Truth. I come home in my body through movement, landing after falling is essential. Holding myself for partnering, I create shelves and fulcrums, knowing my movement is a rigorous form of identity. I recognize myself in the constants of formations, walking my dogs and tracing neighborhoods in San Francisco, dancing in circles with friends again and again, moving over borders, states, and years. When my MFA studies took me to extreme heat I slowed physically and accelerated mentally simultaneously. Last May, as I was completing my yoga teacher training, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, and with a sharp inhale, everything froze.
On Care:
Technique. How could my body betray me? After years of understanding the body as the brain, as Hope Mohr shares, how come I didn’t recognize or know something was wrong? I stumbled through my days in a fog; a grey had cast its shadow on everything. Parenting and partnering are steps I know how to perform “full out with feeling” suddenly dulled; I couldn’t feel the cathartic high of these routines I knew by heart. I couldn’t extend my limbs to create the virtual lines of care and connection I knew as technique.
Patience. As I waited for long weeks to see a doctor, sharing this news felt irresponsible. How could I answer the barrage and multitudes of questions from my tight inner circle? What stage is it? Do you have to go through chemo? How bad is it? Are you going to be okay? Trust me, I will tell you when I know more.
What do we dance in the face of uncertainty? Trust me, I will tell you when I know more.
Connection. I still had a sense of purpose in May 2024: a scholarship from Core Power for 200-hour yoga teacher training. I initially scoffed at the training as corporate but then fell into the people and teachers around me, connecting through spiritual learning and a purpose quest. So, one of the first people I told was Ashle, my lead teacher, who encouraged me to complete the program. While I was in a sea of uncertainty, yoga was a place I could forget for moments when I was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease and prioritize being, and trying to be present. At that exact moment, moving largely in transitions and finding the smallest of movements in balance, I was OKAY. My manic brain wasn’t seeking answers I didn’t have because I was so focused on my body’s choreographies, combining strength and twists with props. I was one of many people in the room. On my mat, I wasn’t dying or suffering; I was trying to get into postures – well, maybe living is the ability to have conditions for dying and suffering, but on my mat, I was okay in my dying and suffering towards an asana. I’m not sure what the other students were going through, but it’s reasonable to assume we are all going through something. Studying Ashtanga Yoga, the eight-limb path, I practiced the step-by-step approach to the realization of yoga, or the yoke, with the universal self. Through the ethical guidelines of the Yamas and Niyamas, the limbs progress from the external to the internal and are the foundations of living an integrated life. As choreographies of being intentional with movement cultivated by focus, this differed from what I know as a dancer – movement as metaphor. My need for my mat began to change my perspective.
Ahimsā, nonviolence. Brutality, as in cruelty toward myself, the forces were thoughts in a constant wheel of worry, and I noticed the ferocity of energy against my body. How could my body betray me? As time and tests passed, I learned my body was saving me. My cancer was localized and hadn’t spread. Body still knew what to do even though my consciousness wasn’t aware. Softening, I accepted and began to move from the discomfort of uncertainty to knowing.
Gratitude. Often the theme in my cohort of yoga teacher trainees, a multigenerational group from all kinds of work and family lives, shifted my practice. I was able to practice. I didn’t care that I was getting better; the idea was not just to get into a press-up handstand in my mid-40s or get into the most intricate binds, but when we practice regularly, we grow our practice. So I grew with fellow yogis who may or may not practice teaching, but we attended to the philosophies of yoga, thinking about Patajali’s writings, and began to share our sankulpas, our reason for existing; I shared secrets and reconnected. My sankulpa: I exist to share intentional movement to create peaceful thoughts and actions. It wasn’t new, but hadn’t been articulated before; this intention has always been a part of my dancing.
Brahmacharya or moderation. As I began to share my diagnosis more openly, I recognized sweet gestures from near and far and maneuvers that stung. Suddenly, I would go from opening a care package with soft socks, snacks, and flowers to having to hold space for a conversation about another person’s anxiety around cancer, illness, and dying. I greeted friends through thoughtful texts and daily haiku emojis with Wordle stats. The abatement of conversations with agendas allowed me to notice compassionate actions that offered rituals for loss. Those who would witness me by flying into town for 36 hours, encouraging me to wonder about the guaranteed better times ahead through writing, make me laugh and not interrogate my conditions. These big hearts passed through state and international borders to lift me, and I welcomed them. In sharing this diagnosis, dancers called me from their busy lives and various tours. They held me and shared how they had made their decisions through breast cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, helping transition me from unknowing diagnosis into being in the season of breast cancer.
Santosha or contentment. Breast cancer season was filled with the heaviness of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation. They were also filled with long chats with my neighbor Sue, her cats, London and Boston, discussing opera narratives, art making, politics, and shared dreams and visions. The steadiness of a long marriage with first sips of morning coffee, friends, and dancers I’ve been directed or partnered by diligently kept me company. At the same time, nurses poked and prodded me, taking blood and trying to find veins during the long hours of sitting during chemo. I learned to move in place, exercising ideas while grasping to understand how the toxicity of the yew plant, one of the chemotherapies I received, was reducing my chance of cancer recurrence.
Svādhyāya or self-study. The choreographies of being in my historic neighborhood, the Castro, became a site for critical study as I didn’t need to go far to practice moving. I walked my pups, practiced yoga, and still danced. I also made shorter dances for Rhythm & Motion. My former company ballet teacher at ODC/Dance, Ms. Liz Gravelle, teaches at the Academy of Ballet on Market Street. Through unison steps shared with classmates, my friends and I would take on these needed movement exercises. When glissades showed up, we would get dinner. These steps of settling in my neighborhood, at the barre, on the mat, became my third space – where I could have another identity formed by the in-betweens. I wasn’t a patient undergoing treatment or a parent on the Parent Guardian Association; I didn’t have to be the Yayoi who was producing or researching a new work, or have people ask me what I was working on, or, even worse, how I was feeling. I could dance. My back could hurt in arabesque, and simultaneously, the speed returned in my legs and I occasionally regained a double pirouette.
Saturdays. I looked forward to going to the boxing gym once a week, even when neutropenic, and had to be careful about catching colds and viruses. Led by my dancer friend Kelly, I simply pushed and pulled. I wasn’t working out for fitness gains, but again, I could connect with my body through movement and my body’s capacity to heal my surgeries appropriately. Surrounded by a bunch of silent boxers who rarely speak and electronic dance music, I could be all of me, in those moments — bald and sweaty. No one asked me about my lack of eyebrows, why, or how I felt — EVER, and I was discharged from being labeled as a patient. The spaces and edges we rarely dance in until we have to live in them, allowing our movements to verb a comfortable identity of ourselves. Movement is my immediate and natural identity in flux, and by finding opacity alongside the wings, ducking in and out of the light, I was okay, maybe even more than fine. My third spaces are open, wide spaces where I could be left alone to move in unison and in time with friends and strangers who cared enough about my being there, not about the conditions I was dancing through.
Asteya or Non-stealing. How quickly we forget. I speak of movement and forget the stillness. They could be just balances, moving so microscopically it’s barely detectable. But it’s in the moving I revive the body’s memories and heal. As I write and put words together and order them, I reveal my process, moments becoming a frame for understanding the choreographies of grief and care, relinquishing the last of my fears to open up to opportunity.
On grief:
Aparigraha or freedom from grasping. My triceps touch my knees; I almost knock off an injectable medication on my arm. Rolling in the dark, unsure of my pain levels, a soft blanket confines me to wonder without action. An inability to focus, a fog, a dampening of acuity. I lean into rest and watch my thoughts but can’t get attached to them because I lack energy. Is this grief?
Iśvara-pranidhānā or surrender. I’ve learned trust and resilience by learning the choreography of a heavy body. Radiation treatments require a patient to be still; my dance skills of helping my partner by holding my own weight interferes with the work of my radiation team who moves me with a sterile accuracy. The physicist I have never met exacts precision, triple-checking every day of treatments so I don’t endure unnecessary harm. I’m on stage atop the cold table with a giant rotating machine beaming on me. The physicist is not lit, but we are performing together for a run of 15 days. Oncologists and teams of specialists, nurses, physical therapists, and nutritionists with constant eye contact are signatures of caring; they glow superhuman as they recite exact percentages from long research. The whys and hows of cancer research reveal the benefits of systemic chemo, nutrition guidelines, radiation, and endocrine therapy and how they can blast rapidly reproducing cancer cells, differentiating their reproduction from healthy cells. As tests and measurements are taken, fidelity to my life becomes paramount. Why this allegiance now? Because the time to move is now.
Śauca or cleanliness. Unnameable but feelable, I return. What is the new normal? I’m prepared that it will take a full year to understand the new normal, and formations are already changing. I go beyond my neighborhood across the country as I write this piece, and I’ve been in multiple rehearsals, including making YES! a new dance on consent whose budding is felt like wrestling in the desire to premier and tour. As I’ve identified the steps to consent for YES! recognition, discernment, and action without attachment – I learned from dancers, doctors, therapists, and teachers during my cancer season. We make decisions for our bodies and hope we are making the best choices. If my medication makes me sick, I demand another choice. When I bought my family daruma dolls for the new year, I hadn’t thought thoroughly about the meaning of daruma. Daruma dolls are traditional Japanese wishing dolls that keep you focused on your goals. Using black ink, you fill in the daruma’s right eye while thinking of a wish. Should the wish later come true the left eye is filled in. Daruma dolls are modeled after Bodhidharma the founder and first patriarch of Zen Buddhism. Traveling from San Francisco to Chicago to Middlebury, Bennington, and finally to Albany, I took these dolls with me and shared them with friends and colleagues as I shared my work. As I write from Middlebury, Vermont, where dancer, and Professor Christal Brown reminded me we all need the daruma, or the vision to enact the steps I identified for consent: recognition, discernment, and action without attachment.
Tapas or Self Discipline. During treatment, I was visioning with my choreographic collaborator, Loni Landon, as we prepared for a commission with Robert Moses’ Kin’s New Legacies project. What would it mean not to do it all? Limit ourselves to not self-produce, teach, dance, while fulfilling our roles as partners and parents. These thoughts lingered into a mentorship exchange with Deborah Slater Dance Theater’s Winter Studio 210 Residency resident artists, Tracey Lindsey Chan and Cyrah L Ward. I struggled with the word mentorship, wanting to refine or remove the word mentor altogether. Instead, I considered my work with these artists to serve their art-making as an aid or connector.
Exploration. The storms pass, seasons change, and dancing continues. I’ve been focusing my time on my choreographic research on consent for YES! Identifying actions — the ability to recognize choices, and as I keep choosing dance again and again, becomes a strategy as I get through the melancholy of a transition to a new unknown normalcy. With collaboration and relationships, I enjoy the process of unwinding the tension my body has endured during this season of cancer. Bare knuckling isn’t a movement option; it freezes you into fear. I learned coming home to the body through the choreography of grief that there is no other side; it’s a continuation of amassed steps we carry with care. Maybe dancing together is the spiritual preparedness we need to face the risk of living — a willingness to see the truth of what is living and the knowledge that the transmutation of suffering is possible through dance as a liberatory skill. When dancing exudes a non-violent habitus, we enact our interconnectedness and learn to shift with one another. Not left to right or right to wrong; instead, I find myself defining virtues we collectively value through the choreographies of grief and care.
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of In Dance.
