sacredness simply moving

In the last few years I’ve done more dancing than writing, as a matter of survival. Not to lose myself, but to sustain myself. To find connection without language, to be among without having to explain. I haven’t known how to narrate myself, and I have missed telling stories, but for a while I felt like I had none to tell, or at least none that felt like my own. Sitting with myself in the quiet and calm that writing demands was excruciating. There was so much internal violence, cruel noise when I slowed down enough to listen. I had to struggle through it; I am struggling still, but now I can see the shape of what I struggle with, and am beginning to apprehend that its shape is not entirely my own. Not quite two years ago I left a marriage in which my relationship with myself was severely damaged. Last November, my divorce became legal. I hope never again to be fooled into permitting the state and its structures of ownership and control anywhere near my intimacies, my commitments. I hope never again to confuse commitment for control. (This will take practice, does.) On the dance floor I have been practicing the feeling of allowing myself to move beside another but from inside of my own frame. I love the moment late at night when people start to go home. The dance floor grows more spacious and everyone faces toward the DJ booth, dancing beside one another but not for one another. Each inside of their own frame. On the dance floor I have been grieving, and lately also beginning to make repair with myself–not blaming myself, but being honest with myself about the fact that I had some agency in choosing to stay where I was being harmed, and where I was becoming a version of myself who I did not like or respect. My sense of my integrity was profoundly ruptured. Why did I do that? What did I believe I deserved, or what purpose did I think this was serving? I didn’t want to throw anyone away, and I wrongly thought that the way to honor others’ sacredness was to erode my own. 

A week and a half ago I attended Klezcummington, a festival and gathering of Yiddish culture, organized mostly by white queer and trans Ashkenazi Jews like me, including my friend Ozzy, on a farm in Western Massachusetts. One of the workshops I attended, led by the performer and scholar of Yiddish dance Yael Horowitz, was titled “Yiddish Dance as Attention Practice.” In the workshop, Yael used the term “co-territorial,” which I know from Yiddish scholarly contexts, where it describes the peoples and cultures–Poles, Ukrainians, Bessarabians, Rusyns, Roma–among whom Yiddish-speaking Jews lived in Eastern Europe, to speak about hip-hop, house, soul, etc as co-territorial dance forms to any Yiddish dance taught or learned or embodied in a US context. As co-territorial for any non-Black dancer dancing here. I loved that. Yiddish dances, Yael continued, keep the dancer mostly upright, flirting at the shoulders, elbows, wrists, ankles. Unlike co-territorial dances in Eastern Europe and in the US, which often emphasize movement of the hips, waist, knees, and which play with falling, release into gravity, in Yiddish dance the body rises, bouncing up and up but not moving laterally, even when dancing side to side or in a circle. When everyone in the workshop clasped hands and played inside the simple form of the zhok (a Romanian slow-tempoed 3/8 hora, a traditional Yiddish dance) that Yael taught us, I noticed myself present and contained but not closed, carried by the dance itself and carrying myself within it, connected within the circle to all the other dancers, attuned to them but not worried about what they thought of me, and most of all in connection with myself, with the pleasures of sweating into the hot day, of improvising a moment of flight by holding still inside the musicians’ syncopation. My sacredness simply moving beside so many others'.

For now what I want to say is that through these terrible years Yiddish is where I kept the kernel of myself that I never hated, and that while dancing I have (almost) never been able to be violent to myself. That on dance floors, mostly in Pittsburgh, I have been learning about being beside and among, about holding and moving my grief without the language of my mouth but so much with the language of my body. That as I return to myself I want to return to written language in ways that make sense, to tell stories about nightlife through the new lens that these last few years have given me, in which I have so missed making meaning with the night, inside of connection and desire and distance, inside of altered states and sex. Have missed giving attention to these life-giving and life-making practices at the edge of death, including where I can't go anymore or where my relationship to those practices is more tenuous, tired, changing--both to my ancestral dances and to the co-territorial, mostly Black, forms of dance and dance music that helped me make it through. I missed writing to all of you.