MY BODY IS A PLACE

What This Dance Is

Bones connect to ancestors. It’s something I’ve been thinking about. Their alignment and misalignment, their buoyancy, a fragile architecture of presence. Buoyancy suggests not merely lightness and a suspension held in negotiation with gravity. Here, movement vocabulary is tuned to a tension between anatomical precision and a lived, affective body. I find myself drawn again to the double bowl pelvis, an image both anatomical and symbolic. The structure of the pelvis, its articulation across planes, echoes something of the wider joint at the front of the sacrum. And that wideness and its exposure speaks to vulnerability as much as to support. The acetabulum, made by the three bones of the pelvic halves equally, feels like a puzzle piece of recognition, a convergence of identities stitched into place. I write this down, move, write it again. The sacrum is wider at the front of the joint. Maybe that’s important. Maybe it’s just how the bones keep each other from falling apart. The acetabulum, made by three bones on each side like they agreed on something a long time ago. Dance is like that. Pieces stitching themselves together until they start falling apart again and I can’t remember. As I prepare to perform, something else is coming forward, something that feels fundamentally different from past performances. It’s not the regular performance anxiety, the self-devouring loop of worry over anxiety itself. Instead, it’s a flash of intergenerational trauma, a sudden charge of emotion rooted deep within the architecture of my female pelvis. The pelvis carries things. Not just me. It’s not something I can tidy into language; it arrives as a sensation, a discomfort with the very ground of my own performability, an existential unease about all the things that have possibly held me back before I even had the chance to step into the dance. There’s a sharpness to this feeling, a flash of recognition that returns in the moment of dancing itself. And as I move, I’m thinking about performance as intimacy (or at least an attempt), an exchange between what I allow myself to show and what I keep guarded, even from myself. A complicated, two-way gaze, something more than audience and performer. It’s a dialogue with the materiality of my own body, with the pelvis as both ground and gap. To simplify what I’m getting at: there’s an audience (or a camera or a notebook), but there’s also a pelvis and whatever else I’ve been storing there. The conversation is between me and that, not just me and them.