movement meets biography

photo from Spark*(KQED Arts)

i just saw this show last night at dance mission theatre and though the show closed last night, i want to write about it here anyway because i bet it will re-emerge again, it being AMAZING and also just a weekend run but had 5 sold-out shows with many people turned away. keep your eye out for future runs or tours to other cities if you live somewhere other than the sf bay area.

the show tells the story of lou sullivan, transgendered female-to-male activist and pioneer who has an important place in san francisco history. sean dorsey read his journals and papers archived in the SF library, and then wrote this piece as a tribute/response.

i am a huge fan of sean dorsey's choreography. before seeing his work i don't think i could truly appreciate the way that movement can tell a story. there is such tenderness in the way he translates story to words, then words to movement. ways that are utterly surprising and yet make so much sense it feels like putting on an old familiar shirt. i find him a thoughtful, thorough, gentle, and brave artist.

seeing performance (or witnessing any art, really) always makes me think, and this time was no different...i found myself thinking about more than what the piece conjured up, though. like about my own relationship with performance. and how much i don't connect to this strange phenomenon we call 'applause.' for me, it's jarring and so automatically done that there are times i question its authenticity. at this particular show the energy of the audience was apparent; they were moved, glowing with their appreciation, so that when they clapped it carried that message with it, but there are times this isn't so. i've heard people say they sometimes clap out of happiness the show is over, for example. and so this makes me wonder: am i partial to the visual arts because experiencing it is generally a quiet, introspective experience? and where is the translation of applause in the visual art world? how does an artist (who isn't famous and receiving constant reviews, etc.) receive feedback from their audience? and artists are the ultimate see-ers, so for many there must be something fulfilling about being seen, no? is true for me? i think i have a very complicated relationship to being seen, but that's another entry for another time.

there was one aspect of the sean dorsey show that didn't sit right with me and it wasn't that the device didn't work in the art (because it really did work) as much as a reminder of the way i experience the world. i am a very different storyteller, for one. and the premise of the piece was that it is hard to know a person when they are gone (aka dead), but you can get to know them, possibly even better than you ever would have alive, if you do one thing: read their diary. well, read their many diaries, which hopefully they have left behind to be read.

so, for the record (this will have to do as my living will for the moment until i can make a real one)-- i cannot and will not be understood by my diaries. hopefully i will live long enough to have time to keep them for my own reflection but then burn them before they are read by anyone else, but we can't always choose when and where we die. but either way, i don't think a person always tells the whole truth of what they are living and experiencing in the simple pages of a journal. at least, i don't. not in letters either. we are all so many layers of experiences in any given moment. so if you want to know the truth of who i was when i die, cut up my journals into tiny pieces, put them back together in a different, random order, and then maybe you will have more of a sliver of the truth of who i was. or better yet, splice them in a pile with every photograph i've ever taken, every drawing, every film, every moment i was captured on film or otherwise, perhaps also every film, song, painting, etc that has moved me, and....well, you get the idea.

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