Remember when we made dances at the Red Eye? That space was so big and you could do whatever you wanted with it.

DANCE YOU CAN’T FORGET – JEFFREY WELLS

In memoriam of 15 W 14th St.

I’ve always struggled with language, the forming of it, the making sense of it, the making sense with it – which is why I think it is sometimes hard for me to enjoy narrative plays. So much has happened already and so much continues to happen that there is actually nothing to do but forget most all of it. There is so much language, so much talking, coming at me so quickly. It’s hard (try as I might (and I do, I do)) to synthesize it into anything not surface, not obvious. Simultaneously I find a bit of hope in this too, or perhaps a lot of hope, that deep within all of us is this basic survival function of creation.

Get linear, get hierarchical.

The task of it inevitably becomes too arduous, too uninteresting, or both. He likes to think of all dance as an improvisation.

Memories aren’t inherently language-based, at least that’s not how I experience them. Maybe don’t create the future or the present, but certainly create the past. They take on a form that doesn’t suit the experience they are recounting. Good?

But they most always become language-based when we want to communicate them to someone else. Ending up on the rehearsal room floor, so to speak. Quote me on that – I’m oversimplifying it. That something so vital about live, body-based, time-based forms is that no matter how precisely something is choreographed and rehearsed, there is always always the improvised element of a dancer’s interpretation – even when the intention of the interpretation is exact replication. No wonder the dance I recall the most is the dance I danced the most.

Dance is decidedly not language-based. Dance, like a memory, is created through re-creation, and needs to be re-created over and over again if it is to continue to exist.

At least not a verbal language.

I’m struck with the thought that the major mode I operate in is one of forgetting. Of course there are things I remember, many things.

But as I read about what we now know about memories – this discovery that we actually create each memory anew every time we remember it – I’m faced with the sheer fallibility of them, of wondering how to trust them. Memories are movements.

So in charged with writing about a dance I can’t forget, I will create something/make something up. Pink light floods the rafters. See if you can bring your attention away from reading and toward the sensation of your pelvis. Stands to reason that the more we do something, the more we sense it, the more we remember it. There were 10 or maybe 9 walking patterns, learned discretely and then assembled together in a pattern determined by I don’t remember what. Talk a lot with your partner(s) about improvisation versus choreography.

Or do/did you?

language is difficult

there is a violet glow

i don’t know what is about to happen i don’t know what it is

it hasn’t happened yet

but I am worn down by now by the gears that turn each day

i think

i have no choice but to be here anticipating the worst

we are cloaked in darkness

always

but especially right now in this room

this room

that awaits entrance

into the collective

dying memory

voices are silenced and projected enhanced and amputated by an old microphone from 1992

my foot exists where your thigh lays

if not for the decade between my foot and your thigh

have the conversation maybe 5 times but never remember

the outcomes let alone

the correct words to use

Because I am never the same then the dance is never the same.

If it stops being re-created, then it becomes a different kind of dance, which is called a memory.

They are in fact trusses.

In the future I’m sitting in the Red Eye alone, every day for seven days, plumbing my memory for the things that happened. Do half as much in twice the amount of time.

I don’t think the audience needs to make sense of it, but I would like for it to make some kind of sense to us. Sphere of influence, the labor of care.

Do we call it a truss or a trestle? It is a truss.

What if I asked you to bring your attention away from reading this and toward the sensation of your pelvis?

“What I am talking about, dear colleague…” reminded me so much of “This garbage can, kind teacher…” but now that I look at them side by side I see how they are different.

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