Lightness of Being

How can a dancer be of use?

Couldn’t figure out how to illustrate this, so here’s Mewy, finding his light.

I took a workshop this past weekend with a wonderful choreographer/dancer/teacher named Ayako Kato. An experimentalist described in her bio as "a kinetic philosopher/poet,” Kato was born and raised in Japan, but has been living and working in the contemporary dance world of Chicago for decades. Her dance practice is improvisatory, inspired by tai chi and butoh and grounded in the Japanese principle of fūryū or “wind flow,” which emphasizes the human connection to nature through movement.

The workshop was part of an series of free workshops titled “Ballet Unboxed,” the project of another Chicago dancer, Tuli Bera, designed to explore, interrogate, unpack, and just plain explode participants’ relationship to ballet — the often fraught gateway drug for countless dancers worldwide. Bera, whose own early training was in classical ballet, created the series to allow each participant — regardless of their current or past relationship to ballet — to connect their own personal narratives and dance history to the larger project of understanding the place of ballet in their own story. I participated in an early developmental phase of this project last spring and I have been looking forward to the series launch ever since. It did not disappoint.

Though Ayako is very much a modern dancer she, like Bera, and like me, studied ballet as a child and young person. She remembers this training with a wince, as one of her teachers was very strict and punitive — so much so that she eventually turned away from ballet and towards modern before abandoning dance altogether for a time in (I believe) her early 20s. In the workshop, she focused on applying principles of fūryū — engagement with nature, centering the body in space and time between both heaven and earth and the past and the future, and understanding how our musculature is in constant energetic flux, spiraling into the core and out again — to the codified movements of the ballet barre.

It was, I don’t know … just really great. I left feeling lighter and full of potential, like I understood both my own body and why I was in the room in the first place a little bit better. But one thing in particular has stuck with me.

Introducing herself, Ayako discussed her early life as a dancer, and the pressure she felt to excel, while at the same time feeling as though it was all somewhat frivolous. The harder she was on herself, I intuited, the more she pointless it all felt, until, she said, she threw up her hands and decided “to go do something useful for the world.” I actually didn’t quite catch what it was that she went off and did instead — went to college? — but it took some time for her to come back to dance. What did it, she said, was being invited to perform as part of a Hiroshima Day ceremony. That performance, she realized, aligned her act of dancing with the movement for peace, and in that moment she understood that she could both follow her calling and do good in the world — which she has, as indicated by the positive impact her work clearly has had on countless students, collaborators, and viewers.

But that phrase: “Go do something useful.” How many young dancers have internalized this idea? I know I did. When I was in college, and vaguely contemplating an MFA, I’m pretty sure I veered from the course thanks to the inescapable cultural messaging that dance was frivolous. It was tied to the body — how unintellectual and, ew, embarrassing. It was seen as the domain, at least back then, of women and gay men — how marginal. It was, post-disco, not cool as a social activity (though hip hop and breakdancing were coming up on the side to lay waste to this notion*). In its concert form it may be the least accessible of the performing arts to outsiders. Many people have some experience going to see a play or a concert; fewer have ever attended the ballet, let alone a modern dance performance. When I told my prep-school second cousin (now a famous economist) that I was getting a minor in dance he looked at me aghast: “What on earth are you going to do with that?”

And of course I perpetuate the notion myself every time someone asks, idly, what I majored in in college I shrink a little inside, shrug it off with a joke. “Philosophy and modern dance,” I’ll say. “How useful, right?”

In August, I was down in Champaign-Urbana for work and wound up in conversation with someone from the University of Illinois dance department on my favorite topic these days. Is anybody there, I asked, doing work specifically with older dancers? Is there a place for that in the scope of your program?

Of course there is, she said. And I think you should come join us and do it.

My brain lit up like a yard full of fireflies and in that moment I thought YES, that’s exactly what I should do. But reality soon intruded: I have a career, and a partner, and a life, all of which I love, not to mention a mortgage, which I don’t. And what on earth would I do with an MFA at this stage in the game anyway? It would not be useful.

But listening to Ayako last weekend got me thinking again about the broad spectrum of what that means. Artists worry all the time about the utility of making art in the face of disaster. How can we dance when our earth is turning?, in the immortal words of Midnight Oil.** And, of course, utility is relative. Somewhere a hedge fund manager sleeps peacefully in belief of their righteous service to capitalism, while an ER doctor wonders fretfully if they should be doing something more for humankind.

Looking back over this newsletter, I notice that I’ve touched a few times on the utility of silliness and frivolity as a vehicle for personal liberation from shame or whatever, or just on the value of messiness and imperfection. But it’s not just good for the soul of the doer; I think it opens up space in the world for generosity. That’s a gift that the clown, the tap dancer, and the improviser give the world: they model for others the act of living lightly and in the moment, and allow performers and watchers to share in some weird magic. Prolonged exposure to such pointless activities could, perhaps, crack open enough minds to effect actual change in ourselves or the world. Lighter and full of potential, we might come to understand the value of taking ourselves seriously in pursuit of some ineffable goal. We might be able to redirect the ship that is heading for the iceberg. There’s nothing useless about that.

What does useful work mean to you?

*Someday I will write my 10,000-word essay on Raechel Gunn aka Raygun, about whom I have 10,000 thoughts, many of them perhaps not what you expect.

**To continue the Australia theme, an underrated 80s banger and a rallying cry for the return of stolen Indigenous land.

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Chicago dancers, if you’re curious about the Ballet Unboxed project you can follow it on Instagram @ballet_unboxed_ or on Tuli’s website. New workshops should be dropping soon.

Also for the region! The Krannert Center at the University of Illinois presents Dancing on the Ceiling: Performances by Women of a Certain Age this weekend for two performances only. An evening of solo performance by dancers over 50, it looks amaze. I would make the three-hour drive but my sister is here for the weekend and we have other plans. I’m hoping that some presenting organization in Chicago will pick it up and bring it a little closer.