back
I'm "back"
I came back to New York City and was greeted with about a million shows of about a million artists I care about, back in this community that I am in love with. It’s good to be back, to be welcomed back into a flurry of dancing. But back is also strange, I felt launched back in time, to before my time away, and sometimes this city seems unable to understand time outside itself, wrapped up in its own warp speed. And I’m also thinking about back as a return, back as a turn, back as the backspace that performance ignores, back as where shit gets catalogued (the back room) and the place where pain recurs and the place that produces tears without explanation. And that’s because I’m thinking about Sol Cabrini’s performance at PITCH at Supr Omen a few days ago, a new series curated by me and Bella Thorpe-Woods. Her performance rocked me, pushed me back with its intensity, volume, fire, and prompted the second response poem of this batch that I’m sharing with you now. And I’m thinking about back because I’m thinking about Sonya Molansky’s performance at Pageant a couple days ago, which made me feel without legibility, made me cry without reason, made me reach back into the depths of my imagination without looking–a gift. These poems stretch back into London (and Berlin too), and attempt a capricious incomplete catalogue of what’s past.
Sonya Molansky at Pageant (May 29, 2026)
What might the psyche produce
On the other half of the conversation
Without vision
Color, bright, memory
Intimacy, wherever it occurs
The erect beads of grippy socks
The desire of the driverless
The tender customer, before their end, between your legs
Your dad, singing, in the back of the restaurant
Your dad, dying
The afterlife, a beach
Your picture, buried in sand
Nothing changes: feet remain
But nothing stays: feet retract
Everything matters: rope, pencil, plant, phone, toe
Everything is matter: your brain is wet, aching for image
Sol Cabrini at SuprOmen’s PITCH series (May 28, 2026)
When will performance! (she turns around, to surprise, to make us laugh) deal with the back?
When will ripped flesh fresh out the back heal into what could be less noble and more alive?
When will looking unresolve?
When will performance! (the turn is the reduction, she is teaching us, the flattening potential of chuckle) function without its facing?
When will I decide not to go to the performance!?
Angel Zinovieff at SuprOmen’s PITCH series (May 28, 2026)
Water’s power can be attempted to be taken by two lines and two banks and the energy that gathers between humans who keep asking for hammers
But the script will keep interrupting itself and the pages will keep falling and the water will bust through, and two lines will face off, and banks will be shifted in the push of an embrace, and where you’ll land is in the wet quality of an imagined cello, tenderly held, gently played
Paris Cullen at LifeWorld (May 21, 2026)
What moves a move?
Trying to save it
Trying to listen
Trying to kiss and break up
Trying to take space with fingers in a mouth
Trying to prepare the skin for transport
Trying to watch without being moved
Trying to feel bodies move air move bodies move air move fabric move air
Trying to feel what’s bigger
Trying to fall what’s beyond
Trying to connect, tongue to tongue
Look up, there’s a daemon, eyes alight, ready to make the link, holding the truthy meat in tulle tongue, drifting away
Sarah Zucchero at LifeWorld (May 21, 2026)
What if the future was friendly and the alien was the hopes of your sixth grade self talking into a pink flip phone and the space ship has wheels and the dancers arrive warm, and what if your past life is what’s next, kind in its shine
Maia Chao and Lena Engelstein at The Whitney (May 17, 2026)
Attention is protected, held, handled with white conservator gloves, directed with frames and tiny metal ropes and headsets, cradled with the clearest voice you’ve ever heard pleading to touch, stroking to touch, asking to touch with laughter and tears and eye contact, tickled with a slapstick and boxing match, and boldly called up to make the contradiction clear (the repeat performance of a genocide’s censorship)
Meanwhile, art is protected with white conservator gloves, sure, but backed up with the police (the security guard, the gun behind the uniform, the invocation of jail, the invocation of I can put you wherever I want) and money (money to protect money) and power gets dressed in beauty
When will the walls shake? When will something break?
Jade Manns at Pageant (May 16, 2026)
Peeling a lemon
You burst
Birthing, tearing
Birthing, stretched
Starting by shedding
In all instincts’ force
There is no dignity
Or there is, but it’s at the bottom
But who needs it
When you’re at the mercy of tickling
Not far from pain
When you’re at the mercy of what you have to do
What is next, destined
What a body can take
What I can take, watching
Manufactured
You fall
Towards the end of the world
In response to the smell of danger
You hear her accent, when she calls (nature)
And we look down to work
And we look up to be the animals we are
And we look in the mirror
Moriah Evans at LMCC (May 16, 2026)
Someone reclines, worrying she’ll squeeze out her last breath, after having tried himself, to squeeze out his consciousness, watching the torture that might be equivalent to the fiery gates that might be equivalent to the ecstatic portal that gets someone past and out, you past and out of you and me, the separation
It is hard work to deal with dance, to deal with what is between you and me, past you, past me
Sam Kann and Chloë Engel at LifeWorld (May 15, 2026)
spit it out, but as slow as possible, which means, rather, spit and hold, in all the absolute illumination of the male filmic gaze and the drowning you can do in the beat and the thrill of man–and the thrill of man, meaning, the gunshot and the power gained from a suit, and gagging it–and it, meaning the beauty of disgust and luxury in becoming another and controlling the uncontrollable other (self), killing your own death, taking out the twin threat, picking up the threatening phone call, across and beyond the masculine threat, to settle into topless glory, the sexiness of ransom and puppetry and releasing the hostage, so you can wash your face, after it all, resolving not to resolve how good it felt
Holly Sass, Sabina Moe, obie puckett, and Charlie Random (and more) at 90 mil in Berlin (May 2, 2026)
The Time Worm is where a PowerPoint and a foot head can be in the same story as a rave as a rock concert as a mosh pit as a slippery orgy facilitated by harp and ladles of lube carefully poured, which is the same story as the basis of every living thing, which is sex and death and
William Joys x Dom Sebastian at The Writers’ Room in London (April 24, 2026)
A couture lion king cosplayer actually shows the importance of self-importance
How I pay attention to the entitlement drag, delicious, delivered in royal tone with royal lip placement and high drama of keys and a too loud speaker
How I paid attention before this queen was onstage, how this queen was a queen even looking out the window, preparing
Important: it’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody
Mary Malone at The Writers’ Room in London (April 24, 2026)
This high femme is on the go
In the trenches of the leopard trench
In the bootcamp of the stiletto crawl
This is a wall show (visual, then sonic, all about the reveal, or conceal, precise, unbridled)
FUJI|||||||||||TA (Yosuke Fujita) at Stone Nest in London (April 22, 2026)
Bury your face in wood and metal
Bury your face in the sound of nothing rising, rushing through holes
Smother me in the invisible visiting upon you from the apse from the rafters
Cure me with marbles plucking sinuses, clanging bones
The sound of listened loving, ongoing
Jessica Higgins at The Writers’ Room in London (April 4, 2026)
Things move through cavities and tubes
Elements combine or don’t
This magic is made mundane in the equation
Water + air + a weeklong residency in a cold drafty building + setting up a camera + reading what’s found
“What if I want a character to be flat?”
Like the undone potential of the female inflatable dancer
Lay her down