I’ve decided to be brave and post some things that I’ve written over the last two quarters. I’d also like to invite you to post (or send to me to post) things you have written that you like, or things you have read that you think should be shared.
That’s right folks, we’re dancers and we read and think… Shocking!
This first paper I’m posting was written last quarter for Candace Feck’s wonderful Dance Criticism and Aesthetics class.
Absence:
Or, Why I am Dancing
The absence of a thing can be more striking than its presence. The emptiness left behind takes on form; reveals in sharper definition what had been there; shows the web of relations, assumptions, desires, which are noisy in their silence.
During my childhood, my dad was a commercial fisherman. This meant that every spring he left for Alaska and was gone for three to six months, sometimes home for my September birthday, sometimes not. When he left me and my mom each year, there followed a dizzying period of re-orientation. At first it was hard to shake the reflexive expectation that he was about to walk in the door, or pick me up from school. Then life would calm into focus again, and he became incredibly present in all the ways that he wasn’t. His booming voice didn’t fill the house, so I thought of how rich his voice was. There was an empty seat at the dining room table that would have drawn no more attention than the other empty seats, except Mom and I knew it was his empty seat. These were some of the absences, the hearing and seeing what wasn’t there. There were also the presences, only there when he wasn’t. Mom and I did girl things together, just she and I, no worries of excluding, or worse, inviting Dad. My ears were pierced, we ate goofy things for dinner, and we enjoyed time together when I was my mother’s sole focus of attention, and she mine. The changes in our lives helped to reveal the shape of my relationship with my father, and I was more aware of it, more appreciative of it when he came home each year.
I have been dancing since before my earliest childhood memory, first around the living room, then around a dance studio, then around a stage, or a grocery aisle, or a park, or anywhere else I found myself. If asked what the most important thing I did was, the answer was easy: dance. But it is when I quit dancing that I started to learn—really learn—the shape of my relationship with dance. My dad’s absence had provided this heightened awareness of him and our relationship every year, but what about dance? I considered it the central aspect of my life, yet to that point I had never paused to ponder the shape of the space it inhabited in me.
The first thing I learned when I was neither dancing nor planning to dance was that I did not disappear into nothingness. This was a little bit of a surprise to me. It turned out that there was a person there, with her own self and life and interests, not a dancer who was pretending at being a person. I had from my childhood thought that I couldn’t be happy if I weren’t dancing; when I found myself at a point where I was unable to be happy while dancing, it was also a surprise to me that I was not only a person, but a happy person not dancing. And though it sounds silly in its simplicity, I realized I could do things. I could do things that had meaning to me, that were full in themselves, not needing the disclaimer “but really I’m a dancer.” I could present myself as I was, and people liked me and took me seriously, just me. Absence begot presence.
After a period of relief and discovery, I also started to sort out the relations, assumptions and desires I had towards dance, starting to see them in the holes they had left behind. Noticing all the new presences in my life had taken a while, but then I started to notice that there was also an absence, a rather large one. The impulse that had driven me to start dancing so early was not a weak or easily dismissible one. I found myself missing dancing, and wanting it to be a part of my life again, if I could detangle from that web of relations which strands were integral to what I loved in dance, and which strands were extraneous and detrimental.
I am dancing again. The renewed presence of dance in my life came with a clarified vision of what I would like to remain absent. I know every day that I am making the choice to be dancing. I am not dancing out of fear that there is nothing else I am good for, and I am not spurred on by fear of disappointing those around me if I don’t dance. Fear has remained absent. I now rejoice that there are so many wonderful dancers in the world, seeing more clearly the way they inspire and enrich me. Jealousy has remained absent. I have more appreciation for the person that I am, and for the ways that dance is a means to express my fullness of interests and abilities, not my only interest and ability. Self-deprecation has remained absent. The list can continue, with items large and small, but they all come to the same thing: what I value about dance is the love I have for it and the joy I get from it, whether it comes from solitary concentration in a studio, spending boisterous time with delightful people, or participation—as audience member or performer—in a work I find inspirational. Absence from dance helped clarify these principles that seem in retrospect all too obvious. It also gave me the perspective to realize that I could insist on dance being part of my life on my own terms, with my own values, and that wanting dance to be that way for me was a good enough reason why; really, the only good enough reason.
