She gestures at the door, through
which I can still see a number of people
walking around. Although it is well after
eight PM, I can hear voices echoing off
hallway walls. “I have a lot of good things
to say about dancers, especially in terms of
their talent. In some ways I do think they’re
misrepresented in that everyone thinks
dancers are the same. I think there’s a re-
ally vocal portion of dancers that people
find obnoxious, and loud, and flamboyant. And I think that’s just
part of the nature of a group of dancers. But it’s pretty easy to prove
people’s assumptions wrong. All you have to do is show interest in
something other than dance.
“As a dancer, you want other dancers to know that dance is what
you love to do... there’s this weird social structure because there’s
the competition and there’s also, ‘I want someone to go through this
with.’ You want companionship in this building and in this experi-
ence, but at the same time this is who you’re gonna be auditioning
next to. So there’s a strange, ‘we can’t talk about anything but dance
because I want you to know that I love dance so much.’ And then
there’s also a desire to actually have somebody to go through this
with because it’s hard. It’s really hard.”
She moves fluidly onto her stomach as she watches me fumbling
with the tape recorder between us. With her hips against the gray,
rubber mat on the floor, she lays her legs out frog-like behind her.
“One of the biggest perks about this school is the student
work,” she clasps her hands in front of her, the bird tattoo sheltered
under her right thumb. “Last year I was in ‘Lyric Fire,’ which was a
saving grace for me. It was a hard transition from taking ballet so
seriously and feeling like I was reaching for a ballet aesthetic to just
saying, ‘Okay, modern.’ His piece mixed poetry and I got to speak
it. And I love to write, to speak, to act - so many different kinds of
performances!” She smiles.
“What kind of art, other than dance, do you perform?” I ask.
Visibly brightening, her answer is out of her mouth before I’ve even
finished the question.
“Spoken word poetry, along with just written poetry. I’d rather
perform it though. I’ve done that around campus and stuff which
has been really cool, and I also want to start doing competitions
because that’s how I was introduced to it. I’m really interested in
the rhythm of poetry. The way that I approach my writing is the
same way that I would approach my choreography, in that I think of
movement and words sort of as the same thing—I use them both as
a language. I’m really not interested in making my reader or my au-
dience confused. I want to share something with them. It’s not re-
ally that I want to make a statement about who I am, it’s that I want
to bring something that we all know to a more illuminated place.”
17
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