DOING

PHILOS
OPHY

I read philosophy, and I make dances. In making dances I do philosophy, the way Ian Bogost
suggests doing philosophy. Modern concert dance has a history of being a place where women
investigate ideas, and do so using bodies that have historically been inscribed with lack and
weakness. Bodies marked as unreliable. I dont read philosophy to explain to myself whats
happening in my dances, or so that I can illustrate philosophical concepts with my dancing. I can
understand how situating the work I make in the realm of philosophy, a realm typically
considered more serious (read: male) than dance could be seen as a bid for inflating my own
importance. I am not looking for confirmation or justification. I read because these ideas set
something stirring for me, I read like a score for thinking while acting, I need ideas to push off
from like a floor or walls, Im afraid of space.

I experience conflicting desires and interests.

Im interested in movement that comes from states, and movement that comes from shape.
When I dance I often move from a desire to solidify my form in space. I imagine myself, in my
movement, drawing a border between myself and the world. In a sense this foregrounds my
body within space, creating a figure against a field. This is an ordering that is particular to how
we see other humans. I think it is difficult to gaze at an image of a person, or to look at a
landscape with people moving through it, and to not have ones eye drawn towards other people
first. But at times I also wish to be apart of the landscape, to blend, dissipate or disappear from
anothers field of vision. I consider the (im)possibility of my body being read as something other
than human, as a mound of dirt or a seismic force.

I experience conflicting desires and interests.

I feel that in writing this, in writing anything I write concerning dancing, I should be assembling a
report on why. Why I do this and not that, why I stood that way, why my dancers jumped when. I
feel like someone is waiting for a document stating: I watched this, and I read that, so then I
made the following decisions for this dance. But there is no why that is clear to me. I read and I
write and I move. Chaining these acts together in a sequence of cause and effect does not feel
informative to me. I would rather acknowledge that these acts occur in close proximity to each
other, if there is a why its the movement I make between them.

What occurs when we see and what occurs when we are seen, and how do these acts relate to
these occasionally conflicting desires, to solidify or to dissipate? There is a question of
phenomenology at work here, and I mean this in the spirit of doing philosophy that Ian Bogost
describes in Alien Phenomenology, which he refers to as carpentry.1 I would call it dancing.

If we are thinking in terms of phenomenology, to see is to establish perspective which

necessitates the presences of the body that is seeing, it positions the seeing body in the world,
as a being in the world. 2 And what of this body that is in the world, that is not just a tool for
seeing, or an object like any other? There are two ideas of the body that come out of the
tradition of phenomenology that I, as a choreographer and a woman, turn to as potential
engines for making and reading my work. First, the idea of the bodily horizon, as described by
Sara Ahmed:
The bodily horizon shows what bodies can reach toward by establishing a line beyond which
they cannot reach; the horizon marks the edge of what can be reached by the body. The body
becomes present as a body, with surfaces and boundaries, in showing the limits of what it can
do.3

1 Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It's like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2012.
Print. p.92
2 Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print.
3 Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.

Shape, and what we identify as line are very important to my work, they are concepts that
serve as a kind of self-limiting function, a mode by which I can evidence the edge between my
body and the world. There is the literal limiting of movement by the shape or the concept of line,
but I am more interested in evidencing the limits or horizon enclosing my body and the bodies I
work with as they attempt abstraction. As often as these shapes reference gesture, or pose
they also frequently make no specific claim on meaning, they do not always ask for a particular
read. Yet they are read, and the readings are profoundly influenced by the facts of my dancers
bodies; their femaleness, their blackness, their whiteness, their size. I have also written, during
this process, about the innumerable ideas and concepts piled onto womens bodies, and my
desire to not pile more on top of this unnecessarily. In moving towards shape, stillness, I think I
am also trying to evidence the conceptual blocks that occur when I ask viewers to engage with
ideas or concepts (other than feelings) via embodiment, specifically female embodiment. When
Im still, or when my dancers assume particular shapes, especially if theyre predicated by
gesture of shape that is overtly already identified as female in our society, what Im doing is
showing the viewer that a block, a trip, a hiccup in understanding is happening, and they are
complicit in it, but also they can recognize it. In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice
Merleau-Ponty writes about sitting at a desk, pen in hand, writing. He spells out how these tools,
these objects allow his interior thoughts and ideas to come forward as his body trails behind.4 I
argue, as Sara Ahmed argues, that for many who are not male, or white, or heteronormative the
body is not able to trail behind as easily.
What else for me, and my work, circulates? Phenomenology, as a practice that considers the
embodiment of perception, offers me many conceptual floors to push against, particularly
feminist investigations or critiques of Maurice Merleau-Pontys works. Elizabeth Grosz, in her
book Volatile Bodies, introduced me to Merleau-Pontys idea of the flesh and Luce Irigarays
4 Where is the citation for this? In the library where, presumably, the copy of The Phenomenology of
Perception I requested endlessly circulates, never, never making its way to the main stacks desk, where I
will never be able to pick it up.

critique of this notion. In his explanation of the flesh Merleau-Ponty refers to the double
sensation...Between feeling (the dimension of subjectivity) and being felt (the dimension of
objectuality) is a gulf spanned by the indeterminate and reversible phenomenon of the being
touched of the touching, the crossing over of what is touching to what is touched, the ambiguity
which entails that each hand is in the (potentially reversible) position of both subject and
object5 My poetic reading of this process and Irigarays objections to it; specifically the leap
from the tactile to the visual made by Merleau-Ponty and his failure to acknowledge the manner
in which the flesh relates to the process of maternity or the way that it is implicitly coded in
terms of the attributes of femininity.6 rattles through me. I find myself re-questioning
assumptions I have about sympathetic kinesthetic responses to my or my dancers moving
bodies.

At the extreme end of reading poetically, or with an artists mindset, is my approach to Deleuze
and Guattaris concept of the Body without Organs. I read and re-read How Do You Make
Yourself and Body without Organs? from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Sometimes I read it while making the mistake of thinking that I will get down to business and
understand something about it. But more frequently I read it as a means to start the mental
slideshow of imagery, about 40% related to the actual text, that ticks by for me as I trip through
the text. This particular chapter, its structure and content, resonates with the desire I have for a
certain kind of moving, emerging from state rather than moving towards shape, a permeable
body, one that dissipates in order to reform.

5 Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print.
p.100
6 Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print.
p.104

To melt or fade away, to choose not to be seen, to operate partially obscured - what is the
lesson in this? One considers that to be seen, acknowledged, foregrounded against a horizon,
holds a certain kind of power. The power of being witnessed. But there is also a sense that to
operate in the margins is to open and discover new lines of possibility, action and desire. There
is a certain kind of power in remaining unformed or unseen, but I fear that has a complicated
history for women.

I have conflicting desires and interests.

I want to see a female body that is resilient, that holds pleasure, that keeps secrets. I want
evidence of a kind of control over the level of permeability of the body, a valve that controls the
flows and intensities to use Deleauze and Guattaris language. But as I re-read this chapter I
do so with an awareness that I also read it because there is something there that scratches at
me, that lurks. This work is whisper screaming that we have to dismantle the notion of the self.
I think the main issue I take with the idea that how we conceive of ourselves is fiction, is not that
I fundamentally disagree with it, but that I feel a kind of patriarchal philosophy at work in its
invocation. In order to deny that there is a constituted self, bordered and bounded, would one
need to have experienced one (self) in the first place? Let us turn that around. Would one need
to be in a world where one was granted the conditions necessary to allow that kind of self-hood?
When I think about the treatment of womens bodies historically, or contemporarily, I see a kind
of self/body that has been made extremely porous. Bodies filled up, written over, bent into
systems of meaning that function in terms of control and negation. I consider Luce Irigarays
idea of two lips touching which I first encountered in Elizabeth Groszs Volatile Bodies. Do I
take this turn of phrase to mean that womens bodies are the constant turning inward and
outward of exterior and interior? What an exhausting, exciting churning. I think that the shape,

movement, gaze, vibration I look for indicates to me for one moment that there is a suspension
of the turn from interior to exterior. Sweet relief. One moment of being because we are.

I have conflicting desires and interests

and as a woman in public, as a woman who in the act of

performing asks to be seen, I have to hold both without trying to reconcile one to another. And in
moving I dont have to understand but I have to do the philosophy.

UNREAS
ONABLE
SYSTEM
S

The modus operandi is negation: x=x not y. Identity, resemblence, truth, justice and negation.
The rational foundation for any order. - Brian Massumis description of state philosophy in his
introduction to the English translation of Flix Delueze and Giles Guattaris A Thousand
Plateaus.7

What do we object to, when we question if x=x and not y? Why am I, as a dancer, a woman, a
resident of this temporality, riled by such a thought? x=x not y occludes the possibility of
transformation and multiplicity. To me, being in the world is very much a practice of holding two
disparate (and often contradictory) things at the same time and regarding them both as equally
valid and true. And this does not align with a desire for correlation. x=x and not y, resemblence,
these are not just limiting functions, enclosing or based upon negation. At the worst these
concepts are a lie, the kind of lie that serves as wishful thinking.

Already in dancing I am displacing systems of meaning that function along these lines. What is it
were looking at when we look at dancing? Things or events. Bodies moving, or bodies and
movement. Actor and event are already enmeshed, and not in a manner of cause and effect. In
dancing I think one confronts the widest spectrum of the actual and the imagined, the very real
physical exertion and the endless possible reasons for movement. But particularly for my work, I
am interested in evidencing how the systems that surround us are unreasonable. I do this by
devising structures for my work that step away from not only narrative, but cause and effect,
category, relationship. I want to invite in the idea that events occur not because but that they
just do, and that in witnessing action without understanding its motivation we might
simultaneously have to take in more fully what is actually happening while imagining more
potential possibilities for meaning. I propose that contradiction and confusion may actually be

7 Delueze, Giles, and Fe Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota, 1987. Print.

better ways of knowing or seeking to know than we realize. Or, in the words of critic and sculptor
Jack Burnham, Art is rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to
endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation by affective congruence when
such validation is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake8

I want my dances to ask viewers to consider how we think about what we see, how we
comprehend visual (but beyond visual) information. If theres a message in this desire its that
the systems of order we use to sort through information are not really our own and they are
never really neutral. But in re-looking or in being offered the chance to witness systems that are
at first unreasonable we can start to recognize the slant to the truths weve previously accepted.

Sarah Charlesworths work helps me to locate what it is I mean by unreasonable systems.

Below is Figures (1983) from her series Objects of Desire.

8 Burnham, Jack, and Melissa Ragain. Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 19642004. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2015. Print.

Given the title of the series, there is a relatively clear reading here: both of these images
represent how bodies, particularly those belonging to women, are viewed as objects that are
desired. Similarly there is the fact of the diptych, the working of juxtaposition as a way of
creating meaning. Sarah Coleman, writing for Art News, describes all of the diptychs in this
series as implying text and subtext as one image appears to subtly recede.9 I have a different
reading of these images to offer. The images, together, imply equal degrees of presence and
absence. There are bodies here, somewhere, but they are not to be seen. There is a literal
sheen to the material we see but cannot physically, tactily experience. To the viewer, staring at
the panel hanging on the wall there is the unnerving sense that we know this is an object, but it
holds in unison the image of two different objects.

9 Coleman, Sarah, Sarah Charlesworth: Objects of Desire, 1983-1988 at Maccarone. ArtNews. Art
News, 30 July 2014. Web. 10 Sept. 2015

The experience of looking at the diptychs in this series can be one of an un-doing of x=x not y
logic. In the rearrangement of images rendered uniform by the medium/materiality of their
presentation a kind of visual hiccup, anomaly, echo occurs. There is a reorganization or
reclassification at work here that is engaged in overturning and interrogating accepted or known
categories. Often this results in a kind of both...and (rather than either...or) outcome that asks us
to accept two truths instead of one. The actual and the imagined touch and in touching create a
kind of frisson thats beyond juxtaposition.

Charlesworths diptychs in this series are not composed of abstract imagery, often the
abstraction we engage in as we view them is moving from the familiar or recognizable
representation of the title, to the less familiar representation. In Maps for instance, we see a the
yellow dividing line of a paved road next to a section of pottery that seems to suggest landscape
or horizon.10 Again there is an immediate clarity, in the sense that we can recognize one of these
objects as a map of sorts and therefore deduce that the other is also something that helps us to
identify where we are in the world and how we should direct ourselves going forward. But there
is also the recognition that in including both of these objects she has expanded the category
Things That Are Maps for the viewer. In both Figures and Maps their is a question of which
image is more readily identified as belonging to the given category for the viewer, and why.
There is the not small discomfort here of having to identify why you see one as belonging before
the other, a process of acknowledging that you have been taught to see one as relevant while
you either dont know or dont imagine the other.

10 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/arts/design/review-sarah-charlesworth-doubleworld-studiesperceptions-shaped-by-photography.html

As I shape Relentless Display I search for ways that I can set up systems that skew and disturb
social and performative categories. Like Charlesworths diptychs, I want to activate systems that
coax viewers into questioning how they see. One of the main engines for this is the relatively
quick step away from unison movement early in the piece. There is a pervasive history of
womens bodies performing in lockstep throughout the history of western concert dance. The
female bodies moving in unison evidence a sense of control (whether inner or outer) and
plentiful supply. Early in my piece, the dancers abandon this mode. At times, the piece begins to
resemble not so much an ensemble but a series of overlapping solos. The dances performed by
each of these women are not in reaction to one another. There is a compositional relationship
to the space, but rarely are there acts in which the dancers relate to one another, and these
moments of relating, affecting, reacting are generally vague. Relentless Display operates on a
system that is not asking us to link these women together, as a corps de ballet or as a band of
sisters. I am asking the viewer to watch a group without perceiving group-ness. I think this is
particularly hard to do when the group is made up of women. The female body seems to be
more tethered to the idea of connection, either the physical connection between mother and
child or the representation of family, home, kinship that we associate with the feminine. The
interesting thing to me here, is not that I am recasting women into roles or action perceived as
male but that I am untethering the female body from the modes of perception, systems of
seeing that we usually use to view it.

In the overlapping solos and unrelated action I am also asking the viewer to literally see and
perceive more. In shifting the audiences position a third of the way through the piece I clear the
way for dancers to use more of the space, expanding the field of the viewers vision while also
asking them to look from a different angle. In this way I think dance can do something that
seems relatively surface, but is actually very hard. It invites the viewer to literally and
metaphorically take up another point of view.

This idea of seeing more expands outward in time as well. Viewers enter to action thats already
occurring. The dance begins without them, and I hope to establish a sense that it may have
been going on already for a long time, perhaps forever. Similarly there is a false ending. (I will
write more about this after people see it in designer run. A false ending doesnt feel effective to
me if Im describing where and how it ends beforehand.)

The unreasonable system Im trying to let this dance live within is one in which the ability to
solidify, to exist as well made objects is as possible and valuable as the ability to dissolve, drift
and become something else. Wherein womens bodies are both bounded and solidified and
liquid slipping through a multitude of contexts, but most important are the both...and not the
metaphors or imagery Im offering you. In his essay System Aesthetics Jack Burnham early on
declares In the automated state, power resides less in the control of traditional symbols of
wealth than in information.11 Power resides in the way that information is presented,
categorized and disseminated. The actions in this piece are joined by their simultaneity in time
and space. Their coincidence is left to be puzzled out.

11 Burnham, Jack, and Melissa Ragain. Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 19642004. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2015. Print.

OUR
BODIES
OUR
SELVES

There are bodies, womens bodies, and then there is the idea of womens bodies. And these are
usually two different things. Like a dance, this framework for thinking offers us both the actual
and the imagined.

Women have vaginas and you cant see what goes on in them so theyre deceitful by nature and
women they are angels on earth but also they are weak so you have to take care of them
because they have no capacity for reasoning, so really their goodness is like the goodness of a
child or an animal which makes it easier for them to be led into sin or lesbianism or probably
both, and women are hysterical and they only process emotionally, their wombs wander through
their bodies unanchored and it makes them hysterical and the only way to stop this is to marry
them off or make sure they get vigorous exercise on horseback, and women its not their fault
that they cant really do science or math because their spatial reasoning is so poor, women
need to lean in, they need to speak up, dont they know theyd be more successful in the
workplace if theyd only function more like men, and women these days they want to have it all
because they concept of having a spouse and children and a job is basically brand new, and
freeze your eggs but only if you have the money otherwise honestly just give up, give up being a
woman, give up and just die. Is a list of ideas about women regarded as basically true at one
point or another in the past 200 years.
Did you know that in the state of Indiana women who have had abortions or miscarriages are
now required by law to pay for the cremation or burial of a fetus? Women are givers of life until
they arent and then their bodies are just machines of death and they should be fined, especially
if they experience a relatively common biological occurrence.
This way of thinking is, of course, absurd. But it is also entirely entangled in the confusion that
fogs our understanding of how bodies function as a representative of our selves. The correlation
between body and self is one I see as pervasive and uniquely dangerous. The uterus has no
morality, at least not a morality recognizable to us. To assume that in miscarrying that the body
has failed, and that the self identified with that body must be held responsible is a line of
reasoning beyond my personal comprehension.

Bodies exists and they are affiliated with certain specific people. Sometimes our bodies, our
actual continued physical existence, come forward. They are somehow more relevant to the

situation at hand. Laying on the operating table maybe, or crossing a border, the body somehow
comes to the foreground of our selves. Navigating a familiar landscape, or performing a familiar
action (I always think about driving a car) our bodies seem to recede from our awareness, they
fade into the background noise of the task. This phenomena, the foregrounding and
backgrounding of the body, is different for men and women and my interest in creating dances
often comes back to a struggle to articulate, name or resist that difference in experience.

Womens bodies experience the world in a different way. This difference is both so obvious and
so frequently passed over that it has taken me months to realize that I need to disclose that
information in the format of a short, declarative sentence. Historically this difference in
experience has been ascribed to biology, in more or less erroneous ways, but gradually I notice
that the biological explanation gives way to socio-cultural or psychological explanations often no
less biased than the idea that roaming wombs create hysteria.

What is the verb that means the fact of being? To exist.

One could say that, in general, we exist. There is a more or less accepted reality of being
present. But for women, their bodies, they often exist despite. This is the best way, so far, I can
explain this difference in experience, this trouble of presence.

Body to body. Body does not = body and not y, if y = history, worldview, experience, placedness,
race, age, gender. A body gathers some of these up to constitute itself every minute while
simultaneously having others inscribed upon it. In moving, performing, how can I enact the
event that will state the existence of a womans body and a self, as a fact, a presence?
Historically womens bodies have been treated as containers for meaning, in representing
womens bodies artists have rendered them as surfaces on which they can inscribe their desires

and fears. When I speak of foregrounding the female body, it is not that I am looking for a way to
render it as a blank page. Instead I seek action that renders the materiality of the female body
less easy to inscribe upon.

In Relentless Display one of the particular things I find myself looking for is movement that has a
sort of object-ness to it, something in it indicates towards being self contained or firmly placed.
Particularly, when Im looking at these womens bodies I watch for movement that might indicate
some sort of self-constituting behavior or self-reifying gestures. I think about touch as a way of
defining for oneself where the self is, its consistency. I look for a shape that feels clear, maybe
because of the way weight is transferred into the ground. A sureness of gaze. My eyes are here
and they look directly. Vibration also functions as a kind of touch. A repeated meeting and
parting of weight and pressure on the joints, between the feet and the floor. Randi Townsends
solo is an example of this. It is not lost on me that the first time this happens, really emerges for
me as a viewer of my own dance, its happening from the movement of a woman who is black in
the United States. Hold on. In order for me to be here, Im going to have to get ahold of myself.

Our self. I search for movement that evidences the female body, its existence despite. And in
this I am not seeking a re-representation of the female body. There have been many micromovements in the second and third wave of feminism to seek wider representation of nonnormative, not-white, not traditionally attractive female bodies in popular media. My dancers,
particularly in this piece, feature women with a variety of body shapes or skin color. But that is
not enough. For the despite to be in evidence, there is a certain carriage of self that lets others
sense the awareness of the weight and density, the frisson of pressure that outlines limbs and
features, when your existence in space presses up against a landscape that was in no way
shaped for you. This is not only a femininity that looks different, that represents different, it does
different and its the way of doing that my dances seek.

Bodies do, and this is accepted as given. But for a female body, a body more often conflated
with objecthood, the doing becomes circumscribed by the internal knowledge that our
body/object is considered lessor, faulty or other. Women have been alternately described as the
weaker sex and the givers of life, either way our bodies are pushed to the extreme margins of
physical human existence. We are taught to regard our bodies with a strange mixture of fear
and awe, and it is obviously not by chance that I have titled this essay with a riff on the classic
tome published by the Boston Womens Health Clinic that represents one of many attempts to
reorient women to the facts rather than the myths of their bodies existence. But how, when we
have cleared our eyes of the misinformation, do these bodies do, act, move through a space
shaped by the misinformation itself? As Sara Ahmed points out in Queer Phenomenologies, the
lines of possibility a person may travel along as they take action are not in evidence for every
body equally. Instead as the body is shaped and oriented by the field of objects/tools it finds
itself within, some lines of possibility appear while other recede. In making dances, I think I try to
work this process in reverse. I want access to different lines of possibility, and I want more of
them, in my daily existence as a human women and as a dancer, literally moving through space
and time. I re-shape my body to call these lines of possibility into existence, and in defiance of a
continuing patriarchy my body becomes, exists as a well made object.

The well made object is a term I first encountered in Robert Morriss collection of essays
Continuous Project Altered Daily. I name this because I want to acknowledge the private joke I
smirk at when I think about adapting the terminology of 1960/70s minimalist sculpture, a
category that to me feels ineffably male. (Insert here, Morris describing the rectangular box and
why its properties qualify it as well made) As a well made object, my body is no longer an object
of (desire) or a tool (for someone elses use), instead like the cube remaining upright it radiates
its own capability at being what it is outwards into space. In my work this tends to manifest as

particularly shaped stillnesses. Throughout Relentless Display the dancers arrange their limbs
in clear, geometric lines and to me each of these shapes is like a declarative sentence that
begins with the words I can and as I can, I exist with a multitude of possibilities. Time is also a
factor here. To hold a position, instead of passing through it, is to let it state and restate itself as
it is held. Not only is there the proposition: I can but the idea that I can be As the position,
held in space, coalesces onto the dancers body more possibilities of what the position signifies
unspool. I have been told that the positions my body, or the bodies of my dancers assume, are
archetypal and at times I have felt confused by this. I think that I search the solid state, the wellmade object, with a knowledge that no matter what shape is assumed it will, on the body of a
woman, be read to mean certain things that would not be placed on a man in the same position.
And in assuming certain geometric forms that dont have easy correlations to gesture or specific
action I am creating situations in which viewers must reckon with how their readings of
movement are caught up in the gender of the performer. (Ok, but this is also just literally how
dance works. So why is it specific to my choreography? Theres something in here about affect,
or maybe gaze?)

It is not only that the position or shape is a well-made object, but also that the moving bodies of
my performers are regarded as well made objects. Asking to be considered any kind of object
seems a dangerous, absurd proposition for a woman to make in the context of dance history.
This is not the Paris Opera Ballet. So instead of asking, my dances and my dancers tell. There
is a sense, throughout Relentless Display, that these women have been set to a series of tasks
and that they will perform them without failure. The tasks do not necessarily assemble into
meaning, but the competency with which they are performed does. Each completed action
announces the capability of these bodies, their suitedness to the task. These women, their
bodies, are well made objects. They exist in space because they can, they do, theyre already
here.

FLOOD
THE
ARCHIVE

I was a child with many collections, each curated haphazardly and jealously guarded. As an
adult I find myself again fascinated by collections, but I do not find myself in possession of
many. To collect is to seek to replicate and to continuously contextualize with each replication.
One box is a container, three are several containers that can be compared to one another, and
twelve is a collection of boxes, a new entity unto itself assembled from many. When you are
young the collections often emerge out of an overarching and simple logic. I have a friend who
at age three declared she would collect red things. In a red bag she carried a red crayon and a
red ball. Some red yarn or string, and her fathers copy of Chairman Maos Little Red Book,
which was obviously, red.

I thought about this collection recently while visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I
came across an exhibition titled Van Gough Irises and Roses. The words What in the living
fuck? actually came out of my mouth. I am a foolish person, I know. I have a residue of regard
for higher cultural institutions that remains despite vigorous shaking. But as I contemplated
that to actually view the exhibit one would have to pay special admission to see an exhibit that
could accurately be retitled: Some Pictures of Flowers Because Why Tax Yourself? I suddenly
thought about Kate Pynoos, age three, with a collection brilliantly assembled through the
combination of a singular focus and chance.

The museum is a collection, it is a warehouse for colonial loot, it is a temple of human

achievement, it is a pile of some really old shit that has not yet been reclaimed by the earth. Its
a record, a mausoleum.

The archive is a collection, it is a warehouse for intellectual loot, it is a temple to particular ideas,
it is a pile of some really old papers usually once belonging to a dead white man. Its a concept
of concepts, filed, to guard against death.

Here is the best description of walking through a gallery in a museum not written as a
description of walking through a museum: It happens fast and hot, the tiny universe of things
bumping and rubbing against one another in succession, chaining together like polymers.12. To
think of the museum as a very specific site in which things rub or touch one another. In which
this process is cooled, deliberated, arranged. And as bodies move into the building, the sight
and site changes, shifts. To turn from a Mondrian to a Renior changes both objects in
succession. I, like Ian Bogost author of Alien Phenomenology, would argue not just the way we
conceive of each object in context changes, but that the objects themselves change and change
us. The bodies of the museum goers themselves, crowding, pooling, dispersing are shifted in
their proximity to these objects.

I was raised at the museum, and by the museum I mean the idea of the museum. This is the
idea that history and culture can be located and centralized, that we can somehow improve
ourselves just by proximity to objects that are researched, certified, anointed. I came to dancing
as a museum of dance, a litany of movements that I would shape my body into and I was happy,
so happy to do it. But then I became interested in systems, I began looking at my collections
and wondering why I was gathering these objects and not others. And, like anything you look at
closely, the systems started to unravel for me, the collections and categories no longer made
sense. I started making dances because dances were what I knew best, so in making dances I
could take them apart. If someone had shown me how a combustion engine worked instead of

12 Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It's like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota,
2012. Print. p.25

taking me to ballet class, I probably would have become an engineer. For a long time I worked
in this broad category of deconstruction, without knowing its name or history, and then I learned
its name and history and I thought, I am making dances that deconstruct and reposition the
images of womens bodies and the meanings that are attached to them and I would argue that
didnt ever really go away. But I get frustrated with this, I get frustrated that even in
recontextualizing the female body it never gets to escape reference or meaning or femaleness,
if youre making dances with women somewhere along the line someone decides youre making
dances about women because how could all of those kinds of bodies be there and yet youre
making a dance about something else? So I tried examining my body like a foreign object and I
tried relating it not to other bodies but to other materialities and I got still because it didnt seem
to matter what way I moved so why move at all? And so then all my dances were read as
evidencing of female archetypes and I think maybe thats when I realized that no one was ever
going to let me be an engineer. So heres some ladies, all these ladies, go ahead. Its a
relentless display.

Its not that Im uninterested in making dances with an eye towards the lived experience of the
female body. Its that Id like to believe that I could make dances that have an eye towards the
lived experience of the female body and

In the midst of these frustrations with how I find my work being read, with how even I read my
work, a phrase keeps coming to mind. Nothing really matters and therefore everything is equally
important. And Ill name it so you dont have to: Its a very prone to depression, reads too much
french post-structuralist theory without really comprehending it, bullshit sort of statement to have
rumbling around ones head. So Ill offer this passage as a corollary, dont worry its written by a
man about the ideas of two men so we dont have to worry that it might accidentally be
interpreted as being about the experiences of women:

Levi Bryant calls it flat ontology. He borrows the term from Manuel DeLanda, who
uses it to claim that existence is composed entirely of individuals (rather than
species and genera, for example). Bryant uses the phrase somewhat differently:
his flat ontology grants all objects the same ontological status. For Bryant (as for
Latour), the term object enjoys a wide berth: corporeal and incorporeal entities
count, whether they be material objects, abstractions, objects of intention, or
anything whatsoever - quarks, Harry Potter, keynote speeches not one is
more real than any other.
Bryant offers a curious and counterintuitive phrase to get to the bottom of
flat ontology: The world, he says, does not exist. Of course, if everything
exists as I have just claimed, than statements of nonexistence demand special
attention. What does Bryant mean? That there is no ur-thing, no container, no
vessel, no concept that sits above being such that it can include all aspects of
it holistically and incontrovertibly: there is no super-object that would gather
all objects together in a harmonious unity.13
The problem is that this notion of flat ontology speaks very directly not to my experiences as a
woman, but to the desires I harbor as someone who has experienced, is experiencing an
embodiment that is named female. It seems like a lense through which the tenants of categories
like female; as mixed as pink, uterus, emotional, childbirth could be untethered from one
another and allowed to drift away. If there is no world, no super container the bigger, broader
containers must go as well. If theres no femininity then a uterus, revenge and a superconductor
can jostle against one another to nobodys great surprise. Women could dances dances that
arent about being women or are about being women and...

When I think of everything womens bodies carry, the conflicted reverence and disgust our
culture seems to regard them with, there is a word that comes to mind and that word is
exhaustion. Unlike the high lacquer rectangular forms arranged accross the floor of a gallery
that inspired Jack Burnham to write System Aesthetics, or the Game Susan Rethorst uses to
begin her composition classes, the material I work with is not randomly selected or purposely
void of immediate meaning. A flatter ontology is something I desire, but its not the way my
dances will be read. The material I work with, bodies and womens bodies in particular, do not
13 Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It's like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota,
2012. Print. p. 12

need more meanings built on top of them. But through them, bodies that are saturated and
ready to spill out, I can start to flood the plain and shift the qualities ascribed to these bodies just
far enough away so that we might, for a moment, recognize them. Clarity, line in movement and
shape is a big thing for me. I want to explain that the confusion and contradiction I offer, that I
talk about as better ways of knowing to quote my own press release, are not coming from my
body or the bodies of my dancers. Our bodies are just fine. The confusion comes from having to
read them anew.

There is an ethos of the impossible here, we are neurologically capable of discerning patterns
and groupings for a reason. But the patterns and groupings weve established arent functioning
for us, instead it seems we function for them. By this I mean gender, by this I mean race. I mean
the prison, the school, any place where we find ourselves filing bodies into categories that are
actually methods of control. How does a flood, a catastrophic reorganization that functions
outside of human logic, nudge us towards a flatter ontology? We cant rid ourselves of the idea
of like-ness but to address the troubled relationship we have with the world we have to look for
different notions of what it is to be alike.

Structure has been a theme throughout my time here. I have long assumed that my issue
making dances is centered around structure, my inability to control it. But I assumed too long
that structure means order, when it can mean chaos. There is the chaos of the museum and
the chaos of the flood, and Id like as much as possible in this piece, choose the structure of the
later. Flood is a loaded term and I have to be specific about what I mean. The flood I imagine
does not cleanse, and it does not wash away. It lifts, floats, saturates and displaces. It
transforms and bloats and molds, but it does not fundamentally eradicate the sense of the
object. The water lets us become untethered, unmoored, in it we drift. And this is terrifying,
because we may be set loose from structures and categorizations that no longer function for us,

but we may also lose the communities and categories we have chosen for ourselves. How to
allow one without doing the other?