What Is Dance?

What Is Dance?

By Suchu Tanyetz

Okay. So. You want to know what actually happened.

Fine. But I want to be clear that I am still not entirely sure I am banned. That is a strong word. What I know is that Marcus — someone I trust, someone tall enough to have a particular view of any room he is in, someone who moves in wider circles than I do and hears things — reported back to me that certain people were angry. Not mildly annoyed. Angry. The kind of angry that gets remembered. The kind that apparently has a shelf life longer than the performance itself, which was eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes. They have been angry for longer than the piece was.

I have been on the other side of this. I want to say that. I have sat in an audience and watched something and felt my face do things I could not control. I understand the experience. What I am less clear on is how a piece that asked a question and then answered it honestly constitutes an act of aggression against the dance community. I was invited. I made a piece. The piece had an opinion. These things happen.

Here is what the piece was.

Works in Pluribus is the Academy of Significant Movement's annual showcase. Many companies. Many styles. Ballet. Hip hop. Contemporary. People like me, which is its own category that no one has successfully named in forty years so we have all stopped trying. The backstage situation is what you would expect when you put this many dancers, this many costumes, and this many strongly held aesthetic positions into a space designed for perhaps a third of that. I have worked in worse. I have worked in conditions where backstage was a suggestion and the suggestion was a hallway.

My piece opened the show. If you do not know what that means — and I mean really know, not just imagine — it means the artistic director received my submission, watched it, and decided it should go first. Before the audience has fully sat down. Before the latecomers have arrived. Before anyone has turned their phone off or fully committed to being present. It is the slot you give something when you do not know where else to put it, which is a polite way of saying it is the slot of shame. I have been in this field long enough to know exactly what it means. I said nothing. I smiled. I took the slot.

The piece began with a voiceover. Booming. Extremely self-important. The voice of every artist statement ever written, every grant application, every post-show talkback where someone uses the word liminal without irony and expects to be taken seriously. What is dance? What IS it? The dancers entered in ballgowns — enormous, structural, the kind of garments that have their own center of gravity — and they ran. Passionately. As one does when the question has been asked and the answer must be expressed through the body immediately.

This was not a celebration of dance. This was a portrait of how dance celebrates itself. There is a difference and I thought it was obvious.

The ballgowns came off. Black. Serious. Then aerobics. Then two dancers doing things with their spines that I will not describe except to say there was a nature documentary voiceover and it was entirely accurate. Then the voiceover returned and this time it had an answer. Dance is nothing. Life is pointless. Fred Astaire began to sing. The dancers reached for their red tails jackets and began to melt to the floor, dissolving slowly, beautifully, like something very significant was concluding.

Except for Marcus.

Marcus is tall. Marcus has hair down his back, curly, magnificent, the kind of hair that registers in peripheral vision from thirty feet away. Marcus could not get his jacket on. The sleeve had done something — I still do not know exactly what — and he spent the entirety of Fred Astaire singing about heaven working on this problem, very visibly, while everyone around him dissolved. He did not get it on. He died anyway. One arm in, one arm out, melting to the floor with the rest of them, the jacket hanging off him at an angle that was, in retrospect, perfect.

I was mortified. I want to be honest about that.

I have since changed my position entirely. A piece concluding that life is pointless, ending with a very tall man unable to put on a jacket while Fred Astaire plays and everyone else dies beautifully — this is not a mistake. This is the piece working correctly. Marcus was not failing the finale. Marcus was the finale. I just could not see it at the time because I was sitting in the audience, which is where someone had decided I should be, watching something I could not control, which is, I realize, also the piece.

The applause was what I would call present.

The show continued. I watched the rest of it from the lobby, where the lighting is different and nobody asks you anything. My mother was inside. She had notes. She always has notes. This is not related to the ban.

As for what specifically resulted in my current relationship with the Academy of Significant Movement — I want to be careful here. I did not do anything to deserve it. That is my position and I am keeping it. Whether something was said backstage in the particular way things get said backstage when space is limited and aesthetic positions are strongly held, whether a certain type of company director with a certain type of investment in dance being a serious and meaningful pursuit took issue with eleven minutes of evidence to the contrary, whether any small fires were involved — I cannot speak to all of that.

What I can tell you is that some people were very angry and have stayed that way. I understand it. I have been that person in the audience. I know what it feels like when something makes your face do things.

I just think that is a reasonable response to art. Not grounds for anything further.

Marcus, for what it's worth, has fully mastered the jacket since then. He showed me. It goes on perfectly.

We did not discuss the performance.

We never discuss the performance.