question

I am realising that all the things I want cannot be objectives in and of themselves. In order to fulfill the finite, one must reach for the infinite. The end cannot be the end.

How do you define infinity?


Maybe my mistake all along is that I have been too obsessed with beauty. Beauty cannot be the objective; it is merely a byproduct of authenticity.

What is authenticity and how do you achieve it?

Authenticity is sacrificing form—the superficial shape of codified movement, for the core of its existence. It is the honest questioning and exploration of the body’s movement and movement capabilities in all of its grotesque awkwardness that invites beauty to reenter through the backdoor and catalyses progress.

Progress?

The understanding of form, the physics and function of form; shape serves a vital purpose. Knowing that the mimcry of shape is instant death, only then will the body begin to explore new languages of movement. Dance is translating literature into the body’s silence and letting permutations of silence speak endless volumes of text.

Post performance

It is a blustery day in late May. I am sitting in a turtleneck and sweater, two pairs of pants, and hand knit socks before my window where the four o’clock sky is weakly glowing grey. The clouds in my head refuse to pass—inexplicable fatigue. It is beginning to rain. Droplets of rain land on glass, scarring the window with short, needle-thin streaks.




After reading ‘Tea that Burns’ (a family memoir of Chinatown, by Bruce Edward Hall) I find myself furtively glancing a little longer at dim and dusty Chinatown doorways into family associations and old apartment buildings with intricate iron grille entrances. I return to an obsession with access, permission to enter through locked gates into lives and stories billowing untold beneath my feet.

History is bitter, burns like tea freshly brewed and scaldingly hot, like bootleg alcohol tipped back in a swift savage gulp drunk from a teacup. Why, in a cheery folk melody played on the erhu, do I hear the sadness of a forgotten history, a fading generation. All the incongruous mysteries of my contemporary reality draw themselves to the surface in a clattering cacophany, while the impassioned screams and giggles of children at recess in the neighboring courtyard fade from my memory.



Mommy and I translated a thread of Chinatown’s invisible tapestry of female laborers mired by financial hardship, family, and fabric, which they hold in their hands, cutting threads, sewing pieces, making shirts, pants, belt loops, collars and pillow cases out of cottons, refined silks and flimsy cloth. In a segment of video footage that explores the poetry of everyday gesture, two women are talking to each other and to the camera while they go through the motions of their garment factory job, cutting loose threads from finished clothes. They are older, with grown children and grandchildren. They only speak Toisan; I can barely make out what they say. I understand the dialect in random exclamations that lead to little comprehension of content. Mommy and I decipher their story: with generous smiles and uninhibited laughter peppering their dialogue, they tell us they are happier here than in rural China. Compared to filling their hands with stones to construct a well, sitting with scissors to cut threads with a friend is a reprieve. They will be taken care of in their old age by their daughters and their grandchildren. Their aging hands are deft, moving smoothly against the backdrop of their bright eyes and animated exclamations.



Writing is exploring the imagination with history alongside of it, recalling, remembering, recording, conversations, scraps of newspaper clippings, dog-eared photographs untouched up and blurry. Writing is choosing your memories.



The scaffolding at 70 Mulberry Street seemed like a permanent fixture until it was removed last Saturday in the quick space of a day, revealing the renovated historic contours of the landmark P.S. 23 built in 1891. The newly washed, painted façade of the building looks offensively stark, too brilliantly terracotta in colour, and strangely angular, as if time had not smoothed away the sharp lines of newly hewn stone. This recently unveiled corner of Mulberry and Bayard is suddenly bright and the shoemaker now has to put up a large beach umbrella to shield the sun and rain where the scaffolding had once covered him.

The other day, I brought my battered red shoe to the shoemaker, interrupting a conversation he was having with another man, who took leave of him with the usual, I’ll stop bothering you and let you get back to work sort of expression. To better examine my broken shoe, he puts on a pair of large, plastic framed glasses that nearly consume his small-boned face and make his eyes look googly. His hands look tough, well-worn with leathery fingertips stained almost the same viscous tallow colour of the glue that he uses to reattach my wayward strap to the shoe. To me, he is beautiful, in all his wrinkled splendour, the albeit romanticised wrinkles that I have affixed to his nondescript clothing and his small body bent over in careful scrutiny of my old red shoe. I sit gingerly opposite him in a collapsible stool, my two bare feet resting on my one remaining shoe watching the agility of his hands speak the language of learned craft.

Pre-performance.

The only thing that reads seems to be desire; how much you want something and the way you interact with that desire, how you temper it, how it tempers you. Desire makes you move across space.

Dance is the balance of opposition – pulling from both ends, the dynamic play between falling and flight, between desire and the release of that desire. It is filling the emptiness of the body with emotion pouring in from inside and outside. It is beauty descending from sky and ascending from earth to meet in the finite body of the depraved human form transformed into sublime loveliness. To move is to inhabit opposition, to be pulled apart by conflicting forces stretching the lengths and limits of the body into kinetic stillness.

The act of performance is the miracle of rendering the imaginary into the real. See someone. Reach for him. Touch him. Trace his outline with your blunt fingertips until you taste the shape of his sadness inside your bones. It must be real, as real as a cup of coffee sitting fragrant, waiting for you at the corners of the room, perched precariously on a ceiling light, behind the last person sitting in the audience.

Be fearless. Step into the unknown, armed with only the inner light of the imagination. Wield images like a weapon to break into the encroaching darkness outside your silhouette.

Performing is like moving with your eyes closed, moving by sensory awareness of the tactility of sound, the weight of the body pressing through space, the floor beneath your feet, sensing heat, light and shadow, and the wind that peels away from your spinning body.

What medium are you moving through? Sometimes it is honey or oatmeal or the salty wave-ridden sea. Sometimes it is the gossamer fabric of dreams or sunset’s scarlet light. Each time it will be different but reminiscent of the last time or the time before and sometimes the time after.