We play a game, one person with their eyes closed, moving in any way. The other two keeping watch, staying witness, protecting yet appreciating. Loving, in a way.
My eyes are wide, each of my cells present to this miraculous moment, when the other has his eyes closed, and I maneuver around him. There is nothing but the instant when one arm flings, and I duck to avoid it.
Always surprising, no preconception of what the next moment holds. A quick shift of weight and within an instant, we find ourselves several feet away from where we just were a moment ago.
It feels like what aliveness is supposed to feel like. I imagine we are a united in a sort of glow. Is this what dance is? A room of oscillation and vibration, with moments unfolding between us. The front of our foreheads glowing with an awareness of everything we don’t know that will happen.
This is our work. It matters and it is amazing.
~ ~ ~
The life I live is often interrupted by challenge – circumstances that feel unbelievably hard to push through. It has always been this way for as long as I can remember.
How can someone like me make art?
Like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: If the basics aren’t met, there is really no room or possibility for the luxuries; the luxuries of imagination, the luxuries of emptiness, play, presence… spending an afternoon in a room with twelve others, winding through each other, sending heat across the space, wondering how a single word can change the shape of our togetherness.
No room for any of that if you are concerned with survival more often than not.
How can someone like me make art?
I scroll through instagram and facebook, seeing intermittent posts about the death tolls, denouncing the internet lockdown, and calling for the media to cover the protests in my country. (Twenty-three years since I saw Iran, completely ignorant of what life is like within its borders, and yet it will always remain “my country”.)
I am bored and troubled by all the posts.
“Iran is a country in which opposition leaders are exiled or imprisoned”
“The Ayatollah, the Supreme Leader, ultimately calls all the shots”
“Iran’s government is highly undemocratic.”
I wince reading these lines, in the way that you might wince if you bring your mother to a particularly racy and provocative show – watching her, watch the show, you wonder what incomplete thoughts are running through her mind, given that she will only remember the raciest parts and none of the substance?
I wince imagining Americans I know and don’t know read these lines, wondering what sorts of disturbing, ignorant half-thoughts are propelled by incomplete headlines and quotes like these.
I argue with myself about reposting something. Isn’t it my duty as an Iranian-born, very assimilated immigrant, to care about my people? To make sure Americans know what is going on in my country? I wonder if I am abandoning my roots by not being loud and appalled. I should be appalled shouldn’t I?
I click “share” and then spend 15 minutes trying to come up with some kind of caption to the post that I can feel good about. I write a few words, and then feel the rising sense of disingenuousness before deleting the entire thing.
I am bored by the narratives and resent the surface reading of world news – only recognizing the blooming, intermittent mushrooms, when the mycelia have lain under the surface, stretching for miles far and wide.
What happens to you when I share a post that reads, “The death toll in Iran’s protests have reached 100” ?
Because that’s what we artists do. We wonder, “what happens to you when I do this thing?
~ ~ ~
As an undergraduate student, I remember suffering living unbearably close to the surface of my skin. Just one layer deep was what felt like the pain of generations. So much history, grief, despair wanting to bust and bleed forth through my pores, as I went to class, sat at my computer, or danced in rehearsal.
Other bodies, they seemed somehow more whole, more safe, more resilient. I was scattered, broken, hurting, cracked, bleeding, chipped and damaged.
How can a body like that be making art?
I am in a studio with a new generation. Almost a decade has passed. I don’t feel damaged and broken anymore, although many wounds persist. I don’t feel damaged anymore partly because I have done enough work that I can decide not to entertain the thoughts that want to destroy me.
I almost can’t believe I get to be here.
How has someone like me continued to do this? Kept doing this?
In my practices, my unraveling and unbecoming has reformed the very fabric of my cells. I am not who I once was. I stand as a testament to miracle.
My body has followed my nose in spite of myself. In spite of every duty-bound obligation to be a good immigrant child who lives the American dream and attains some level of middle-class success, I find myself living life as an artist. Some force is taking me places and I am grateful for it.
It has made me a person who does things like spend hours in a room, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, witnessing how an idea can transform a space, wondering what makes dance what it is.
We are lovers of the mystery of our beingness. A question can grip us in one simple moment. A fire lights up behind the eyes. And that fire is bright enough to live for.
In some moments, it can feel like perpetual failure. But in others, I can see there is no such thing as failing when we are in this committed love affair with time, body, space and mind.
Look, how someone like me has managed to keep making art.
