(Not) Dancing for the Camera

This is a post about dance events and photography, which I want to contextualize by sharing a few of my own experiences:

When I was a newer dancer, I posted the featured image for this article on Facebook. I was competing in a social dance competition – specifically a mix-and-match where I danced with a number of randomly assigned partners. The photo got to the wrong person, and I was accused of doing sex work.

After graduating, I could not come out in a lot of places I worked, for fear parents would withdraw their children from my care or classes, or create enough issues that I would be fired – something that at the time was legal in the US. I had stones thrown at me for walking down the street with my partner. I never posted photos of us online.

During my graduate program, the Westboro Baptist Church staged a homophobic protest at our university, because they found a picture online of one of the female professors teaching in a suit.

Last week, my own campus was targeted by people writing anti-trans messages outside the building where I work. I do not know if they knew that I worked there, or if they knew that a week prior, I had spoken out – as a transgender professor – about the issues with Alabama’s “Divisive Concepts” bill.

As the political situation in the United States becomes more and more dangerous for queer and trans people, I – as someone who teaches – am scared. Republican rhetoric maintains that trans people like me are groomers and abusers, implicitly a threat to children and young people. I want to do the work I can do as a professor, but also as an advocate for equity through the model of my own presence. One of the choices I made when I decided to walk that precarious balance was that I wanted to be very, very careful about managing the risks posed by putting photographs of myself online.

Fusion As Potluck

I’ve defined fusion a few times now – sometimes alone, and sometimes with friends. Sometimes to reflect words people currently use, and sometimes something all my own.

I keep defining fusion because I don’t think there’s actually one correct and complete answer to the question. There are as many fusions out there as there are dancers – all using our bodies as a kind of language for negotiating the things we want from our community. I keep defining fusion to give people more language to ask for the things they want, more places to see themselves, and more ideas for how they want their communities to grow. You may connect with this definition, or you may not. As you’ll see from the definition itself – that’s probably ok.

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Fusion is a potluck.

Fusion is a place where everyone brings something to the table for other guests to try.

Fusion is a place where some people bring an exquisite dish, made from scratch for hours and hours, and some people bring a fruit tray, and some people bring paper plates and tin foil.

Fusion is the place where all of those things are equally important.

Fusion would have an easier time defining itself if it didn’t have to keep defending itself. A lot of people don’t like fusion, and there are good reasons for that too. But until you realize that every single table set for fusion is going to look different, you’re going to have a hard time doing anything productive with your dislike. You can criticize every dish on the table, and how people have made it, and how people eat it. You can ask that people make the dishes better. But fusion is not the dishes, it’s the potluck itself, and that’s important.

Fusion is a potluck where people try food from other cultures. Sometimes they make it not quite right, or in disrespectful ways (I’m always skeptical of fusion cuisine).

Fusion is a place where some people have dislikes and allergies, but we still try and find them something to eat – to send them away nourished and fulfilled.

Fusion is a place where you’re allowed to put things on your plate for pleasure, or because they’re good for you, or because your best friend made it, or because you’ve never seen it before, or because it looks particularly good to try.

Fusion is a place where you’re allowed to say: “I don’t want to eat that right now.”

Some people would rather go to a restaurant where they know what’s on the menu. Sometimes I would too. Sometimes I go to a potluck and there is nothing there I want to eat, or the mix of guests is wrong, or the music is too loud, or I’m next to the person who’s sitting too close and saying things that rub my soul the wrong way. I don’t necessarily get to choose my table, or the ambience of my meal. But I don’t go to a potluck expecting a restaurant, and I don’t go to a potluck or a restaurant for the same reasons. I happen to enjoy both.

If fusion is a potluck, we should know the ingredients in the dish we’re bringing, and be able to share those ingredients with others.

If fusion is a potluck, we should make space for other people’s dietary choices.

If fusion is a potluck, we should appreciate every dish on the table, even if we don’t try it ourselves.

If fusion is a potluck, we know that not all dishes will go in the same mouthful, but they can still be delicious.

If fusion is a potluck, we don’t turn away people who have made a good-faith effort to bring something to share, but we also expect them to act like good guests in our homes and spaces.

If fusion is a potluck, then we are asking our guests to come into a certain kind of container, with social norms that not everyone will know. Is it ok to just bring beer? What if I’m in a rush? Can I use the oven at my host’s place to re-heat this? Can I take the leftovers home? We get to create those norms in our local and national communities, and also know that hosts are going to have different preferences and values.

We can ask our hosts to make their values clear.

This analogy – which stretches impressively far – lends itself to a certain vision of fusion that is not the one that every scene is trying to build. It is, perhaps, not the most technically driven, and I’m still looking for a way to account for the DJs. It does, however. capture something of the feel of the fusion spaces I love best – where I feel welcomed for what I’ve brought, and I know that I can bring different things on different nights and still be ok.

So for today, my fusion is a potluck.

Bring yourself.

Be welcome.

Finding the Scale of Your Activism

Some days it feels like the world is burning… and let’s be honest… it is.

I try and write a post each semester about my values for going back into teaching, and something I’m going to try and align myself with in my life and in the classroom. But with multiple genocides ongoing, a pandemic that we’re trying to ignore, and the world hip-deep in a climate crisis, it’s sometimes difficult to see any difference that we can make as individuals.

So for the start (ish) of 2024, I wanted to share some wisdom that I’ve picked up about how to keep doing your work, even when you can see the seemingly insurmountable pile of work that still needs to be done that you do not have the resources to address. This post is inspired by Dr. Allison Upshaw – who showed me what to do – and by Piper Fierce, who made me go out and do it, and so so many others who have inspired me in my own activist journey.

Everyone has the potential to be an activist, even if they don’t know what that looks like. In the world of queer theory, we say that queerness can be an identity, but it’s also an attitude towards the world you live in. It is possible to live, love, and practice your life “queerly,” even if you are cisgender and straight. You do so by cultivating a mindset that is aligned with the values of queer liberation, and finding ways to put those values into practice.

In the same way, it is possible to live an activist life by cultivating a value-driven mindset that is attuned to the need for change, and finding ways to put those changes into practice also. For some people, that’s going to start with learning, for some it might mean re-organizing the systems of your life, or speaking up in different ways. It might mean going to protests, attending community events, putting your body to work for a cause, writing, calling, giving money etc. When you look at all the ways to be an activist, it is impossible to take on them all, and so part of the journey of activism is finding what out you, personally, can and should and need to do.

Everyone’s activism has limits, and that’s ok. While the status of my green card was in flux, my limit was going to a protest that might put me into conflict with the police. I would cheer people on, meet at the initial rally, give out water… but I wasn’t brave enough to put my right to live in the US at risk. Some people can’t get arrested. Some people don’t have money to give. Some people don’t have the physical ability to be in certain situations or do certain kinds of work. Recognizing the limits to your activism is an essential part of being honest with yourself, so you work can come from a place of power and potential, rather than being driven by guilt.

That said, your limits should not be driven by discomfort. Activism isn’t easy, and it involves being able to choose the things that are right but hard. The systems around us are designed to make us complacent through convenience, to put up barriers in the way of changes for the better. It can be tempting to get stuck in a place of self-care over structural care, or to fall into the trap of “well I haven’t learned enough to act yet.” Pick a thing you can do today, and do it. Pick something bigger tomorrow. Set yourself goals and responsibilities, and push yourself to meet them. Find out what the brave thing is that you want to do. See if you can act the way the person you want to be would.

We have to be allies across the work. Which cannot mean everyone getting behind the one, “most important” thing. We have to trust that between us there is enough change to go around, and if there isn’t, that’s a problem we need to fix with greater empathy. This also means that people need permission – from themselves and others – to follow their curiosity in their passion for change, and to discover what work they do best. We have to learn to celebrate the activists who are doing work in spaces different than our own and treat them as allies, rather than as competition.

That means also that we have to learn how to deal with ignorance in our allies, and in ourselves. If you know that you are not doing activist work on a particular thing, you are still responsible for being an ally to those who are. That means we have to be committed to accepting the expertise of activists in other areas, to believing people when they say they have been harmed, and trusting other experts to guide us in making changes. When it’s not clear who to listen to, and marginalized voices are in conflict, that’s when we have to be able to name our values and let them guide our choices. For me, that sounds like: “What is the change being asked for? What does it cost me? How might it put me in conflict or community with different groups of people?” and then going from there.

Activism occurs at different scales. Some of the most life-changing conversations I’ve had with people have occurred one on one. Sometimes you need a quarter of a million people to march on Washington. I have sometimes felt uneasy about describing my teaching as a form of activism, but I ultimately realized that it is a way I help people learn, and see each other, and set up a container of values that I hope students will take away with them. The need for change in a world on fire is overwhelming, but finding the scale you work at, and using it to make the changes you can, is the only way to start.

Sometimes the work activists do is a physical manifestation of the power of humanity.
Sometimes it’s a law whose effect ripples down through generations.
Sometimes it’s one person who lives who would have died, and all their infinite potential.

Without a microscope, we cannot cure diseases. Without a telescope, we cannot reach the stars. It is ok, I promise, to know which kind of activist you are, and cultivate your own life of change.

Good luck in 2024!

What Everybody Gets Wrong About Technique – Part One

In 2016 I read a book that changed my life. It’s called “What A Body Can Do” and it’s by non-binary author Ben Spatz. It put into words a lot of the feelings I was having about technique, about language, about gender, and about how I move through the world as a queer, neurospicy, often very odd human being.

“Technique” is a word that a lot of people think they understand, but don’t. They say things like “that dance had a lot of technique” or “She has a lot of feeling when she dances, but she’s not very technical.” What I hope that people will understand by the end of this blog post is that neither of these statements quite make sense, and that by finding better language for what we see, as opposed to the shortcut of “technique,” we will actually be doing a service to our dancing, and to our communities. This blog post is about how.

What is Technique?

“Technique” in the way it’s commonly used, is a hierarchical system of values. When people say a dance is “technical” they often mean that it looks like ballet, or a white-codified form. Historically, ethnographers and dance critics framed a binary opposition between the trained “technique” of white concert and social dancers, and the “natural” or “instinctive” dancing of People of Color. This binary was used to justify paying Black dancers lower wages, exclude them from recognition as artists, and associate Black vernacular dances in particular with racist ideas about comparative morality. When people say that a dance “has a lot of technique” they usually mean that they can see an upright posture, elongated lines, attention to agreed-upon details of articulation, and other movement elements that tend towards the white, concert end of the movement spectrum.

One way I share this with my students is through this thought experiment, which doesn’t work perfectly in text, but which I invite you to try for yourself: stand up, shake your body out, and get into your best dance posture.

Ready? Go!

Most people when they try this will stand up straight, weight shifted slightly forward over the toes, arms hanging loosely down from the shoulders. Depending on their dance history they may or may not turn out their legs. This is a very useful posture for… some types of dancing. It’s completely the wrong posture for tap, for Blues, and for many other forms of dancing. It’s ok, but not correct, for many others. It attempts to be an approximation between several different dances that winds up failing all of them by not being specific enough. This happens because people hear “dance posture” and make assumptions about what “dance” means, just like they hear the word “technique” and assume that technique in general, and dance specific technique, are the same kind of thing.

So What Should We Do Differently?

Since I started teaching dance history and analysis (oh gosh, over ten years ago now), the consensus has been that we need to push back against this idea of technique as one way of moving, and instead think more about technique as a system for getting things done. This is where Spatz’s work was transformative for me, along with a bunch of other writers like Aimee Merideth Cox, Fiona Buckland, even Bessel van der Kolk (have you worked out that I’m a nerd yet?).

Here’s an experiment for Spatz. Pick a balance and try to hold it. Feel your body making micro-adjustments to try and keep you in place. If you are standing on one leg, feel whether you shift more to the center of your foot or to the inside. How much do you need to relax or tone up your core? These adjustments will be different for every single body, and every single change of position, but they are experiments in technique that you can build for yourself and learn to replicate more fluidly, and transfer between different balance points as you develop your expertise. You might be able to share them with someone else, if they asked you how to balance well.

Spatz also thinks about gender: what are the different ways you try and live your gender in society every day? How do you show the word that you are your own particular, individual flavor of boy, or girl, or non-binary person, or something else? How does what you show change from day to day and context to context? Can you think of a moment where you had to learn a new technique for your gender because an old one didn’t work for you? These techniques are not for “gender” in general, just as technique is not for “dance” in general. They are specific and personal ways that you can use your body (and words) to do the things you want to do, live your life the way you live it, and move the way you want to move.

Wait, So Does Dance Have Technique?

One way that dances become recognizable is to develop a pool of techniques in common that can be shared, taught, and aspired to. The difference is that with this new understanding, no one dance has any more, or less, technique than any other, and no technical system is more or less valuable. While dancers may have more or less expertise in the particular techniques they want to adopt and use, it doesn’t mean that the techniques themselves aren’t there. Techniques for creating upright posture, elongated lines, defiance of gravity etc. still exist, but so do techniques of improvisation, groundedness, mess, connection, and individual adaptation. Techniques of moving to the music and techniques of allowing the music to become disconnected from your own sense of bodily time. We can look at dances not to see if they are “technical” but to discover what technique is doing inside of them to create the identity of the dance and the community that practices it.

I practice dances that fall over the stereotypical technique spectrum. I do my gender in predictable and unpredictable ways. What I would like people to realize – because I am a nerd, after all – is that my choices in these things are usually deliberate, and usually link back to values I care about deeply. If you dismiss what I am doing as “untechnical,” you’re probably missing information about who I am, and what I care about. If you dismiss a dance, or dancer, as “untechnical,” you might not have the tools or cultural education to identify the techniques they have chosen, and why they are in use.

As many of us take a break from dancing before the New Year, I invite you to consider what techniques you have particularly chosen as reflections of who you are and what you care about, and how you could bring them more into your dancing. How could you gain a better recognition of the choices and techniques of others, and how doing so bring us together in better conversations about the dances we love.

Where Am I Now? Touring, Teaching, and Taking Class

Hello from my whirlwind multi-city tour! This is the latest sabbatical update, you can read part one, part two, and part three at these links. For those of you following the saga of people stealing my work, these sabbatical posts seem to be some of the most egregiously plagiarized – if you see someone pretending to be me, please let me know!

At the beginning of October this tour was largely unplanned, but a last-minute job invitation inspired me to pull it all together. While I have one more city to go and am totally exhausted, I hope that this little snapshot of my sabbatical life illustrates how broadly I work, and how many ways it’s possible to have fun when the arts are your living.

Covering Cover Letters

It’s job hunt season on the academic market right now, and so to go with my article on DEI statements, I feel like it’s finally time to write my guide to good cover letters.

I got my current job because of my cover letter, and I’ve read a whole lot of them since I started working here at the University of Alabama. A lot of people meet the basic qualifications for most of the jobs on the market, and as search committees whittle down from the hundreds qualified to the handful given a chance to speak in person about their values, and demonstrate their skills, cover letters are frequently a deciding factor.

Where Am I Now? The Hambidge Center

Imagine a cabin in the mountains. Hundreds of acres of trails winding through woods, waterfalls, and wildflowers. Imagine waking up with the sun, drinking your coffee in a hammock on your porch, and then getting to grips with your art. Imagine dinner each night served at a communal table of artists and friends. Imagine weekends spent sampling roadside barbeque and local wine, horseback riding, trout fishing, and just taking the time to breathe the air in it’s almost edible vibrancy.

In case it wasn’t obvious: I don’t have to imagine, because for the last three weeks, I got to be there!

Where Am I Now? Choreographing and Performing

It’s time for another sabbatical update! If you missed the first, or have questions about what a sabbatical is, you are welcome to read part one. Since then, I’ve flown to Vienna to officiate a dear friend’s wedding, and spent a grueling week by a hospital bedside watching my fiancé slowly recover from emergency surgery. In the last month, however, I’ve also done a HUGE amount of choreographing and performing.

As a professional dance geek, my writing tends to be at the forefront of my research, and my sabbatical plans were no different – work on books, chapters, and articles. But I write because I’m a dancer (more on that at the end), and when opportunities came up to showcase the physical side of how I create I jumped at them, even though they all came at pretty much exactly the same time! It was beautiful chaos, but here are the projects that I’ve worked on in the last few months:

Why Lauren Boebert Needs Lesbian Dance Theory

Back in the 1950s, the US government made a bad decision. In fact, it made several, but that’s another blog post. In the 1950s, the US government decided that the Venn diagram of communists, artists, and LGBTQ people overlapped so much that all three groups should be considered a danger to US society. 

Feel free to comment with what should be in the open sections…

Welcome to Hattie Mae’s Jook Joint!

Legacy. Family. Tradition.

Audiences at a packed Birmingham bar got a treat last night as Alvon Reed and cast presented a sneak preview of developing musical “Hattie Mae’s Jook Joint.” This emerging show, supported by Alabama State Council for the Arts, spans three generations of Black entrepreneurs, activists and artists as they struggle to keep their jook joint alive and their community together. Last night’s event was also supported by Eighty Eight Piano Bar, who developed two unique cocktails for the occasion – Hattie’s Homebrew, which packs a smokey whiskey punch, and Booker’s Sweet Love.