In early August I went to New York on a mission to recover the past.
I lived in New York City for almost five years of the last century, from shortly after college in 1990 to 1995, when I decamped to Chicago, and I landed there almost by chance. I had spent my final year of school – when I wasn’t tying up the loose ends on my philosophy major or working at the radio station or the campus disco – in the dance department. I took classes, choreographed my own solo piece, worked for my advisor as a TA, and danced with her in an end-of-semester work. I remember this period as one of the happiest and most settled of what had been a pretty turbulent four years — years marked by a lot of drama and confusion about what I should be doing with my life, or at least this education that I was so lucky to be getting. Despite the fact that the house I was living in with my friends was falling down around us* and that I had no real plan for life after graduation, I was happy – in large part because I had finally corralled my fragmented energies and carved out space to dance.
Some years ago my best friend from high school returned an absolute treasure trove of correspondence to me, in a fit of housecleaning rigor for which I am deeply grateful**. In one of my letters to her from that time, I wrote that “I’ve been thinking about dance as a legitimate pursuit,” that I was going to try more choreography and that I was thinking about going on to get an MFA, because “I get all excited when I think about the opportunities and facilities available if I was doing this full time.” I don’t remember this at all, but reading these letters now I’m struck by how confident I sound – a marked change in tone from previous letters heavy on angst, boys, and accounts of excessive beer drinking.
After graduation I was set to go to the American Dance Festival for the summer, and had vague plans to go home to Seattle after that, but thanks to a message from a well-placed alum to the dance department secretary, I wound up first taking the train to NYC, for a job interview at the Joyce Theater – a mid-sized dance theater in Chelsea. After my interview, which I remember mainly for the wildly uncomfortable shoes I had panic-purchased at a Union Square discount store, I took another train to Connecticut, for the opening night of a show my lighting designer boyfriend was working on, and then took yet another train to Durham, home of ADF.
While I was in Durham taking four classes a day, I found out I got the job. So when ADF was over (or actually, a little before) I took the train back to New York with little to start my career in arts administration with but a duffel bag full of dance clothes and that crappy pair of shoes. I’ve written about some of this already, but it didn’t take long to get derailed. I took class here and there, and performed with some friends from ADF for a bit, but after a year I just drifted away. I quit my job at the Joyce and fled to Connecticut to join my boyfriend and run followspot for a run of Evita. When I came back, I worked at a lighting shop (more on this down the road) and on the stage crew at the Joyce, among other places, but I never took another dance class. Not even after I got into circus, and joined a new community committed to physical discipline and expressive movement. This summer, I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Like, what the fuck happened?
It’s certainly not news that young people leave hobbies, art practices, or goals scattered in their wake as they go about figuring out who they are. I quit taking piano lessons when I was 10! But I’ve been watching Somebody, Somewhere (late, I know) and the joy that ripples out of Sam as she rediscovers the pleasure of singing makes me gasp in recognition. How does something so fundamental get so lost?
Spoiler: there isn’t any smoking gun; no traumatic incident repressed for 30 years – though I don’t have fond memories of that Graham technique teacher who kept making snarky remarks about my belly. Rather, I think, it was simple. I couldn’t find my people.
When I started working at the Joyce I quickly internalized an organizational ethos that valued a certain degree of polish. The Joyce is a small theater, but decidedly not “downtown” or “experimental.” The companies who passed through were full of technically accomplished dancers, othered by both their distance from my hippie college dance program and by the fact that they were on stage and I was in the office. I knew there was a scene out there somewhere – at PS 122, at Dance Theater Workshop, at Movement Research – but it felt inaccessible to my 23-year-old self, on my own in the city and probably in a bit of postcollegiate shock.
With the exception of the few folks from ADF (also more to come), none of the people I knew in New York were dancers. They were in bands, or maybe they were actors, or themselves working in entry-level jobs in journalism, publishing, or the nonprofit industrial complex. My boyfriend was constantly out of town, and didn’t quite register my isolation. I asked him recently what he remembers about this time, if he noticed when I stopped dancing and (somewhat sheepishly) he does not.
Lacking the social support of college or the American Dance Festival, in a professional environment that hired my brain not my body, I wasn’t driven enough to keep at it on my own. And if I’m really being honest, my own internalized misogyny sealed the deal. I wanted to be cool and I wanted to be taken seriously, and in the 90s that meant I wanted what I did to be valued by men. Dancing – this embodied, emotive pursuit – read to me as essentially feminized and as such, worthless. (Maybe here is where I note my own father had been prone to running commentary about how I was majoring in “basket weaving” at school.) Office work was similarly worthless. I understood at some level that my job was actually pretty impressive for a recent college graduate with no work experience outside of food service, but I did not have a clue how “careers” worked, and I stumbled over my answer, embarrassed, if someone I wanted to respect me asked what I did. It didn’t help that I was being what I now understand to be sexually harassed by someone else on staff, though at the time I thought I was supposed to be flattered. And, I missed my boyfriend. I wanted out – of New York, of the job, of the dance world. So I left.
When I came back I was armed with a tool belt and a buzz cut. I was tough and I was cool, and I had turned my body away from expression and toward the skilled labor I understood to be good currency in this man’s world to which I so desperately sought acceptance. Those skills have stood me well! I learned a lot in those few years: how to pack a truck, how to climb a ladder, how to run a light board. I for sure made a lot more money as an off-Broadway electrician than I ever did as an administrative assistant let alone as a dancer. I may have lost my dance identity, but I learned how to take care of myself and to stand up for myself. It wasn’t all bad.
And yet. When I went to New York earlier this month, one of my objectives was to go back to the Joyce, this place I’ve shoved into a back corner of my history for so many years; this place that feels loaded with meaning. I bought tickets to a performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group and on a Saturday night my friend Suzannah and I took the C train in to Manhattan to see some dance in a space I know so well, even if I haven’t set foot inside it in 28 years.
The show was unsurprisingly great, and the theater looks exactly the same, save for some new carpeting. As we sat there in the loge before things got underway, a woman ran up and embraced the man sitting beside me. “See you afterward!” she trilled, before scooting away again. When the house lights came up between pieces, I leaned over. He’d been whooping and hollering at the curtain call and I had to ask: “Are you with the company?”
He was, he said – or rather, he used to be. He had danced with them for 25 years, in Belgium and Brooklyn and around the world. He retired 10 years ago, he said, and this was the first time he had come back to see them perform. “I was going through some stuff,” he said. “It was just too much.”
We talked through every break (sorry, Suz). He pointed out other company alums in the audience and told me a bit about his career and his life the past ten years. And I told him my deal – that I was on my own pilgrimage, revisiting something that once meant the world to me but that had gotten mislaid as I, too, went through the stuff of life. I skipped the cancer part, but told him, shyly, that I had just recently started dancing again and he lit up, cheering me on: “That’s fantastic! Good for you! Keep going to class. Just feel the pleasure and not all the baggage. It’ll do you good.” I paraphrase, but that was the gist.
As the house lights went down for the final piece, a work for eight dancers set to Harry Partch’s “Castor and Pollux,” which debuted in 1980, he leaned over and whispered, “I helped create this dance.” And then as the music started and the dancers started to move he leaned over the rail and hollered out “WERK!” And we both cracked up, the past for the moment sitting light and effervescent on the present.
*Like, literally there was a hole in the floor of our bathroom and you could see into the apartment down below. One day that spring a large beam fell from the ceiling of that apartment (aka our floor) and crashed to the ground. Our downstairs neighbor just stepped around it for the remaining weeks of school.
** This stuff is so, so rich. An incredible document. So much beautiful teenage cringe; so much documentary evidence of the lost 80s underworld. I can’t stop reading them.
That what the fuck happened thing. You deconstruct it well, but there's always an element to it that's not truly understandable because you're not who you were and some of what we did (or didn't do) in the deep past was the result of . . . something--an inclination, a gut-level preference (or anxiety about), a whim that's ultimately unparse-able. Here's a small instance. I once owned a 1965 sunburst Stratocaster. Loved it. After college my wife and I lived in Hartford where I was in seminary [dodging the draft], and the second year she lived with a friend in Kalamazoo and got her library degree at Western Michigan. I went out to join her after Christmas--all I had left was my thesis. I'd been playing some music with a guy down the hall in the big stone buildings Hartford Seminary had, and when it was time for me to pack and go my guitar was locked in his room and he was nowhere . . . and so I drove off and never saw the Strat again. Why? It took a gestalt of factors: a) After my thesis was turned in and Susy got her degree we left the Midwest for Montana and never looked back. b) The guy must've been something of an asshole because he never did anything to get the guitar back to me. c) [This is the big one.] The "I don't have my guitar" problem was never at the top of the list of things I had to worry about or figure out--and by then three-quarters of the country lay between me and the instrument. That all makes sense. But even so, there's this: Why did I never recover my Strat? The person I am now would not let what happened happen. [Though the person I am now would also say: It's just stuff.] Sorry to use a relatively trivial example . . . but deconstructing one's decisions/outcomes from the deep past always seems to leave something undecipherable . . .
“Just feel the pleasure and not all the baggage” excuse me while I embroider this on a pillow! Excited to one day return to a dance class in one form or another. I’m dying to read more of your teenage letters.