were talking about not having to edit parts of yourself out as you work with Fog Beast. What has that been like for you?

Wailana: Coming from Hawaii we always talk about our ancestors. That’s always first. And God and spirituality. That’s revered first and then all the other details come into play depending on the project. In my schooling, in my training, I had to learn to chant in Hawaiian. I had to share where my mother is from, where my father is from, where I was born, where I was raised, as an introduction to who I am so that all of me is invited and so everyone could understand the bigger picture of me.

Coming back to the continent after being away for 17 years, coming back as a dancer, in many ways I am the same person but I have also changed. In many ways I have gotten deeper into who I am and at the same time I am still sort of lost and I realized that there are many other people like myself who feel more lost than they do connected to places of birth and ancestry because you know colonization really wreaked a lot of havoc and confusion with identity.

I feel like Melecio is trying to invite me to be my whole self in Fog Beast and I think that in his search for his identity and for who he is, we are brothers in that way. Perhaps we are both sort of lost in this world trying to find our voices and trying to find who we are and the more I feel like I do that for myself I realize that we are all doing this. That we are all looking for our ancestors and roots. Our indigeneity.

I wonder sometimes maybe for white people – they don’t question or ask who their ancestors are and what they’re indigenous to and what their indigenous languages are and they are maybe ok with just saying that they are white. And I’m like “ok I know you are white but like what kind of white? Where did your ancestors come from? What did they speak? What did they eat? What mountains did they look up to and what rivers and oceans were they are part of?

In Fog Beast I am invited to speak the languages that I speak and share them. I feel a refreshing support and I don’t have to edit myself so much.

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So come to The Big Reveal. You are invited. My hairdresser will be there. She can show you photos of her Mountain Lions and together you and she can be amazed. Out beyond the Bay Area traffic and escalating rents, a beast is traversing the hillsides, its movements revealing the mysterious ecology of connection of which we are all a part.

So come. Be daring. Show yourself. Bare your teeth, heart, your desires. Step into the conference, that is a performance, that is a ritual. Bring your ancestors. You belong there.

This article appeared in the June 2019 issue of In Dance.

As a dancer and choreographer, I always expected I would experience an injury, but I never imagined it would be something so significant as re-learning to walk, shower, and eat. Neither did I imagine I would learn how to dance with PTSD. In 2017, I suffered a near-death experience in Mexico City during the turbulent week of September when catastrophic earthquakes left hundreds dead. I was there to conduct research about dance companies that formed in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake that left the city in ruins and thousands dead. Coincidently, thirty-two years later, I experienced a tectonic shift too after falling from the third story as I evacuated a building. I have yet to process the entirety of my traumatic experience but I am starting to describe my non-linear recovery path from the past two years. One of my central concerns is examining how I dance after a near-death experience that left me with new disabilities and sensibilities. I have come to see that relearning to dance after a near-death experience is about developing new sensibilities towards my muscles that I had not known before.

Prior to the accident, my dance training included high activity movement and performance practices. I received my BFA from the University of Utah’s dance program. The curriculum resembled a conservative school with its emphasis on providing students long hours in the studio and teaching them various dance genres. From the early morning to late evening, I loved taking classes in modern technique, Contact Improvisation, Congolese, somatics, ballet, jazz, kinesiology, composition, and many others. I also had the honor of being part of the school’s performance dance company for three years, which rehearsed after classes into the late evening.

My professional experience after my time in the dance program was no different. I went on to be a founding member of the improvisational dance company Movement Forum (MoFo), dance in professional companies, and I became an independent choreographer. With MoFo, I danced in public spaces and in all-weather conditions. One of the most memorable performances was dancing outside in the middle of winter for the New Year’s Eve party outside of Abravanel Hall. I spent the summer of 2006 in Iowa City dancing for Elloy Barragan’s contemporary ballet dance company. From 2007-2009, I danced for Dance Koester Dance, a company whose choreographic style and process was notorious for being emotionally and physically demanding. Everyone wanted to dance for Steve Koester because of his fast-paced, high affect, and intricate partnering sequences and I was part of a fortunate few who had that honor. From 2011-2013, I had the privilege of getting my Master’s in England and Serbia while conducting performance research in my birth country, Mexico. I choreographed dances with a tenacity to avoid repetition, always wanting the works to be exhausting—mirroring the overtiredness I experienced and saw in my working-class immigrant family and communities. In all of these settings and spaces, I relished the feeling of my body activating the fast-twitch muscles that gave me the ability to complete powerful bursts of movement in and out of the floor or in contact with other people.

Mind you, my love for moving freely was despite, or rather because of, the multiple social and legal barriers of mobility I experienced. As a formerly-undocumented queer person of color from a working-class family who arrived to this country at age six, I was fully aware of the limits of mobility. In majority Latino spaces, machistas were suspicious of me because I was non-gender conforming. In Serbia, I was accused of terrorism for dancing on the street. In multiple states, I was accosted for being brown. When driving, I always looked in the rearview mirror for police officers. These limitations intersected with the advancement of my creative process. For example, in 2010, I had the opportunity to present a piece I co-choreographed with Molly Heller for a dance festival in New York. Lacking a federal or state-issued ID, I could not fly. I took a Greyhound bus from Utah to New York; it took me six days, there and back, to present an eleven-minute duet. Yet the borders were not limited to transportation. I was not able to apply for federal or state grants for my shows due to my undocumented status. For this reason, in 2011, I decided to go back to Mexico and start the process of becoming a Legal Permanent Resident in the US. Hence, my adoration for dancing fiercely and freely gave me what I could not access legally and socially. It was a freedom I found as a sophomore in high-school when I began taking formal modern dance classes from Becky Dyer, complementing my love for cumbia and the sense of home the social dance provided to me.

The accident in 2017 took away dance as I knew it, removing one of main sources of what I had come to identify as my source of freedom. I was evacuated out of Mexico and spent four months bed-bound to recover from complex fractures sustained on the right-side leg, hip, and elbow—all of which required major reconstruction surgeries. I was bed-bound for most of the day and would use a wheelchair when I got up to the bathroom. Medical staff at the hospital would bathe me. After I was cleared to put weight on my foot in early January 2018, I started to work on my physical therapy regime. I had the double challenge of having the entire right side of my body injured, which prevented me from being able to use a walker because I could not put weight on my elbow until it healed. This situation delayed the time I could put weight on my leg. Physical and occupational therapists would visit my house at least four times a week as part of home health care. At one point in time, I had twelve specialists facilitating rigorous exercises to get my range of motion back and to make sure my muscles were not atrophying. Their aim was to increase the muscle mass on my legs and glutes so I could hold myself up when I walked. Making the recovery worse, I had developed vertigo from the movement of the earthquake. I would get dizzy if I moved my head too fast. Also, any alarms would cause distress. I detested movement, and desired nothing but rest and stillness. I used to love movement, but the destructive shaking of the earth tested the limits of that love. Movement became the antithesis of my freedom.

The accident has challenged me to reconsider what dance looks and feels like. I have been asking myself “What is dance in the face of near-death?” every day for the past eighteen months as my abilities have changed. Right after my first surgery, I did an improvisational dance with my right hand. When my family visited for the first time, I danced with my dad on the bed to Down AKA Kilo’s “Lean Like a Cholo.” I danced cumbia in a wheelchair to bring in the 2019 New Year. I did a trio with crutches in my backyard. I danced with a limp when I took a Zumba class with my mom. With Jose Navarrete, I taught a workshop for FRESH Festival and I was always on the verge of an anxiety attack. Recently, I have been dancing with chronic pain. I avoid sitting too long because my muscles get stiff. I avoid standing too long because my bones ache. My life is dictated by a constant list of actions and movements to avoid, or positions that need constant modification. Dance has become an uncomfortable reminder of what I can and cannot do. Rather than providing freedom, dance marks the limits of my physical comfort.

The past year and a half I have been asking myself what dance after a near-death experience looks and feels like, and I have come to see that the prepositional “near” in near-death has brought me to one of the closest elements possible: my muscles. In January of 2018, my right elbow stopped recovering its range of motion. The muscles were stiffing up. One day, as I massaged my biceps and the elbow to prevent the build-up of scar tissue, I felt my muscles wanting to cry. I began listening to them as their whimpers expressed they still were traumatized from my fall from the third story building. They were having a hard time relaxing in the new environment, being unsure if it was time to relax. They were in crisis mode still. The adrenaline had crystallized between the muscles’ fibers. My bicep wanted to hear from me that it was time to heal. So I said, “Thank you for all you did to protect me during the fall. You did a fabulous job contracting and helping the elbow bone take the impact. I am so grateful for you. You protected the vital organs. You are vital too. It is okay to ease up now. You don’t have to be scared anymore. You have done your job.” At that moment, my bicep muscle and I cried together. Fue un desahogo total. I felt it release tension and I was able to increase my elbow’s range of motion. More important than seeing the increased range of motion, I was thankful to hear my muscle speak. No doctor instructed me to talk to my muscle. Quite the opposite, the doctors asked me if I was talking to a mental therapist when I mentioned to them that I was talking to my muscles. My bicep advocated for itself. I regretted not having listened to it any sooner than that moment.

Now that high affect dance is no longer freedom but only frustration to me, I have learned to talk to my muscles as a central part of my healing. It is through them that my body has become the studio. My body has become a site-specific location. My body has become an international collaborator. I have been at the gym or physical therapy five to six times a week for the past eighteen months. The weight machines are my contact improvisation companions. The vibratory sound of the same playlist has been on repeat for half a year. I have learned to talk to my muscles, and we are creating a language of our own as we listen to each other. My muscles and I have come to call this low affect process rephabulous. The word rehab is hidden inside of this motivational phrase because this rehabilitation process is about acknowledging the fabulousness of my muscles, seeing them in all of their glory and all of their struggles. However, my goal is not only prioritizing the fast-twitch muscles to be the high affect performing fibers that they used to be. Instead, I want to linger in the slow-twitch muscles too. The ones that sustain the long-endurance movement. And so, I am relearning to dance after this near-death experience with a new sensibility where I hear my muscles and the way they speak, love, and care for me. We are taking care of each other anew. The simple articulation of a single muscle moving slowly is freedom and agency on its own.

Upcoming for Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz: Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers (FLACC), Nov 15-23, flaccdanza.org; NAKA Dance Theater + Mujeres Unidas y Activas present BUSCARTE: May 2020, nakadancetheater.com.

This article appeared in the June 2019 issue of In Dance.

On January 25, 2018, Molly and Aviva Rose-Williams performed Side by Side at Paufve Dance’s 8x8x8 performance series at The Uptown in Oakland. I was there that night and have also watched the footage (deftly videographed by Erin Halley) multiple times to try to put my finger on why I consider it a perfect work. An engaging mixture of sensibilities and movements drawn from circus (spectacle!) and minimalist, postmodern dance (anti-spectacle!), Side by Side is six satisfying minutes of comedic intimacy. I was most moved by the moments when Molly and Aviva engage in brief gestural conversations, enlarging the gesture space beyond face, head, shoulders, arms, and hands to include the whole body.

Molly and Aviva Rose-Williams are Berkeley natives and also twin sisters. Their most recent collaboration, Mind the Gap, performed at Kinetic Arts Center where Molly and Aviva are 2019 resident artists, builds on the Side by Side to explore the pleasures and pains of being twins—the unparalleled intimacy, sometimes marked by playful exuberance and mutual support, other times an uncomfortable mirror to be covered with a sheet and hidden in the corner (read: they adore each other and also benefit to a degree from living on nearly opposite sides of the world). I brought my kids, 12 and 6, to that show, and all three sets of eyeballs were glued to the stage, a rare successful intergenerational performance outing—in other words, not one of us stood up to shout, “THIS IS SOOO BORING. CAN WE LEAVE?” (Yes, one of my children did that at a performance, I kid you not.) With technique, wit, and fearless vulnerability (is there any other kind?), Molly and Aviva charmed us all.

The twins grew up with parents who Aviva says, “both appreciate the arts and both feel like anything’s possible.” Early on they trained in circus, first with Splash Circus Theatre and later as members of the San Francisco Youth Circus from 2006 to 2009. After attending Berkeley High, Aviva and Molly auditioned for the National Circus School in Montreal, a grueling, four-day experience that resulted in neither being accepted. Aviva: “It was awful. They cut people as the days go on, so if you’re left at the end, you’ve seen all of your friends get cut. Mol got cut and we were auditioning together, so she ended up having to come in just for the hour that I needed her to do our act. It was so unpleasant.” When Aviva was sitting in the canteen with the final 30 auditioners, a young man rushed in. Aviva: “He had his coat over his head, got on his hands and knees, and started running around the canteen whispering, ‘There’s a circus school in Quebec! Come audition. Auditions are next week. Tell everyone about it!’ Though I came back to the Bay Area to study nursing at USF, I realized, ‘Oh! There’s another circus school in the world.’”

Molly spent three months in Bolivia and then went off to Middlebury College. Aviva spent an unfulfilling year at USF and training in the professional acrobatics program at the San Francisco Circus Center before following the advice of that “crazy guy.” She auditioned at École de Cirque de Québec, got in, got on a plane, and never turned back. Upon graduating with a degree in Chinese Pole in 2013, Aviva and cohort-mates Helene Leveau, Benjamin Renard, and Constanza Sommi, formed the circus collective À Sens Unique (“one-way”), and relocated to Renard’s hometown of Le Mans, France. (I highly suggest you pause your reading and watch a few À Sens Unique videos on YouTube to get a feel for their charming blend of circus arts and physical theater.) Aviva currently resides in Brussels but tries to visit the Bay Area as much as her tour schedule allows.

Molly started dancing in college, and continued, somewhat to her surprise, after graduating. Side by Side was the first piece the two made together—a test-run of sorts to see what might happen if they were to bring these parts of their lives that had developed separately from one another back together. Mind the Gap, a full-length show, felt like the natural next step.

One of the themes of Mind the Gap is the geographical and psychoemotional distance the twins have experienced since graduating high school. Much of the verbal text in the show explores the sisters’ mutual but not always simultaneously experienced urge to individuate from each other. In a gorgeous moment in the piece, Molly unwinds herself from an intertwining duet and says, “Every time we separate it feels like my heart is being ripped out of my chest and part of me is being hollowed away. But without all these miles between us, I don’t think I could have ever learned how to be by myself.” Then Aviva says, “Or with other people,” and Molly says, “Or with other people.” The way they look at each other is as two separate souls, one softened into a deep pool of understanding and care into which the other can see herself shine. Throughout the work, we see them take turns being the reflective water for the other.

This loving listening appears in the partnering, the unison work, the easy laughter, and the generous turn-taking on stage. Watching Molly and Aviva perform, and listening to them talk, their sororal love illuminates the space around them—like in Frozen! (except without the imbalance of one sister having ice powers and the other heteronormative desires).

What follows is some back-and-forth between Molly and Aviva. You’ll notice my absence—these two clearly have had a lot of practice talking to each other.

On their creative process

Molly: Before every performance, Aviva and I would set intentions or questions: what are we curious about, what do we want to find within the experience? I hadn’t realized until we were doing that together that I do that myself when I perform solos. But doing it together and having the conversation every time, we would actively decide to think about pacing and energetic flow or about what it means to perform the piece from where we are right now as opposed to where we were when we created the movement.

Aviva: Mol’s extremely articulate. All I can think of is a cardboard box next to you, simple and bland when it comes to articulation.

Molly: [Laughs.] The entire piece relies on feeling the realness of our relationship. And yet there was almost a distancing from our real life relationship and a leaning in to our artistic, creative collaboration that needed to happen in order for the relationship to feel really alive in the show. Something that’s been so exciting about working with Aviva is finding a collaborator who can match and expand my physical interests as well as having a completely different creative domain in terms of how we might use a physical language to convey or investigate something.

On the roles of dance and circus

Molly: My whole life growing up I did acrobatics, played soccer. It always felt like there was something external about the physical experience. When I started dancing I feel like I actually met my body. My first dance class was with Andrea Olsen at Middlebury—experiential anatomy. There was very little so-called dancing. It was mostly touching our bodies, finding how things worked, exploring ranges of movement. As I started to investigate a new relationship with my moving body, I realized there was also incredible capacity and potential in dance for the athleticism I had grown up loving. Now that I have these skills I can actually feel it when I’m doing it.

Aviva: The thing I find most interesting about working in circus is finding everything that’s in between the things that people have already found. Especially on pole, I’ve noticed there are specific positions you can get in and normally a trick is getting from point A to point B. How do you change point B so it’s something that’s never been seen? How do you rewrite these things and make them unexpected? This goes towards dance: how do you change rhythm and change a body’s buoyancy in space so that it becomes unexpected? Then for the performance, you have to figure out what you’re communicating with all of that. That’s where I think my work veers towards dance because it really is movement exploration.

On generating movement

Molly: We approach movement exploration really differently, which was one of the hardest parts of the creation process. My experience of your approach is that it has a lot more to do with pathways and I’m interested in felt experience and a broader narrative element, the experience of the energy, and the experience of the event, which is more intangible. Your process is more concrete in a way that can be shared between two people.

Aviva: I feel like creating movement and creating things in general are a series of choices. And in general you can’t make bad choices. Any choice that you make can become something else over time or reinspection. For me to get to a reexamining I just need to create something and find the logic within it when I’m working with other people.

Molly: Hearing you describe it that way, in some ways our process is not that different. I feel like your body and intellect have a more harmonious relationship and your intellect doesn’t stifle your body as much as mine does. The relationship between my intellect and body is not quite as intimate, the translation isn’t as easy so I have to take more distance and then come back to it later. Our physical process is somewhat similar, but mine happens over a longer period of time.

Aviva: One of the things I loved the most about working with Mol—and I loved a lot of things—is being able to come in as a circus person from a very specific environment, and be like we’re making something. It didn’t have to be circus or dance or theater. We can use our voices. We can use guitars. We both thought that if there were risks we weren’t able to take before, this is a great place to take them.

On the audience

Molly: Maybe this is my projection but I feel like everyone wants to connect and most of the choices we make every day of our lives are somehow related to the desire to connect with others. I think it would be silly to think someone was making art in a process completely devoid of that desire. Art is a really beautiful way to connect with others and to connect with ourselves.

Aviva: Coming from circus I’ve seen the opposite where people love training, they love the physical engagement with their body, they love how it makes them feel, they love the way that it makes them look to themselves and a lot of performance that I’ve seen also feels like just a step, if you train this much and you want to validate it then you need to perform to make money so the performance doesn’t feel that important, it’s a way to validate their training experience which is really a connection to their body. There’s not much riding on any sort of connection.

I had one final question for Molly and Aviva: What was the driving question for Mind the Gap?

Aviva: A lens of oneness through our twinship to talk about oneness with all people.

Molly: Where did we come from? And where are we now?

This article appeared in the June 2019 issue of In Dance.