Range of Motion (pt. 3)

Can you be anything else?

Read more in this series here: Range of Motion, Part 1 and Range of Motion, Part 2

I dreamt the other night that I couldn’t dance, and not in the two-left-feet sort of way. I was in class, in the dream, at the barre and in the center, but I could not move my legs. Every effort was heavy, dragged through honey. I tried to step forward, to turn, but I was pulled to the ground, wrapped in lead. I became distraught, embarrassed by the spectacle, incapable of controlling my limbs. A dream on a platter for interpretation, and perhaps an easy read for anyone whose body has betrayed them.

The very same day, I came across Chloe Cooper Jones’s April New York Times essay on falling in love and learning to dance. A journalist and a philosophy professor, Cooper Jones is the author of Easy Beauty, a memoir about living with sacral agenosis, a congenital disability that impairs her growth, gait, and mobility, that was shortlisted for a Pulitzer in 2023. The essay is about her transit through a period of grief that encompassed the deaths of both her mother and stepfather and the dissolution of her marriage, and the embodied experience of that grief. On a book tour for Easy Beauty, devastated by her mother’s rapid decline from metastatic cancer, she writes:

The next morning, I woke up in my hotel room and discovered I could no longer move. Gravity had taken on a new dimension, and I was latched to the bed. My skeleton was rigid, and my muscles were stones. I began to wonder if I was having a break with reality. My brain felt as if it were being ripped apart, torn up. I was certain that if this tearing continued, I would simply be somewhere else, no longer here, no longer myself.

Through the love of a new partner, choreographer Matty Davis, and his creative mentoring, Cooper Jones learns to unlock her grieving body, but as expressed on the page this is not an easy, uplifting process of empowerment. It’s messy and despairing, and physically painful at times. This is the cost of somatic reclamation – and I was grateful to find my dream mirrored back at me that day.

Attentive readers may have noticed I haven’t written much about dance lately. That’s because for the past month or so it’s been a little rough, a development that took me by surprise. The initial phase of recovery from my broken foot was so full of joy – I was happy to be able to just move again, and to begin rebuilding my strength, again. But as the glow has worn off, the early infatuation phase shifting into something deeper, new challenges have reared up both physical and psychological.

For one, the scar tissue around my breast continues to pull and bind, despite diligent regimens of stretching and months of PT. It’s a source of constant low-key frustration – so much so that I’ve finally scheduled the revision surgery I’ve been putting off for a year. I’ve also been taking a new estrogen-suppressing drug and the side effects are in full bloom – with this one, joint pain and stiffness that makes it hard to even walk in the morning, and that turns me into a little old lady at night. I’ve also been having dizzy spells, sometimes to the point of nausea. At the gym I bounded up too quickly from some ab sets on the floor and had to run and barf in the toilet. Another side effect? Just being old? Who knows. When I went to the oncologist the other day, he just asked if I was getting enough exercise – was I going for regular walks? I’ve given up asking, or trying to explain.

All of this is frustrating, but on the whole expected, just still more lousy manifestations of the long tail of cancer treatment’s toll on the body.  What knocked me sideways is what’s in my head. 

Earlier this spring I signed on to a three-month performance project for “older” dancers – in this case, anyone over 35, a distinction I find bleakly hilarious. I was excited to discover this opportunity, and almost frantic for a time that the slow healing of my foot would prevent me from participating. We’ve been rehearsing once a week since March, a beautiful mix of older and younger dancers across a spectrum of ability and training: some relatively new dancers, some retired professionals; some coming out of ballet, some modern, or contact improv, or hip-hop.

The goal – now in sight – is two performances in early June. But as the rehearsal process has wound along and we get closer and closer to a polished piece, the experience has also triggered a host of old wounds that I thought were, like the scar tissue in my breast, painful but manageable but instead still seep bloody and raw. Insecurity, invisibility, embarrassment, body hatred – they’re all present and accounted for, as loud as 30 years ago. When I found out I hadn’t been cast in a small section of the piece I had been hoping to dance, my limbic system telescoped back in time – I was 22, 16, 12, feeling the sting of inadequacy and rejection. 

I can’t believe it. I thought I had worked through all of this shit! This was supposed to be empowering, goddammit. I’m mad at myself for expecting too much, ashamed to want something so nakedly, and then furious at the world that sees middle-aged women, or cancer patients, or both as diminished. That urges us to shut up about my desires, to keep our expectations low and go for a walk. I want, like Cooper Jones, to unlock the secret of my body in the studio, to let movement sweep away the grief and trauma of the last two years, or the last 40. But of course, as she too discovered, it’s just not that easy. 

Beyond the specifics of my own history, some of my frustration stems from the framing of the project, conflicted as I am about the aesthetic and political utility of siloing older or otherwise differently abled dancers into their own Very Special category, even as I have willingly placed myself there. I mean, the dance world has been discovering, or rediscovering, older dancers for decades, and exploring the dynamic capacities of aging bodies through a wild range of techniques and interventions. Choreographer Wendy Perron offered this incisive analysis of the state of the field almost ten years ago, noting: 

“Of course the interest in older performers is nothing new. Liz Lerman started using older people in her dances in the 1970s; the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, MD, carries on her tradition in some of its programs. Choreographers like Stephan Koplowitz and Risa Jaroslow have chosen to work with older performers. Naomi Goldberg’s currently active Dances for Variable Population gives performances and workshops throughout the summer. These kinds of explorations ask the question, Who gets to dance?”

Who gets to dance? Do I get to dance? I thought I did, but for these past few weeks I’ve begun to doubt again. Perhaps all is delusion, an unseemly desire. This is where I sit right now: looking at houses in the suburbs, charting their distance to the circus gym and the dance studio, and wondering why, of all things, this is my top concern – causing far more anxiety than inadequate bathrooms, access to amenities, or the possibility of Trumpy neighbors.

In her essay, Cooper Jones quotes Smith, her partner, as saying:

“What I’m talking about when I say ‘joy of movement’ is just the act of trying to engage as many of our systems — cognitive, emotional and, yes, physical — as possible in the hopes of pushing our life force to the surface and just feeling it, being with it.”

It’ll be two years this week from diagnosis. The glorious May weather brings with it the sense-memory of lying on the table, a needle buried in my breast, hearing the radiologist say, in response to my naive questions about whether or not it might be cancer, “Oh I don’t think it could be anything else.” 

It can’t be anything else, but like the 17-year cicadas taking over the Midwest my own life force is pushing to the surface with screeching urgency.

Can you be anything else? I hope so.

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So many more thoughts about this but I’ll stop here! It’s a busy month, leading into what’s looking like a busy busy summer. In addition to the June dance performance, I’m stage managing my coach Kristi Alyssa’s new full-length circus show Way Home in July; rehearsals are ramping up and tickets are now on sale. If you’re in Chicago, get ‘em while they’re hot.

We also just announced the summer dates for Soup & Thread, the community sewing project Sheila Sachs, Andrea Jablonski, and I launched in January. We’re excited to be part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks programming this year, bringing some gentle soup-themed crafting to public parks across the city. We’ll also be popping up downtown, along with our friends at the Creative Chicago Reuse Exchange, at Sundays on State June 16 and July 14. And more fun developments will be announced soon for the fall.

And of course, I have this book to edit? The essays for SO DIFFERENT NOW: WHAT SINEAD TAUGHT US, are rolling in and they are so good. Our manuscript is due to the publisher in August, right around the time I will probably be moving. So that was some good planning. My coeditor Sonya Huber wrote a bit about the project on her Substack, here.

I’m also traveling some for work, a fresh crop of books I acquired for the University of Illinois Press’s 3 Fields Books imprint are dropping this fall, and I’m putting a bunch of exciting new projects into production in the months to come. Big publishing is a shitshow, but over in my little corner of the academic press world I’m happy to finally be firing on (mostly) all cylinders professionally, and can’t wait to share all these wonderful books with you.