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In Dance

The Echo Between Kink and Performance

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Editor’s Note: 

I am curious about the other creative passions dancers are into, the influence of dance on those pursuits and vice versa. I originally met Kegan Marling years ago when they were on staff at Dancers’ Group. Later I had the joy of performing with them. More recently I became aware of Kegan’s photography practice when they were shooting a show I was in. When I learned that Kegan worked as a photographer for Mr. S Leather I got really interested in the intersection of dance and kink in photography.   

It’s a joy photographing dancers, yet I’m also drawn to how movement exists outside of the dance studio and off the stage, within the bodies of those who might not necessarily consider themselves dancers. 

When asked about the confluence of dance and photography in my work, I immediately thought of the fluidity and performance within the kink community – the dramatic movement of a whip through space, the choreographed architecture of the body tied up, and the entwining of bodies during aftercare. 

There is an interesting echo between performance and kink. Terms like scene, roles and props are commonly used, as are many of the guiding principles of improvisation. I’ve heard people talk about their “pre-show rituals,” and roleplay and cosplay are essentially theater. 

The accompanying two scenes reflect some of these dancerly qualities in kink. The first set (featuring Danny Nguyen) suggests a performative energy and flow, with numerous props including ropes, floggers and roses and the Folsom Street Fair crowd watching from all around. The second set (Johnny Tohme/Welder ONYX and Rey ONYX) leans into the composition of space and entwining of bodies, and closes with Rey in their pup hood receiving aftercare. 

Kink scenes often end with some version of aftercare – a sort of closure ritual. Like dance, kink can be very physically and emotionally demanding. Aftercare is an intimate check-in with each other: How is your body? Where is your mind? What support would help? What does your body need right now to come down from that emotional and physical high? 

Perhaps this is one area where I could have taken a lesson from kink – when I think back to the crash that often came at the end of a dance performance, a little aftercare wouldn’t have hurt. 

 

A man whips another man in a kink scene.
[ID: ID: A shirtless, bearded, brown-skinned, muscular man wearing blue shorts whips a lighter-skinned man in a kink scene outside in front of a large crowd.]
A table with props is set up for a kink scene involving two men.
[ID: A table with props is set up for a kink scene involving a man in blue shorts and a black leather ONYX vest and a man wearing an apron over his naked body, outside in front of a crowd.]
A man leans back in the act of cracking a whip.
[ID: A brown-skinned man with a well groomed black beard and faux-hawk, and rose petals scattered at his feet, leans back in the act of cracking a whip as a crowd looks on.]
Two men gaze affectionately at each other.
[ID: Two men gaze affectionately at each other: a brown-skinned man with tattooed arms, his hands behind his head, and a lighter-skinned man with a salt and pepper mohawk carefully wrapping a red rope around the tattooed man’s torso.]
A man in the act of tying a rope in a knot around the wrists of another man.
[ID: A cropped photo of arms: a lighter-skinned man in the act of tying a red rope in a knot around the wrists of a brown-skinned man whose palms are pressed together.]
A man gently cradles the jaw of another man who leans back in pleasure with a rope gag in his mouth.
[ID: A lighter-skinned man with a salt and pepper mohawk and beard gently cradles the jaw of a brown-skinned man in a black beret who leans back in pleasure with a red rope gag in his mouth.]
Two men holding and looking at each other.
[ID: Two men holding and looking at each other: a man with a salt and pepper mohawk and beard in yellow briefs with suspenders, and a man in black chaps and vest in a leather puppy hood.]

Credits: 

Photography by Kegan Marling, in collaboration with ONYX Northwest members: Graylin Thornton, Danny Nguyen, Johnny Tohme (Welder ONYX) and Rey ONYX. ONYX is a nationwide organization formed and operated by queer Men of Color who enjoy the leather and kink lifestyle. The organization provides information, resources and community activities to help educate and empower BIPOC men. (onyxnorthwest.com). Additional thanks to The Academy SF for providing the location. 

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

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He is Killed as a Scapegoat But Reborn: Brontez Purnell and Nijinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’

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Photo by Danny Peck
[ID: Brontez Purnell in 2009. He is wearing white overalls and is shirtless underneath. He has his index finger in his mouth seductively. He’s looking at an orange box placed on the ground.]

I had got a call from the beautiful and stunning Zari Le’on, (whose work and presence I had admired for a decade plus). She said she had read some of my books and got inspired. In her cool Black girl Cali cadence she said to me, “Do you want to come train with me and do Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”?!”  I was like, “Wait, holy shit, GIRL, WHAT?!?!?” I am one to NEVER turn down a challenge…shots fired, it was ON.

I had met Le’on some decade before, when she taught a Dunham workshop at Laney College that had COMPLETELY blown me away. I had started my dance journey AT Laney College, as a Dunham student, and ballet student. I had learned under Danny Nguyen, Lynette DeFazio, Lynn Coles, and had got a scholarship to dance with Colette Eloi, danced in her contemporary Haitian company for about 8 years. But it was around the time that I saw Le’on’s Dunham demo, and the Katherine Dunham seminar at Laney, that I was transfixed by the fact of how new it felt. I had only danced with conga drummers. Seeing her connect the tenets of the routine with a single solo electric violin player and two dancers condensed a lot for me aesthetically. I had always thrust my body into dance backed by a pulsating drum beat, at the time made a good part of my money go-go dancing in this band Gravy Train!!! And worked the go-go box at the time at too many underground clubs to recall. What I mean to say is, my body had always acclimated to dance being associated with a very loud noise. This felt eloquent.

I said to Le’on, “Abso-fucking-LOUTELY! But like, you know I’m old and fat now? And haven’t been in a ballet class in 2 years?!”  (She said we would work on it).

Brontez Purnell, naked, throwing a waterfall into the air.
Photo by Christopher Duggan
[ID: Brontez Purnell is nude and turned sideways. The photo is a still capture of him tossing water into the air and a singular stream of water is frozen mid capture. There is popcorn and discarded dental floss on the ground around him. He is standing on white parchment paper with vases of flowers placed in the corners.]

Now let me be clear, I have always been a spooky Witch boy who LOVES a séance, a dedication, and a conjuring. When I was making “Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of ED MOCK” (my documentary about the late Ed Mock) what I realized was that there is this kind spiritual work in trying to recover a language of the past—it’s like studying a personal form of hieroglyphics—the work always feels like some form of spiritual intervention you are putting on yourself. Certainly not for the weak of heart. But also, “The Rite of Spring” wasn’t just any ballet. It was the rallying call of what the work of dance would be the rest of last century. Nijinsky humping that nymph’s  veil on stage said to the world, “I am about to make a ugly thing, very beautiful” OR maybe it said “I’m going to make a beautiful thing, very ugly.” Either way, both statements are important—the key word here: transformation.

Did I also mention that I am one of the most horrible ballet dancers that has ever existed on the face of the planet?

I remember being 26 years-old and a male ballet teacher stopping me in class and said, (while I was at a barre routine), “Child, you are so far b e h i n d the others…how do you EVER expect to dance professionally?!”

Two very STRONG thoughts crossed my mind at the time.

  • Who the fuck said I wanted to “dance professionally”?! I was taking ballet cause like, I don’t know, I just wanted to feel pretty. And also…
  • I thought to myself, “Am I about to like, traumatize these teenage ballet dancers when I beat this dude’s ass for talking CRAZY to me?” (I went to the dressing room and cried instead.)

Now cut to present day, when I say “fat and old” I don’t mean these as apologetic statements. I just have to reckon with the fact that sometime during quarantine, my knees do a nosedive, and turning 40 changed the landscape of my body. THAT SAID, Le’on had said something to me that sparked so much courage: “You just simply have to come back to class and put the geometry of ballet back in your body.”

THERE. THERE WAS THE THING I NEEDED TO HEAR.

I can’t explain it, but all through my 20s and 30s the physical act of dancing ballet was something I could never quite “feel”—but after a long absence, when I’m at home just playing by myself, a tendu is something I can now finally intellectually and physically connect to my entire hip (it was something I feel like I spent years just muscling through), the subtle invisible line that ballet sets to poetically integrate into one’s body is DEFINITELY THERE. It’s like the years of language is finally catching up to me as my body system seems to go the other way. But I do think all those years of struggle with ballet did this thing: when I said “I took ballet to ‘feel pretty’” it was actually a prayer for my future self—that it taught me how to lift myself gracefully but more so, how to fall with grace.

I think of two versions of this.

The plan is to work with Le’on on a recreation of the original but sometime around next year a Brontez Purnell Dance Company version of “The Rite of Spring” to be set in Paris next October- near fashion week- with costuming by Collin Strata NYC.

Now let me be clear here,  I have NO CLUE what I’m doing. There even feels something kind of antagonistic about calling it “a ballet.” In all my movement work I have always worked in a deconstructionist mode of dance. When I started Brontez Purnell Dance Company with Sophia Wang in 2009 we were described as mixing “punk rock subversion with free jazz improvisation” – I say to you with great humility that my branding has always felt both blessing and curse to me, but I digress.

I do think there comes a point, where for a dancer like myself, mounting “The Rite of Spring” is a graduation, or a homecoming of sorts — like a Silver Anniversary of myself starting a journey with dance. I do, as I return to the barre, hold a kind of excitement. Remember: I am from that crunchy granola school of Bay Area dance, that in the mission statement was always “dance is NOT about how you look, but about how you FEEL.” And for this dance what I FEEL like doing is privileging my love and unlearning of a form, the bad knees be damned.

This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

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Curation as Care

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Curation comes from the Latin root word “curare” which means “to take care of,” but Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU, suggests that we take this further to mean “to heal” so that curation does not simply become a rearrangement of dominant ideals, values, or aesthetics, but rather, “a mode of intersubjective, interrelational obligation.”[1] There is a long history of curation as an act of exercising power, rather than one that takes care of or heals artists. But in recent years, more and more predominantly white performing arts institutions are calling upon either external or internal curators to diversify their stages and depart from exclusionary histories. In the aftermath of the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, many artists of color have been invited to stages, panels, and administrative positions we had never been invited onto before. In the Bay Area in particular, since 2021, we’ve had the opportunity to witness ODC Theater bring in guest curators, and now Maurya Kerr as the inaugural ODC Theater Resident Curator. This position is meant to expand the breadth of the performance offerings at ODC Theater and to engage with more collaborative modes of curation.  

In February and March 2024, a program curated by Kerr along with guest curator Leyya Mona Tawil and ODC Theater Creative Director Chloë L. Zimberg will bring four remarkable performances to ODC’s stage. From February 23-25, ODC Theater will present Fanny Ara’s Lilith, and from March 8-10, the theater will present Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts Put Away the Fire, dear, both of which were curated by Maurya Kerr and Leyya Mona Tawil. February 16-18 brings Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters’ presentation of Long Playing to ODC Theater, which, along with Degenerate Art Ensemble’s Skeleton Flower from March 15-17, was curated by Zimberg. I had the chance to ask Kerr a few questions about her curatorial practice and can see the strong connections between the curated program and her “personal goal for our curational work together was to very consciously center racially marginalized voices.” Kerr sees part of her “responsibility as a black [sic] woman with access to power is to keep spending that privilege over and over and over again until as many of us are free(r) as possible.” This sort of values-centered curation can make space to change the paradigm of what is presented and who gets to be produced. 

Values-centered curation is what brings six fantastic programs to ODC Theater in early 2024, and speaks to the importance of diverse bodies on stage. On the other hand, I admittedly wonder about the lenses through which we engage with diversity. Racial diversity is, of course, of paramount importance. As Kerr points out, “whiteness has been socially, politically, and artistically centered since white settlers slaughtered America’s indigenous peoples and enslaved and tortured Africans to build capital—it’s so fucking beyond time for that to end.” I wholeheartedly believe that decentering whiteness is necessary. And I wonder, in a larger picture beyond ODC’s upcoming season, if the curation of diversity has only gone skin deep in many attempts at diversifying stages across the performing arts. We are seeing Black and Brown bodies on stage (though not everywhere, and not all the time), but they aren’t always representative of the diversity of movement forms or playwrights, or composers. While I recognize that one person or one theater can’t do everything, I wonder when presenting institutions will demonstrate a priority to produce works that engage with forms of movement or music or theater that come from minoritarian artists. Movement form itself continues to be a lens of diversification that hasn’t yet been engaged quite as deeply as would be possible in larger institutions.  

But I believe a different world is possible, and perhaps that possibility comes from the potential power of curation. So then, instead of an act of creating a new dominant narrative or recreating the old dominant narrative, what if we imagined the practice of curation in our institutions as liberatory, as acts of love, as ways to engage with social practice? How would this change the impact of our curatorial practices? I wonder if we can think about curation as a way to “open up other ways of seeing and sensing the world unimaginable through a normative lens.”[2] When curation is wielded as a tool for promoting counter-narratives, rather than a manifestation of power and privilege, we have the opportunity to convene with the possibility of other worlds and other ways of being. We get to engage with imagination. And we get to rearrange how we are in relationship to one another. The performing arts often transport us to new places and transform our world views, so we must lean into models of curation that highlight artists and art forms that are on the margins. I hold a healthy level of skepticism about the sustainability of such diversifying curatorial practices in performing arts institutions, but while it’s here, I’m going to enjoy and celebrate seeing artists like Fanny Ara, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Kayla Farrish, and Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters this upcoming February and March. 

[1] Gopinath, Gayatri. 2018.Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press.

[2] Ibid.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

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Welcome

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A 50 year-old white woman in a gold top and red lipstick smiles over one shoulder holding a dancer’s hand on her other shoulder.
Photo by Kegan Marling
[ID: A 50 year-old white woman with dark hair cut in a shag, wearing a sequin gold top and bright red lipstick, smiles as she gazes over one shoulder, while gently cradling another dancer’s hand on her opposite shoulder. The photo is cropped from the elbows up against a white wall.]

“Life is fragile, handle with care.” So declared the tagline of a Dow Chemical safety campaign when I was growing up. Dad worked there as a safety engineer.

How do we engineer safety? What do we make spaces safe for? Who do we make spaces safe for? 

Dow distributed shiny two-tone green stickers with nested figures: a little round figure inside a triangular figure inside a rectangular figure. We were told the sticker carried the message: Look out for your safety, and the safety and care of your community.  

This issue of In Dance is dedicated to care. To unpacking what our art form and our community are experiencing and exploring when it comes to practicing and performing care. How have our views of care and safety evolved in recent years? 

 “The pandemic and its ‘bubble’ confinement logic gave us the sensation that safety lies in solitude and inactivity. But safety is not the same as care, which requires interdependence and the risk of contact. Relationality is key.”[1]

Think of this In Dance issue as a care package! Containing pieces on: 

  • Communication as care 
  • Aftercare 
  • Curation as care 
  • Dance company as care company 
  • Care for our past and future selves 
  • Care for the earth 
  • Care for immigrants 
  • Care for the archives 

What is self-care, if relationality is key? There is a movement afoot to replace ‘caregiver’ with ‘care partner’ to shift the perspective, respect the care dynamic, represent reciprocity. But care too often becomes imbalanced. An estimated 43.5 million people in the United States provide unpaid care to an adult or a child.[2] Those providing care develop “caregiver burden,” a state of complete overwhelm as a consequence of isolating, exploiting or undercompensating.  

If you happened to visit Dolores Park during the early part of the pandemic you would have seen white circles spray-painted all over the lawn. A micro-community sprang up inside each ‘safety bubble.’ Risking contact! To lift our own and each other’ spirits. Look inside these pages to see ample evidence of care in dance — pictures, rituals, jams — elevating and amplifying what’s right in front of us. Care that includes people at the edges. Care for every single life. 

 

Carefully yours, 

Rowena Richie's signature with a three nested figures replacing the "A" in "Rowena"

[1] Kristof Van Baarle, Felipe Cervera and Helena Grehan, “Stranger than Kindness,” Performance Research: On Care vol. 27, no. 6-7 (October/November 2022), 4.

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8412180/

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

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See What Happens

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Photo by Warren Franklin
[ID: A bright, partly cloudy day on a hillside with trees on the horizon. Four women, with their backs to us, look at and beyond a tall tent made out of pastel colored chenille. They vary in heights, frames, and hairstyles, but are all wearing a white tank top and flowy white pants.]

Wendy Rogers’ backstory: Since 2011, See What Happens (SWH) recovers and explores the material and lived archive of my Body of Work (1968-present). Together with multi-generational collaborators, I repossess moving artifacts, while generating dances arising from the emerging present. We reinterpret, re-mix and repurpose. We engage directly with the temporality of dance and a dancer’s body, raising questions of who dances how over time. I also tap the material Body of Work — video and audio recordings, costumes, sets, photos, etc. — to construct public offerings of live performance, exhibition, digital media and/or talkstory. Every studio and storage foray fills me with gratitude for work made and life lived with extraordinary artists. Names exceed word count.

I am grounded in the radical pedagogy of Ruth Hatfield begun in childhood, Berkeley, 1957. Movement exploration is primary. Years of study and/or performance with modern/postmodern artists (e.g. David Wood, Margaret Jenkins, Merce Cunningham, Sara Rudner) led me to a neo-experimental approach, set and improvised work. I dance in dialogue with the work of others across decades, following composer Lou Harrison’s words: “Cherish, conserve, consider, create.” In multi-year projects, dancing evolves into specific performances allied to occasion and place and persons. I commit to shared authorship with dancers and collaborating artists.

In fall 2019, after two decades as an expat in the Inland Empire, I pulled up stakes, and headed home to the East Bay where I grew up dancing and later established the Wendy Rogers Dance Company (WRDC 1978-1990). The pandemic interrupted my third ten-year project, SWH (2011-2020). The ‘2020 vision’ I had imagined became a blur. Political turmoil, climate disasters, social upheaval imbued with appalling racial injustice, as well as extreme and residual circumstances of pandemic, call everything into question.

An older woman jumping and looking down with her arms outstretched. She is wearing a pink long sleeved blouse and red trousers.
Photo by Jonathan Godoy
[ID: An older woman in an auditorium jumping and looking down with her arms outstretched. She is wearing a pink long sleeved blouse and red trousers. A Brown man is seen behind her and to the right jumping. He is wearing a yellow sleeveless tank top and blue trousers. A pastel chenille tent peeks out.]

Piper here. Hi! We’ll get to why I’m here in a second, but I want to introduce myself. I’m a Black and Japanese, Queer, female storyteller and artist. My mediums are dance and language arts. I love living in the East Bay and am grateful to the Ohlone peoples for their stewardship of this land and acknowledge that we are living on their unceded ancestral home. Dance is the only thing I have always known I have wanted to do forever. Starting at age 3, I have never stopped. It has saved my life in many ways, many times. Studying grant writing became a way to support and secure my space in the arts. My work with Wendy, among the many benefits, validates that I made the right decision in following my passions. Especially in the service of something bigger than myself.

Wendy continues: And then, in the midst of 2020 quarantine, wendyrogersdancing.com, a digital venue for SWH, crashed. Recommendations led me to Piper Thomasson. The archive in its entirety became our project. Piper helps me write proposals. (Also, there was the night she joined me to rescue the archive from a flooding storage space.) We share mutual excitements considering our perspectives on present times: mine as a White, seasoned dance artist with roots in seventies activism; hers as a smart, Black dance artist with stories to tell. We share an agenda to bring more recognition to East Bay dance cultures. Her support and challenges shape SWH in ways that reassure me of its value. We both have a stake in what we want to learn from the past and to achieve going forward. Our collaboration mirrors the project itself.

Hi again. I agree with Wendy; let me name that in no uncertain terms. Even at the beginning, my input in proposal writing about why this project is relevant and worthwhile has influenced SWH. In real time, we are contributing to the archive and everything that the archive will be.

I grew up in Stockton, CA. Plenty can be said about that city. For example: “I love it.” Or, “As far as I’m aware, it was no hub for arts or dance culture when I was growing up in the nineties.” It’s certainly gotten better — Shout out to Elazar Abraham and HATCH Workshop — but I wasn’t patient. I moved to the Bay Area wanting to be amongst artists and art, armed with my passion, curiosity, and work ethic.

Even after a(n unexpectedly) rich experience earning a degree in Dance in the Silicon Valley, it wasn’t until I moved to the East Bay and encountered Wendy and her archive that I learned how radically possible and democratic the process of art making could be. Wendy already had a great prototype with her 10-year project approach. I knew this needed to be shared. The Body of Work is so rich, and what Wendy is doing with it and how she’s sharing it have the potential to set a powerful precedent for collaboration and reflection.

Part of what intrigued me was Wendy’s rejection of the conventional funding schedule. Grant and fellowship cycles became a part of her extended creative process, not the process being beholden to the cycle. AND YES. I recognize the privilege necessary to be able to do that…but I never thought I’d see a White artist choose to reject a system built for them. Not only was Wendy working outside of that system, she did it successfully. For me this shows “it’s possible” instead of “is it even possible?” to change the way art is made, funded, appreciated and recognized.

Wendy closes: Instead of ending, SWH has become an ongoing way to be, whether instigating activities or welcoming opportunities generated by others. I reinvent how to move in studio time with Sara Rudner and Risa Jaroslow, dance mates from NYC circa 1975, together again in the East Bay! I have relished interacting with the mix of dance artists gathered by Margaret Jenkins’ Encounters Over 60. I was her student circa 1971. I continue making work with Jennifer Jerum and John Diaz, dance mates from SoCal since 1997. A recording of one of my stories circulates nationally (and without me) accompanying dancers in The Running Show (2018-present), created by Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri. Monica was my student in San Diego circa 1993. Piper and I research potential homes for set paintings and other collaborations (1976-1988) with NYC artist Robert Kushner. I am remastering groundbreaking, electronic music from the seventies. Bay Area composer Paul DeMarinis recently sent me a tape I had forgotten, 3 Easel Studies for Wendy Rogers, realized in 1975 on the Buchla Music Easel. How inviting for a next SWH venture.

Two women sitting, looking mischievous, on either side of a slide image of a woman wearing a decorative hat projected on a wall.
Photo courtesy of David Tobis, Wendy Rogers & Piper Thomasson
[ID: An older White woman and a young Black woman looking mischievous on either side of a slide projected on a wall. The slide has a White woman looking off to the right, holding a yellow sleeveless blouse. Her left hand is holding her hat, which is made out of a decorative pillow.]

This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance. 

Wendy Rogers has choreographed and performed contemporary dances for 55 years, in the SF Bay Area, NYC and SoCal, where she taught contemporary dance at UC Riverside 1996-2016.  Honors include Fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Irvine Fellowship in Dance and a 2009 Fulbright in Malaysia.

Piper Thomasson has English and Dance BAs from Santa Clara University where she received the Anna Halprin Award for Excellence in Dance and the Gracelyn Rillorta Bateman Award for Inclusive Excellence. More recently, she’s a CCI Cali Catalyst Award winner and dancer with Antoine Hunter’s Urban Jazz Dance Company.

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A Jam of Our Own: Cultivating Brave Space for People of Color in Contact Improvisation

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I began dancing contact improvisation (CI) in 2014 and immediately fell in love with the form, taking a deep dive into study and practice. While I always felt welcome in the community at large, it was impossible for me to miss that, in every contact space or festival I set foot in, the vast majority of attendees were white, and I was one of the only people of color in the room.  After eight years of practice and not much demographic change, the need for an affinity space for people of color within the wider CI community was clear. The Bay Area POC (people of color) Contact Improvisation Jam was created with the intention of increasing the accessibility and appeal of contact improvisation to POC by bringing us from the margins of the jam to the center, and by reducing the social-emotional barriers inherent to entering historically white communities and practices.

The POC Jam is a unique space with its own cultural feel. One year old as of January 2024, the POC Jam started as a Sense Object Artists & Activists in Residence project, and will continue to be produced by Sense Object as a stand alone program this year. I am one of the founders and hosts, the other is my close friend Inertia Dewitt. Our regular community members repeatedly share how important and nourishing this specific space is for them. And we have a very high rate of return for first timers, which is not the case for most contact spaces I have been a part of, especially among newcomers of color. As I have observed the jam this year, and had many conversations with attendees about their experience, I have arrived at an articulation of why this space feels so special and necessary.

CI is a practice that invites us to be as deeply in our somatic experience as possible. As POC in predominantly white space we are often dedicating varying levels of our energy and awareness to navigating and existing in white space. This impacts our nervous systems, reducing the energy we have to be in our somatic experience and enter into a state of ease, listening and connection. Several dancers who dance in all the various jams have commented that they didn’t realize how true this was until they experienced their increased level of presence in the POC Jam. One jam attendee, Ronice Stratton, said something to the effect of, “It is much easier to dance when you aren’t fighting the impulse to be vigilant.” It is a beautiful, warm and steadily growing community with a healthy future, and my hope is that it will support the evolution of the Bay Area CI community into a more diverse, inclusive and equitable space.

For more reading on race and other demographics in the context of contact improvisation check out Keith Hennessy’s 2019 In Dance essay Questioning Contact Improvisation.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

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Accessibility