Ce texte s’inspire d’une partition intitulée Dancing is..., qui a été dévelop- pée par les chorégraphes Zoë Poluch et Stina Nyberg afin de réclamer la capacité des danseur·euses à théoriser leur expérience subjective et à mettre cette théorie en pratique. Dans la lignée de cette partition, qui effectue un va-et-vient continu entre danser et écrire, je souhaite proposer ici un inventaire – ou un index – impressionniste des multiples façons dont la danse occasionne une dépense (d’énergie, de temps, d’engagement, de pensée, de répétition, de stratégie, d’argent, d’imagination, etc.). Chaque déclinaison de Dancing is... est une partition individuelle à lire ou à exécu- ter. Par la notation de ses diverses occurrences, danser devient un acte de langage qui, à son tour, génère encore plus de danse. La partition produit une danse qui en appelle une autre, et ainsi de suite, dans un mouvement incessant de gestes et d’écriture.

Danses cheaps

Danser, c’est se sentir sexy et bizarre en manipulant des objets invisibles.

Danser, c’est persévérer sans raison apparente. Persévérer encore et encore.

Danser, c’est la loi de la fripe : rendre magnifique ce qui est considéré comme laid ou déclassé.

Danser, c’est bruyant. La personne qui se tient devant vous est bruyante.

Dancing is not turning away.

Danser, c’est refuser la servitude.

Danser, c’est entrer en communion avec des êtres rusés, débrouillards et ingénieux.

Danser, c’est prendre part au festin de Babette, un repas infini.

Danser, c’est réaliser que sa vie est rivée aux récits du péché originel et de la pauvreté.

Danser, c’est manger les fruits du mariage sacré entre le mythe de la création chrétienne et celui du capitalisme tardif.

Danser, c’est à propos de l’argent, du privilège, des fins de mois et de la viande dans l’assiette.

Danser, c’est avoir de la difficulté à faire son épicerie quand le coût d’un repas, avec l’inflation, dépasse celui d’une poignée de danses cheaps. C’est aussi se priver d’aller au restaurant pour l’anniversaire d’un ami parce que ce repas-là risque de coûter au moins deux cents danses cheaps. That’s not ok!

Danser, c’est un monde d’abondance, où la beauté se loge dans une matière invisible et pourtant sensuelle.

Danser, c’est « aussi rappeler que faire société requiert du soin et des solidarités, et que tolérer et entériner une culture de la pauvreté, pour quelque groupe que ce soit, est inexcusable ». (GMAQ)

Danser, c’est « relationnel, adaptatif, fractal, inter- dépendant, décentralisé, transformateur ». (adrienne maree brown)

Danser, c’est ce que chante Gui B.B (en pop star glamour) : « I’m running away with my own money / Shlang shlang: I’m the villain the empty space self-neglected always / Imagining that I’m the victim of bad men. / My body at night speak the thrut1. »

Danser, c’est se soucier de la politique de la danse (qui fabrique la danse et comment, et qui a l’occasion de la voir).

Danser, c’est ton œil qui se gonfle de soin et de colère.

Danser, c’est tenir l’espace alors que l’autre devant toi enfle et se comprime. Dancing is Anxiety2. (Simik Komaksiutiksak)

Danser, c’est «l’absence d’un filet de sécurité sociale minimal – qui existe pour tous les autres secteurs de l’économie – (mais qui) est acceptée comme une fatalité (pour les arts) ». (Simon Brault)

Danser, c’est être constamment engagé·e dans une relation transformatrice impermanente.

Danser s’attrape par tes yeux qui rêvent.

Danser, c’est remettre l’objectivation et l’auto-objectivation en question.

Danser, c’est le plaisir de me saisir comme objet, comme ça me vient, et d’en faire mon affaire, laquelle n’est jamais totalement mienne. (Bibi Bakare-Yusuf)

Danser, c’est faire trembler l’édifice de la possession et trouver dans ses débris une intrigue irrésolue.

Danser, c’est : « Ah ça y’est je m’accouche ! » (Maï[g]wenn et les Orteils)

Dancing is “dange- rous. But the danger is in the cost of the power it confers, not in the sources of pleasure it exposes.” (Adrian Piper)

Danser, c’est descendre au ras de la pensée complexe, et constater ce qui s’ouvre à son plus bas degré.

Danser, c’est se demander: «Est-ce que la danse est réductible au mouvement?»

Dancing is “turning your fucking head”! (Deborah Hay) La performance en vaut-elle la peine ?

Danser s’impose comme une impasse au phénomène d’ascension. Je me demande d’ailleurs comment être une artiste et une adulte. J’aimerais bien avoir une bonne poignée d’exemples inspirants sous la main, mais la réalité s’avère plutôt char- gée d’emplois précaires menant souvent à la dette, de changements de carrière à répétition, de renoncement à la parentalité et, éventuellement, d’abandon de la quête artistique.

Dancing is “to make it acceptable to butcher and invent language at any age”. (Ryan Trecartin)

Danser, c’est aller au marché des gobelins et y échanger mon balai pour une poignée de billes.

Danser, c’est poser des questions comme : « À qui ton silence s’adresse-t-il ? Vers où s’acheminent les actions que tu poses dans la tranquillité de ton foyer ? Sur la scène ? »

Danser, c’est n’être jamais seul·e. Parler toujours aux morts et au monde entier.

Dancingisthemomentbeforethingsarenamed.(Meg Stuart)

Danser, c’est... se glisser dans les craques, explorer la fracture inaugurale, descendre là où les choses tremblent. Danser, c’est investir dans les outils chorégraphiques libres de droits comme le Everybody’s toolbox et le Nobody’s business, avec la conviction que la danse est une profession idéale à pratiquer pour expérimenter de nouvelles manières de faire-penser-être ensemble, encore et encore. (Alice Chauchat, Petra Sabisch, Mette Ingvartsen, Bojana Cvejić, Ellen Söderhult et Eleanor Bauer)

Dancing is “fundamentally reflexive, and only in poetic language can one deal with meaning in a revolutionary way”. (Trinh T Minh-Ha)

Danser, c’est...

Danser, c’est...
Danser, c’est...

Danser, c’est...

Danser, c’est...

1.Transcription phonétique du mot «truth» prononcé avec l’accent québécois en anglais.

2.Anxiety est une perfor- mance dirigée par Simik Komaksiutiksak qui creuse l’histoire, les récits personnels et les réalités actuelles des communautés autochtones et racisées. Présentée au MAI (Montréal arts interculturels) à l’hiver 2025, elle rassemble les artistes Cheyenne LeGrande, Courtney Taticek, Chrystal Tam et Katie Couchie.

Oblique entries to my baby child and to Performance

Dear Performance,

I feel most authentic when I hold an inside position. This is perhaps because I identify first and foremost as a dancer. My history is linked to the problematics of this position in contemporary Western European performance: I feel a
deep curiosity about the dichotomy of the “on stage” such that an inside and an outside is created, i.e. the choreographer, performers and the audience, the critic, the discourse. Blurring the ontology of the inside/outside positions would be to remain embodied everywhere. I think of the structure of the Western European theatre gaze as a kind of disembodiment of the audience, which, I would say, is neither good nor bad, but just the situation from which our problems, ideals, and desires will emerge. The inside and outside of the performer and audience will be the structure within which we are tasked to find resolution and from where we’ll start asking things for and from each other (as performer and audience/witness/viewer). What are the multiple structures of separation (and therefore relation) that allow us to witness one another and come into relation? What happens when a new relation is created?

Dear Performance,

The Answer comes with a certain sensation of relaxation. You lie back a little, it happens in the back parts of your mind, as well as in your chest, all the way down to your pelvis, anus, and genitals. That’s where the Answer lies and it comes up like Focus and hits a target, which is the truth. And that truth sounds like something. It is or has a particular Voice, with a particular tone and vibration. It is your real Voice, the one that Knows.

Yesterday, Kai took a bath with a full cup of frozen blueberries and watched himself eat them in a full-length mirror as his hands and mouth got bluer and bluer and purple.

When Seb read this, he wrote back: “Blueing, as a process into which one falls, like merging, like multiplying.”

The Voice can be useful to a parent.
Your child can tell when you’re not speaking from the Voice. If you ask with your Voice, they obey.

When it’s time to brush your teeth you say “It’s time to brush your teeth”

The Voice says what the intuitive knowing knows, which is brush your purple teeth

Dear baby child,

A frame is a conceptual boundary, i.e. a way of organizing and presenting that sets limits on and guides how we interpret particular content. Frames, by delimiting the sphere of appearance itself, are operations of power that are stabilized through a series of foreclosures.

I ask myself what images and archetypes I want to see of motherhood and there are none I want to see and also they are almost anything.

But I’m a wall (I think to myself “ just be like a wall”) with a window because you can lean on me completely. I’m there for you. On my best days I do just that in all the moods and ways you come. And a window because no matter how much I want to keep you forever, I know our exalted freedoms are intertwined.

Just like that dream I had, where my body was not a trap for you and yours not a trap for me.

I ask: How is agency afforded?

In what way can I be a frame within which the unrecognized and unaccounted for multiplicities of your identities can flourish?

Dear baby child,

Sometimes I need a time “out” like you, a short moment of nothing and silence. Because silence and your body “precede the what-it-means question.” Like the German word aufhebung, I think of a time-out as this act that clears and uplifts, like a nap.

Dear Performance,

When I was a child, I often went with my mother to the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), a theatre and gallery space for “ethnocultural” artists in Montréal. I’d think: This is great, but I’m not going to make community art or cultural art; I’m going to make “real” art. This distinction I sensed as a child is not neutral, and one I came to understand as the dissimulation of Western European norms into simply what “is,” shaping what matters. I see things in nearly opposite terms today: this aesthetic hierarchy, which suppresses a multiplicity of perspectives
and maintains feigned ignorance, does not and cannot give value to my work, but impoverishes it ethically as well as aesthetically. We could say that I came to “include” the MAI in my understanding of contemporaneity, as it dissolved my previous understanding of standard art.

Dear Performance,

I’ve always been mildly annoyed at the seemingly sacrificial ideal of the avant-garde movement of the early 1900s which sought, as the goal of artistic praxis, the dissolution of the fourth wall between art and life: would that not be the end of art? But maybe that is the most commendable desire: to push up against one’s borders, at the risk of coming undone, to be reminded of our openness in order to live the truth of justice. Pushing up against borders as a way to blur, as a way to make quiver.

Dear Performance,

I wonder if intimacy is the fourth wall. To be intimate is to cross a threshold, to acknowledge both separation and relation, maintaining difference while coming together. What is public, group intimacy? Performance?

Dear Performance,

I want my child to be awake with me but it’s late and I’m actually glad he’s asleep. It’s dark inside and outside all of a sudden. I crave quality time and cozy activities right now. Make it right, make it so. I have to wait till the morning but then it’ll be all business, so serious and out the door. Getting places on time is the worst. Here we are. I’m 43, my partner is 47, my child is 11, my mom
is 81, my dad is 79, my brother is 39. We’ve lived our lives together. Is there one version of who we are as people who’ve ended up together for their whole lives? There would be so many versions. There have been so many versions. There are so many versions to come. There will have been so many versions
of our story. We were asked in a grief ritual workshop, How does your grief move? Movement appeared like the true way of all things and somehow so mistreated, so disrespected. We do not respect change, we do not respect movement. Knee jerk, turn away. I’m deciding right now to speak from my voice. Can one aspire to full unison with objectivity? Would that then make my subjective opinion universally true? I’m hungry but damn I’m already in bed.

Dear baby child,

To clap is to hit the space between your hands. It is also to bring the air that is swirling around you, between your hands and the other audience members around you into a kind of tornado scramble. This is done in order to stop the ancestors (all ancestors) from crossing over into this world. It is like when you walk in the woods and you whistle or stomp around real loud so that you don’t scare a bear. It’s also like chimes and bells that ward off evil spirits. Not that the ancestors are evil spirits, but a good performance is a calling to the ancestors, it literally brings them into this world the moment of the performance but you don’t want them to stay because they have left and they need and we need them to be across the veil and across time. They are our essential links across space and time and without them there we would collapse in on ourselves and become a pile of cold-hearted, navel-gazing dumbfuckery. We need them across. The claps make sure they do not stay. If you do not clap, like in most rituals it is a different kind of moment with the ancestors, a collaboration.

Dear baby child,

Why would we be afraid of reckless new ways of being in the world together? Dear Performance, And yet I know that any answer must ask further how a sense of disruption, the nature of a break, is culturally specific such that we can’t always recognize the cracks and what it means Dear baby child, to let live as blue as purple as ghouls.

Dear friend,

I have a five-year-old child. A year and a half ago, I experienced a rebirth after losing my identity postbaby. This is a common thing you hear about mothers. I had not named what I was going through as such—someone else did when I described what was happening to me. I felt the relief of having my experience acknowledged, so I thought I would write it down and share it in case it brought you any needed relief.

I felt this loss of self as a doubling. After I had my baby, I watched myself live my life: the real me observing the mother doing things. Sim- ple everyday activities like washing dishes became the mother washing dishes. Before, I just washed dishes.

I watched myself be a mom. I accomplished tasks as if I were a mom. I am not saying that I felt incompetent. I felt quite competent, but I was not unified with this Mother idea, the ready-made concept that existed without me and to which I was now joined. I watched her work. I watched her be comfortable with her baby. I watched her love her baby. So, I lived for a while, a couple of years maybe, happy and at the same time think- ing maybe I was going a little crazy, or maybe I would just be outside of myself for the rest of my life. Mother and I. But who is she? She is me, and she is not me. She is all mothers, and I am her.

From the outset of my pregnancy, I felt at odds with something hard for me to put into words. When I became pregnant, I also became a woman and my partner a man. Before having a child, we were both the same, just two humans. This may sound strange, but until then, I had no sense of what “feminine,” “female,” or “woman” meant to me. I had neither embraced nor resisted my assigned gender identity. I had not felt the need to, which is a privilege but also a potential slumber. I was aware that I did not know what it felt like to be a woman, but I also did not know what it felt like not to feel like a woman. This awareness was pres- ent in me more as an intellectual curiosity than a problem affecting my mental, physical, and material wellbeing, as it can and does in a society that still enforces a gender binary, from violence to handouts at primary schools to a general assumption that only women give birth.

If I had enough space previously to swim around comfortably within the pool of gender signifiers available to me in this place and time in the world, I now hit the edge of myself. Funnily, I thought I had gone into motherhood with enough feminist idealism to protect myself from a gendered maternity trap. Before my child was born, I had a mantra or manifesto: I would stay myself. I would not forfeit my ambitions and hopes because I had a baby. It would be me plus baby. I believe this equa- tion was at least partly the cause of my troubles and doubles. It kept me attempting (re)unification with myself. It kept me tight: I am me, and I will not be changed by external circumstances, not even by a baby of mine.

I suspect this edge of myself would have appeared if I had chosen not to or could not have had a child. To fulfill or to fail the social expectation of motherhood is to reckon with gender and the social norms that enforce a heteronormative capitalist patriarchal notion of family. Entering moth- erhood was like a scene in a movie where the live-action character walks into a 2D world: I entered a world with flattened gender roles, both cause and manifestation of a shrunken psychic landscape maintained by a symbolic contract. As this world was sneakily hard to detect, my partner and I shared the intensity of caring for a baby and the household duties as equally as possible, but this was not the issue. What I am speaking of was something in the air that changed the nature of things (i.e., mother doing dishes), regardless of the distribution of tasks. I felt crushed. This was hard for my partner and me. We were now in different worlds, even when we were in the same room.

My friend, things changed when my child was around three years old. I went on a trip alone to New York City to attend my best friend’s birthday. I spent many open-ended, unstructured hours with people who, god bless, did not make sense in any conventional way. They existed thoroughly beyond the 2D world I had found myself in. They appeared incredibly alive, vortexes of paradoxical desires, irreverent to any order, reminding me of life beyond the narrow hallways of motherhood. We visited a Korean spa and sat naked in tubs of hot water, watching each other get scrubbed down on pink latex mats, and took naps in infrared pyramids of amethyst. Then we went out dancing, much later than my usual bedtime. Time had become such an obsession since I had my child, and to be up living something sweaty, loud, and rhythmical at a different time of day was not insignificant. Time became temporality, from a list of things to execute to a sensuous quality of being. In this new city, with people I did not know well and who did not know me well, I felt both seen and unknown, unidentified yet completely welcome and in a kind of soft-focus, open-ended intimacy with the world.

This sensuous time of (really fun!) experiences was a catalyst and, like an alchemical transformation, dissolved my 2D existence and revealed an incredibly alive world. In other words, the world! I could truly and fully feel myself for the first time in a long time. Driving home with my friend, still far away from my child and buzzing from such an extreme experience after the constraints of the postpartum period, I picked up a bookmark on the floor of the car. It was a hologram scene: Multicoloured hot air balloons floated around dramatic cliffs in 3D. And right then and there, I had an epiphany. I knew what motherhood truly was (drumroll please...): Motherhood is transformation with another. It was an epiph- any because I felt it in my whole body, and it changed everything. The ecstasy! I felt like my child, and I were revealed to me. He and I were, in fact, the key to the world beyond the 2D experience. Together, we made something new: me/him/us. Therefore, every moment together was completely new; every moment was not already known. We exceeded all prescriptions: My experience as a mother was not predetermined by a mother-child relation that could be dictated from the outside (when they cry, just wait five minutes, then ten minutes, etc.). It was mine— absolutely mine and absolutely his, and this was a gift to and from the world. Of course, I knew that my relationship with my child was mine, but I had not felt what this meant. And this cannot be known before. It means nothing before the experience itself. It is absolute newness. After this, I was no longer on the outside watching the mother do her good work and love her child. I felt like I belonged to myself, my child, my family, and the world. An indeterminate intimacy. I was in my life, and this was orgasmic.

I use orgasmic in the sexual sense, not just as a metaphor for good or joyful. The epiphany of me/him/us unfolding in relation to the world was—and is—a source of sensual pleasure. Motherhood unconsciously (and perhaps consciously) came with a taboo on sexuality, which had manifested in my body through symptoms like my partner not being able to come near my nipples because they were linked to my baby. But since my epiphany, I no longer feel like there is a real me observing the mother doing things. It is just me now. Mother sex is one.

Now I feel like I love my child for the first time. What I mean by “love” is an ambiguous kind of knowledge that is necessarily embodied, transformative, and requires time and intimacy. Put slightly differently, it took time for me to become a mother. I needed to acknowledge the incremental steps it took to come into a new way with another.

I am not the type to hold this experience as one unique to mothers. Every moment of living must be like this: bursts of newness and trans- formation with another, again and again. But there is something about a baby that screams and squeezes these epiphanic sensations out in a loud way. No one has so uniquely addressed me (I need you!) and objectified me (a body for my baby) more than my child. It is the most personal yet most impersonal address and illuminates how the iconic maternal expe- rience of love and transformation is but one version of being called on: by the everyday and the world (your house pets, the trees, the air, the stranger, etc.). I need you, they say. And in the space between the call and your response is the opening that is yourself, taking your time.

Funnily, even though you often hear about losing yourself and then finding yourself again in motherhood—as though the self were a fixed entity that you could misplace—finding my identity postbaby meant regaining a more ambiguous sense of myself. In other words, returning to myself involved getting in touch, once again, with the openness at the core of my person—a fundamental unknowability and fluidity I might not have noticed had it not been taken away in the flattened 2D mother world. In fact, this openness and ambiguity, which were neither solid nor fixed, turned out to be the very thing I longed for, maybe the essence itself of this lost identity. I see now that the Mother I sensed was more a stereotype, what Trinh T. Minh-Ha refers to as “an arrested represen- tation of changing reality” (qtd. in Chen 86). The designation of “mother” needed a qualification to aptly speak to the multidimensional sensuous experience that motherhood had brought me to. In the end, I felt fully welcomed into the fold of motherhood when I found mothers who iden- tified as nonbinary mothers. I like to say that becoming a mother led to me to becoming queer. I experience and understand this designation as an open field filled with my unconditioned experience of love. A newfound love affair with the world, an existential orientation, as well as a gendered one—to remain unfinished, unknown, unknowable, and unexplainable as a mother.

The tension between my experience and the concept of the mother’s experience in a cisheterosexual nuclear family setting sent me on this journey of merging, losing, and blurring the edge of my body, myself, and the social and symbolic orders at play in and on my life. Tracking the (ongoing) dissolution and reformulation of this complex system of identity has been the story of discovering how my lived experience un- folds, unfettered, in space and time while being inseparable from the political and social battles for liberation from the gendered conditioning of motherhood, real and symbolic.

Although it is perhaps tangential, the last thing I would like to share, dear reader, is that I discovered that my fantasy as a not-pregnant person involves me as a pregnant person. I think this is my first real fantasy, and I see now that what I mean by fantasy is an imagined situation that crystallizes according to a person’s particular constellation of history, needs, taboos, and desires. This fantasy is something I guard fiercely because it feels like a key that could destroy my world and reveal another. It is the proof of a leak, an exit from the version of the world that presents as solid, final, or 2D. The fantasy is my own life in a set of images that responds to me in the most unique way. It is the incarnation of a deep freedom, multidimensionality, and vulnerability. Its very existence is a crack—and perhaps like the ambiguous self, an opening—which is both a strength and a potential undoing of myself and my relationships. I breathe a sigh of relief knowing there is a dimension, and surely multiple more, that exists simultaneously beyond where I am now. Not because I am unhappy, but because there is comfort and a sense of truth in excess.

Dear friend, what having a child taught me is that I want to live in 3D, and I want to live in the same dimension with those I love.

Works Cited

Chen, Nancy. “Speaking Nearby: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha.” Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 1992, pp. 82–91.

Consider the metaphysics of a telephone call: ringing. Hello? Maybe Silence has called. Or maybe Monster. Or the Dancer. But the Dancer comes out and starts dancing. The lights dim. A show begins.

Dear Writer, I would like you to dance but I don’t think you can pull it off.

The Plot is a video performance and a hypothetical movie plot, meaning it will unfold in its own time.

The Plot is archetypal and so are its characters: a writer wants to write but can’t, a voice actor becomes a dancer, a dancer moves like the writer. The Protagonist always arrives in a mythical mood, just after what happens before the beginning and bows at the end.

The Source is the original iteration of the movie, now lost. A post-structural prank. The Plot is a house of mirrors: reflection, refraction and translucency are thrilling!

The low grade horrorphoria of staring too long in the mirror. An abstract accumulation: the writer becomes fair and unfair (first she was only fair). A horror parable whose aesthetic and spiritual lessons, like a pile of Plexiglass, glisten obliquely.

From the directives of the scores, the performers enact the world they think they belong to. Like rituals they conjure, knee bend and let it blow away.

The Plot flickers fingers close to your eyelashes and eye balls. What are you afraid of? She can’t say. It’s just a feeling.

An open system: the indeterminacy of their relations and identities. A closed system: they show up and care for each other.

To tell your narrative to an empathic listener is to open yourself up and to dispossess yourself of the story.

The audience watching the characters enact being in a movie, feeling seen and seen feeling.

The Teller is pure action.

The Teller, in a sexy blue velvet dress, gives a final speech. The secret might be revealed. But no…

The characters exist in the space between a telephone ring and the non-response to the call, their actions spurred by an asymmetrical demand that can never be annulled or accomplished and so is infinite. I have a crush on God and I want a dog to ask me what I’m afraid of. Who is the answerer?

—

The Plot borrows from the aesthetics of téléthéâtre while also cutting through an imagescape more reflective of the digital and social media era. Each scene is an edit from a scored improvisation, a charade that creates and amplifies the sensations in the movie. Choreographies and editing are here like surfaces. The heels tiktok, the tights slide, the piano carries the dancer’s movements as Isadora her veil. Embodied visual concepts, like blur, zoom and transparency are explored in their expanded political meaning.

The Teller, active and alive, reiteratively tells the story that the three characters (The Protagonist, The Writer and The Voice Actor, who eventually becomes the Dancer) perform like an inherited emerging pattern. These characters, interrupted and never fully recovering themselves, make tremble at every distinction the stability of entities and concepts. In other words, the process of differentiation of their identities is in correlation to the indeterminacy of their relation, in which they are distinct and yet not separate. Who came first — the characters or the plot?

Underscoring The Plot is the absence of the original iteration of the story that Emma-Kate names The Source. This originary loss is intrinsic to the whole and, like dark matter or the strange impossibility of being present at your own birth, puts pressure on our grasp of time. We all need a Teller for our Protagonism.

There is a tenderness between the three performers/characters and their efforts at telling the story. Faithful to the task, they cradle the opacity of The Source, the profundity of their interdependence and then let it go, over and over, like a breath.

“. . .knowledge births (precedes) understanding.” — Audre Lorde, Poetry is not a Luxury

“What does the one who seeks the truth want? What is [their] type? What is [their] will to power?” — Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

1.

I’ve been looking for a way to dance and a new way of thinking my way into dancing. I’ve tried not thinking as a way to get free in dance. For me, working on dancing seems to involve working toward and through degrees of freedom, which comes hand in hand with power and the unconscious. But this not thinking has only led me to representations of freedom. I am looking for a sledgehammer to break through the veneer of fake representation and allow representation to become representation — or a ridiculous way of saying “good art.”

The frame, the thinking or the sledgehammer, is the process of entry into what I’d call a “real dance,” and what I mean is a dance that dissolves and creates at the same time. So I am testing out the truth to see if it might be a temporary pass to a break/ make dance.

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2.

Here’s how to dance the truth:

Dance all the weird shapes you enjoy, plus dance normal shapes, plus Make Big Symbols (like be a hawk). The truth passes through transmutations of sense: to be with what is familiar, made unfamiliar, then remade familiar. It is about attitude: nothing is weird and nothing is different because sometimes you are an authority.

Dance a series of actualized forms and actualized meanings. They are the truth. These forms have forgotten what would constitute “good” or “bad” (this is “the how”). Take time. It is not only a flow: everything takes form, is repeatable, is as if repeated but isn’t, and is transmittable. You want everything to be visible. You are already there. The truth is accomplished with sensation but not inflated emotion, unless the inflation is deflated. Make spontaneous choices. These happen out of the necessity of chance and the chance of necessity. You are active, never reactive.

Think of what you have left out: intensities, in-between spots, distances, etc. Do them. The truth will lead you to the unified field. Here there are no surprises and no failures. The truth is cool because it’s not surprised at being everything and it’s hot because it’s activated.

3.

Preacher’s words to repeat: You are the truth.

I write and dance at the same time because I gain insight. I’ve shared “The Truth” as a performance and as a workshop. The text was performed in the context of ATTABLER, a research-practice performance and co-creation with Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Emma-Kate Guimond, Véronique Hudon, and Katya Montaignac; it was also activated as a workshop for the schizo-somatic series organized by Diego Gil and Csenge Kolozsvári at the SenseLab, Concordia University. In both situations the “how to” portion of the text guided people and myself into dancing. — Hanako Hoshimi-Caines

My name is Hanako Hoshimi-Caines. I use the pronoun “she”. I was born in Quebec to immigrant parents. My whiteness changes depending on the situation in which I find myself. When I was a kid, I was more conscious of not being white. I take the position that politics are always at work and so there is no situation that evades it. I understand being an artist as being involved in a certain kind of subtle activism, which includes, among other things, engaging in the truth of plurality and the interdependence of identities. I used to adhere to the elitism of contemporary/high art simply by accepting “quality” as a universal notion with objective criteria, not situated within any particular culture. I see this now as a way of unconsciously maintaining and reproducing my own whiteness. In writing this text, I want to send deep respect to the people who have dedicated their time to equity and justice on a regular and ongoing basis.

Rethinking the arts hierarchy

As a kid, I often went to the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) with my mother, a community worker.

I’d think: This is great, but I’m not going to make community art or cultural art; I’m going to make “real” art. This hierarchy, or elitism, in which contemporary art is placed above cultural art, is not neutral and is one way in which white Western European values shapes what is standard, or simply what is the norm. Although I still need to work on dismantling the rigidity of these categorical differences in my own mind, I can say that I see things in nearly opposite terms today: this aesthetic hierarchy, which suppresses a multiplicity of perspectives and maintains blind spots, does not and cannot give value to my work, but impoverishes it ethically as well as aesthetically. And I want what I do to be meaningful. Working to dismantle racist, sexist, classist, ageist and ableist exclusionary structures is the only way of making anything of real value. The MAI is not special and different because it shows cultural art as opposed to “high art”, it is special and different because it responds to the whiteness of contemporary art and steps up to open space for a plural reality. I came to “include” the MAI in my understanding of standard art and contemporaneity, which changed how I think of and approach my own work. “Inclusivity” as an institutional goal is problematic when it means integration into established hegemonic norms. “Inclusion” is desirable when it involves an internal process of transformation, an active organization and reorganization of a place with the fluidity of plurality.

Dialogue at the heart of the institution

I’d like to share a recent experience I had this past November, when I spent two weeks working with artist Tanya Lukin Linklater as part of the exhibition Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. I was struck by how the place didn’t feel elitist and very soon understood, by speaking to as many different and diverse staff members as I could, that this feeling was not accidental: inclusivity and accessibility was their number one priority.

Two initiatives stood out: I was told that anyone working at the museum could start a group to advocate for the needs and interests of marginalized and underrepresented peoples. Each group decides how membership is allocated and what constitutes an ally, i.e. that being an ally involves listening, becoming knowledgeable about specific needs and taking action accordingly. The group shares current events and important issues at quarterly meetings that all staff attends. Secondly, there are numerous informational and educational sessions about the art, the artists and the salient political points of the temporary exhibitions, so that every person working at the museum can be a knowledgeable and welcoming host to visitors and artists alike. These actions translated into a place that belonged to the people working there, no matter the position they occupied within the museum hierarchy. The sense of individual agency for a diverse group of people made the space “inclusive”. Making the place livable and welcoming to everyone involved accepting disagreement and imperfection as an ongoing part of making the museum better. That I am surprised at all by this experience made clear how habituated I am to the feeling of elitism in most contemporary art and dance spaces in Quebec.

From this I would like to see dance and art institutions in Montreal make inclusion and accessibility the number one ongoing priority, as opposed to seeing it as an adjacent institutional goal. And as I saw at the Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas, this begins inside the institution. The facilitation of plurality, through the divestment of hegemonic and hierarchical power, is not separate from but integral to an active and actual formulation of “contemporary” artistic quality.

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Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a choreographer and dancer based in Montreal. She has an emo- critical commitment to dance, choreography and philosophy as a way to see, feel, and love better. And what she means by love is a form of ambiguous knowledge that is necessarily embodied, transformative and involves time and intimacy with things.

L’inclusion et l’accessibilité

comme priorité numéro un —

Article paru dans “Les échos du milieu” du Regroupement québécois de la danse

Je m’appelle Hanako Hoshimi-Caines. J’utilise le pronom «elle». Je suis née au Québec de parents immigrants. Je dirais que ma «blancheur» dépend de la situation dans laquelle je me trouve. Quand j’étais petite, j’étais plus consciente de ne pas être blanche. Pour moi, le politique est partout et il n’y a donc aucun moyen de l’éviter. Je vois l’artiste comme une sorte de militant qui s’implique de façon concrète dans et pour la pluralité et l’interdépendance des identités. Par le passé, j’ai adhéré à l’élitisme de l’art contemporain en acceptant la «qualité» comme principe universel aux critères objectifs, non situé dans un contexte culturel en particulier. Je pense aujourd’hui qu’il s’agissait inconsciemment pour moi de conserver et d’entretenir ma «blancheur». Par ce texte, j’espère rendre hommage à tous ceux qui ont dédié et qui dédient aujourd’hui encore leur vie à la lutte pour l’égalité et la justice.

Repenser la hiérarchie dans les arts

Enfant, je suis souvent allée au MAI (Montréal, Arts Interculturels) avec ma mère, qui était travailleuse communautaire. Je pensais: «Tout ça c’est très bien mais je ne ferai pas de l’art communautaire ou interculturel, je ferai du «vrai» art». Cette hiérarchie, ou élitisme au sein duquel l’art contemporain se place au-dessus de l’art communautaire, n’est pas neutre. Ils résultent du pouvoir des valeurs blanches européennes occidentales qui décide des standards de qualité. Alors que je travaille encore aujourd’hui à déconstruire la rigidité de ces catégories toujours très présentes à mon esprit, je peux dire que je vois désormais les choses de façon complètement différente: cette hiérarchie esthétique, qui empêche de nombreuses perspectives, ne peut et ne doit conférer aucune valeur à mon travail. Bien au contraire, elle appauvrit l’éthique et l’esthétique de mes créations. Et je veux que mon art soit significatif. Travailler à la déconstruction des structures d’exclusion racistes, sexistes, classistes, âgistes et validistes est la seule façon de produire du sens. Le MAI n’est pas spécial ou différent parce qu’il programme de l’art multiculturel plutôt que du «grand art», il l’est parce qu’il répond à la «blancheur» de l’art contemporain en donnant de la visibilité à une pluralité existante. J’en suis arrivée à inclure le MAI dans ma définition de l’art «vrai» et de la contemporanéité, définition qui a changé ma façon de penser et de travailler. L’inclusion en tant qu’objectif institutionnel est impossible s’il s’agit d’intégrer l’hégémonie des normes établies. L’inclusion est bénéfique quand elle implique une opération interne de transformation, un bouleversement actif et fluide grâce au pluralisme.

Un dialogue au cœur de l’institution

Je souhaiterais partager ici une expérience récente vécue en novembre dernier alors que je travaillais avec l’artiste Tanya Lukin Linklater sur l’exposition Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now au Musée Crystal Bridges de Bentonville en Arkansas. J’ai été frappée par l’hospitalité de l’endroit et j’ai rapidement compris, au travers de conversations avec les employés, que cette impression n’était pas fortuite: l’inclusion et l’accessibilité sont leur priorité numéro un.

Deux initiatives ont été mises en place afin de concrétiser cette priorité: n’importe quel(le) employé(e) du musée peut lancer un groupe de défense des intérêts de populations marginalisées ou minoritaires. Chaque groupe décide de ses conditions d’entrée et définit lui- même ses alliés: être un allié signifie être à l’écoute, s’informer des luttes et agir avec la connaissance des besoins spécifiques. Les groupes peuvent présenter leurs enjeux et actualités lors de réunions trimestrielles auxquelles participent tous les employés. Il existe également de nombreuses sessions d’information portant sur l’art, les artistes et les questions politiques présentés dans les expositions temporaires, afin que chaque employé puisse offrir un accueil informé aux visiteurs comme aux équipes artistiques invitées. Ces diverses La facilitation du pluralisme, à travers l’abandon du pouvoir hégémonique et hiérarchique, n’est pas indépendante mais bien partie prenante de l’élaboration d’une véritable qualité artistique «contemporaine» actions font du musée un lieu d’appartenance pour tous ceux qui y travaillent, qu’importe leur place dans la hiérarchie. L’encouragement des initiatives individuelles ont fait du musée un lieu «inclusif». Et ce qui le rend si accueillant, c’est l’acceptation de la différence et de l’imperfection, qui y sont considérées comme normales et constituantes de l’identité du musée. Le fait que j’ai été si surprise par cet environnement montre bien à quel point je suis habituée à l’élitisme des espaces d’art contemporain au Québec.

À cet égard, je voudrais voir les institutions culturelles faire de l’inclusion et de l’accessibilité une priorité permanente, et non un objectif parmi tant d’autres. Comme j’ai pu l’observer au Musée Crystal Bridges, cela commence au cœur de l’institution. La facilitation du pluralisme, à travers l’abandon du pouvoir hégémonique et hiérarchique, n’est pas indépendante mais bien partie prenante de l’élaboration d’une véritable qualité artistique «contemporaine».

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Hanako Hoshimi-Caines est une chorégraphe et danseuse basée à Montréal. Elle a un engagement émo-critique avec la danse, la chorégraphie et la philosophie comme moyen de voir, de ressentir

et d’aimer mieux. Et ce qu’elle entend par amour, c’est une sorte de connaissance ambiguë qui est nécessairement incarnée, transformatrice et qui implique temps et intimité avec les choses.

ARCHIVAL LAB/LABORATOIRE D’ARCHIVES

This fanzine invites you to follow the traces of a ghost-like dance. The dance by Hanako Hoshimi-Caines was performed before a select few, and was not filmed or photographed. Yet its sensory content was methodically captured in this multi-authored work.

H’S DANCE

I got excited at the thought of being watched. Perhaps I hadn’t noticed the inherent sexiness of performance, the structure of viewership as a kind of invitation to voyeurism. But I took this request for a solo at face value: can we watch you?

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about intimacy in performance. I talk a lot about intimacy. And the more I hear it, the less I know what it means. After a discussion about the fourth wall and how to break it, and after hearing talk of intimacy again, I wonder whether intimacy is the fourth wall. To be intimate is to cross a threshold, to acknowledge both separation and relation (like magic, like difference).

In the room, it was like a staring contest, but without the clarity of the eye-to-eye line. Both sides being put to work. I felt like a lion pacing in a cage or a dead fox whose teeth you’d like to play with. I probably got a little cocky. Sometimes I like it. But at least I felt safe, the walls of the room with that fourth wall between you and me. What is public, group intimacy? Performance?

These days I’m into pleasure—maybe because pleasure is how I measure what is mine to give. It’s one way of working on something and being put to work by it. I get caught on something and do a little dance—the cap on a bottle of cream, black stretchy tights, one move, next to another, nothing at all, a word that sounds so funny when it gets stuck in your throat and whatever else feels just right (except I really don’t think I could jerk off a purebred horse!). I’m not very patient. I don’t mind being bored. I always like to give, be bubbly and smiley. I always want to be beautiful. It’s like there’s a new world in the old one. Even my shiny yellow shorts have something to do with that.

I recently went to an open improvisation and felt so relaxed watching people be so cute and lost and yet so committed to being there. I liked the idea of giving—that openness and commitment—even though I don’t think you can aim for it. I think some things can only happen in excess.

Before starting I said something like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m only going to do things that give me pleasure.” I meant that I wasn’t going to take, for example, the phases of the moon as a score. Then you would have been watching the moon. I tried to say this before I started. Maybe it was the silence, but somehow it was too late. I had started and there was nothing (nothing?) I could say or do once I appeared to step up (to what?). Now they think I’m lying or at least have dubious intentions.

They told me after that they didn’t believe me. And by this at least one thing was made clear: that performance makes you A LIAR! Or at least makes you potentially not what you seem. Or at least creates many more possibilities than what is given. Even the truth lies somewhere in there—but where? That’s for sure not determined ahead of time.

Maybe I told them what I was going to do because I was curious about the difference between the space I was in and the one they were in (the power of the structure of separation). Maybe I couldn’t be believed, because somehow we had already agreed to seduction, the walls of the room and that fourth wall between you and I. What remained to be believed, and remains still, is only conjured up in the new middle (between R and N and R and N and L and P and N and C and C and Y and V and C).