love of power vs power of love

dancing the world we want into existence

This week I was so so tired. I got into that completely overwhelmed, sad, hopeless zone. I have been sick recently, and I don’t think it’s unrelated to the amount of stress swirling through the streets lately. Isn’t everyone worried about impending doom?

:)

Yeah… not the easiest conditions for a nervous system to try and chill the F out. Dancing, however, continues to be a source of generative information, life force, and joy, even.

In class on Thursday, I ended up DJing because the 10am class had been canceled, so my amazing pianist Scott Killian had left the building. Though I missed Scott and wished he’d been able to stay, I ended up having an incredible time. It felt like a party… like the old days of Ballez class back at BAX, when I was trying to give the dancers that feeling of being in the club. Playing queer pop music reminds people to flirt, to not take themselves so seriously, and to do what feels good. There was some singing along that broke out and generally a sense that we were in there to play with each other.

I love when class feels like a community experience, instead of a platform for individual striving. Not to say that class can’t be a place of individual growth, I think it absolutely can, but the purpose of it, the beauty of it, is that we gather together. We dance together. For the love of how that feels.

Meg Harper and Janet Panetta (foreground) in photo from Ballez’s Giselle of Loneliness at The Joyce, 2021.

photo by Christopher Duggan.

I felt that so much in my training with Janet Panetta, and I miss it these days, without her here to create that community.

I’m thinking of the “love of power vs the power of love,” an idea attributed to Jimi Hendrix, and/or sometimes to Mahatma Gandhi. Whoever said it first, the idea feels important right now.

We are in a state of economic instability in dance, and feel we are collectively disempowered. Yes. That is true. And, it has been true before, for most of dance history. Somehow, our feminized labor under patriarchy always leaves us coming up short on economic resources… leaving us to require the support/power of others who hoard it. Historically, dancers have been sex workers, have had to hold multiple jobs, and have been told they’re “lucky” if they get hired to take on dance work that isn’t really what they want to do, because it pays the bills.

And, the conditions of getting well paid dance work continue to define what we “must be,” aka, how we must look, act, dress, engage with the world— in order for us to get access to those jobs, to access the power and resources we desperately need. Fitting into the prescribed aesthetic of what a dancer must be becomes the requisite standard that dancers impose upon themselves, often in fairly intense, masochistic ways! We beat ourselves up at the barre, looking in the mirror, judging every perceived flaw. We fear the attention of the teacher, afraid they will see how we don’t “measure up.” And those moments of joy and pleasure and play in community disappear.

I wonder how much of this self-inflicted exile from our true desires creates the dance world we are collectively inhabiting. How much are we each believing that we don’t get to be ok, that we won’t be ok, that we’re not enough, that we will never have enough? And instead of enjoying our dancing, are we just reinforcing the harsh standards that no one really enjoys anyways, because that is what we believe we must practice in class? From there, the industry standards get set. And held. And maintained. Those who fought tooth and nail to fit into the prescribed aesthetic, and gave up so much of who they were in order to do so, go on to inflict those same standards upon the next generation coming up the ranks, “for your own good.”

Can we change?

I want dancing to be fun, to be pleasurable, to be a space of freedom and connection and that means we have to be allowed to be our full, complex selves, who don’t always fit the industry “standard.” I have students who can’t or won’t trust me, who can’t or won’t trust themselves… that their pleasure, joy and connection might actually be the gateway to their greatest dancing, because they’ve been fed the idea over and over again that they are not enough.

What I saw in class last week, when the dancers were enjoying themselves and appreciating each other, was some of the best dancing I’ve seen in a while. It was free, playful, exhilarating, valuable. And it showed a powerful vision of what class could be: a space of collective joy.

What if the power we have is collectively created and shared, and can change the aesthetics of the forms we practice from the inside out? What if we practice the power of love, instead of the love of power? What if we radiate joy?

The world that I want to see, is created from collective empowerment, not individual wealth. I do believe our greatest resource is love. What if we give it to ourselves and each other?