This performance is a world-making of intimate space and boundedness. The dancers dwell in the smaller subtle movements of couple dancing, the silent negotiations, the tight embrace and the significance of the hands. They work with materials such as tactile contact, rhythmic footwork, pulsing, affectivity, animation, mood, pleasure, imagination, and voice. They pay attention to the emergent figures of the dancing rather than recognition of pre-established categories of the political or ethics. 

This performance is part of a larger practice and study in social and folk dance. I’m interested in the dancing that one has lived with and that one lives. I am currently focusing on the vernacular of African American jazz and in particular the lindy hop, swing and blues dancing. Engaging in these dances has made me attend to and negotiate the schisms between self and other, culture and art, ownership and theft, and the visibility or hiddenness of race in dance.   

 I’ve been focusing on the ongoing negotiation in these couple dances, which is made up of nuanced yet direct shifts of initiating, listening, responding, supporting, resisting or breaking away while continuing to dance together. Social dancing has been a way for me to practice what Audre Lorde describes as ‘the erotic as power’ because it is a scene where the capacities for joy and pleasure are underlined and encouraged in an explicit way, which I value.