january glare
Sharing poems borne of the blazing energy of the past month.
In January, New York City was shining. Not only with its bright not-even-that-dirty-yet snow and sharp freezing sun, but also with the glisten of APAP season (are we still calling it that?) where everyone seems to be in a show or going to a show or skipping one show to see another show. I managed to dance most days and managed to see dance many days. All the dancing was also marked by rage–bright rage, shining rage–at the ongoing, escalating, horrifying state violence of this cursed country.
It was hard to leave. (I’m in London for the next few months for PhD research reasons and for fun reasons). It was hard to leave because the dancing web in the city feels so dense, increasingly life-giving. And relatedly, it was hard to leave my community because building on trusted relationships to stay and organize and fight seems like the most important tactical tool we can deploy at this moment. But here I am, gone for a bit, now with hopes to be somehow connected and useful from afar, and to learn from artists and organizers here. And I’ll be coming back, and I’ll be ready to rage.
Here are the poems that came out of this shining month.
Jo Warren’s All Mouth at Judson Memorial Church (January 9, 2026)
How fast can you paint a heart in a gut?
The stomach can cradle a crush, throbbing, in a gold frame
Use big brush strokes, trace huge clouds, get a blinding sun, and let rain come to soak the brightest blue, blow it out like a candle
Cut fast and tight, with clear color and see-through pages
Dark, suddenly I can’t hear your yelling at all
How fast can you fake a feeling?
It’ll go deep and then vanish, really real, really good, really hurt, and stupidly gone (imagined, heavily)
Then it’ll spread, down to where skin meets floor, and where eyes meet eyes and hand meets neck and pain meets cheek, and you’ll skip away
How fast can you slow down a look?
Find the proof of doubt in a glance, this is where fucking and fucking up and breaking up are all kind of the same
It’s all up here, up there, the hot air pushed up against the ceiling, slick, laughter caught on your tongue
How many times?
You’ll have to spit and spin
Fall off the rails and into my timing
You’ll have to punch each other
Fantasy, amplified, outlined, whipped off and beamed out
Unstoppable, so we’ll need the editors hand again
Owen Prum’s Extremely Chemical at Judson Memorial Church (January 9, 2026)
What if my modern depression (its chemical make up) was both red, pulsing drumming total fear loop, and also, the hue of the boring house lights, the sweat marks of socks in a Cunningham class
What if the chemical firestorm went mute, turned into a postmodern dance that demonstrated skill and restraint, dry and spicy, the band plays silently next to the arrangement of plain beauty
Once collaged together, once the nervous skulks away into the dark, the formal gives away a little hint of something, of a kid pretending to ride a horse, trying to remember how to have fun
OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century) at Danspace Project (January 10, 2026)
A lesson in dancing with ghosts is a lesson in mixing up (it was already mixed up) the violent history and the joyous revolt, shooting the motherfucker in the crypt and gliding on the lightness of the tips of boots
and grinding into the weight of pleasure eyes closed chin turned up
and showing the obvious here ness of the club and Black social dance, here in the history of experimental improvisation and here in this church of dance
and playing the song you wanna hear, laying down the track
and caressing the walls that have held so much good and so much bad
and crying at the poem of liberation and it’s divine enunciation
and piercing hundreds of beans with hundreds of pins
pouring one out for you
Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard at Prototype Festival (January 11, 2026)
The divinity of love and the divinity of painting aren’t so far apart, channels for godliness that are squeezed and clamped down on by outer force but also by inner overwhelm, fear of the enormity of the divine, fear of the inner losing its identity, isolation, safety in walls
And the divinity of devotion, laying face down in a grave to never forget the presence of death in life, and the divinity of refusal are close, also made difficult by their weightiness, the instability produced by having to know your importance and insignificance at once
And the wisdom emerges through hallucination and the pain of awe and the awe of pain, where dreams have crowns
The crows circle, playing and foreboding, waving away the separation between here and there, brushing off the notion of purity
Kashia Kancey’s The Closties Variety Hour at Triskelion (January 12, 2026)
Wake up, we’re gonna start
Welcome to four fast false starts
Welcome to the characters, the glitch stars, the holders of my blink, the holy spotlit bars, the nightmares and the real friends, the curtain pullers and the legs, the church and the misdirect
Pull back the curtain for murder but the funny kind, betrayal but as victory lullaby, sirens, sirens, the sexy kind, bunny, cake, wine, where indulgence rests, tries
I want a house, that’s it, I want everything, that’s it
Alone, singing, ignoring the pounding on the door (“I must leave”)
Alone, screaming body, monologuing on the floor (“I know everything”)
Melancholy electrified, joy injected with terror and terror injected with love, fear indistinguishable from desire, and nothing less than life insisting on its enormity, swelling absurdity, glistening teeming laughing boom
Noa Rui-Piin Weiss and Miranda Brown’s ¿¡¡simon negs≈≈>:(:{{** at JACK (January 16, 2026)
We’re admitting it
We’re admitting we love to be told what to do
We’re admitting that this is part of the perverse pleasure of dance, the learning and the following and the embodying of the instructions, the executing and the praise
And we’re facing it
We’re facing that better seems to mean more effort, more work, more sweat
We’re facing our assumption that art must be work and work will make us enough
And we’re confronted with loving to be told what to do and then being told to hurt each other, being told to create hierarchies
We’re finding loopholes, and by loopholes we mean putting on plays and serving up theatricality and sound effects and fake pee
But all that’s left to do, to fulfill the kill, is to kill the command
But what kind of dance happens after we unseat the king?
We’ve been begging to dance without him
But we just take a bow
So, this was a preparatory dance, a practice dance, a dance before the dance that won’t happen in this theater tonight
That dance hasn’t happened yet
Isa Spector’s Real Estate at The Brick (January 16, 2026)
Yeah, we are selling movements
Dropping the moving box
Looking too close at the time between boyfriends and the faces at the orgy
Hitting head on the beam
Getting trapped in break time which is sex time which is a pas de deux, soft and sculpted
Climbing the same stairs your ex had
Really syncing up now, talking through the miraculous alignment of steps and touches and tragically feeling when you’re off, two steps behind
Yeah, just hoping to actually feel something when he gets down on one knee and be able to say no but then say yes to laying on a roof, his warmth there, there
Yeah, making a joke to cradle the hope
Yeah, writing a play to make a dance
Patricia Hofbauer’s Center for Fiction: This is Not May ‘68 work-in-progress showing (January 17, 2026)
Pouring sludge from a pitcher onto the desk of the master (Lacan, btw)
Feeds an academic mania expressed in rapid fire routines, scenes disarrayed, piled up
Asking after the potential of political hysteria
With the young and the old
Trying to remember that “conflict is possible”
And overwhelm is not an existential threat, even if we feel utterly distracted
Cherish Menzo’s DARKMATTER at Performance Space (January 18, 2026) (I also wrote about this one for Performance Revue)
Ink so dark it can reflect, shine, infect, create
Room so dark I can see, conjure, hallucinate
Horror but shared (one contact lens each)
Horror but shared (kissing and biting)
Exposed, hooded, armored, bare
Speaking, distorted
Naked but lavved up, “watch us how we soon unravel”
Tiran Willemse’s Untitled (Nostalgia: Act 3) at Danspace Project (January 24, 2026)
Backstage behind the delicate iron clad veil of ballet, repeating relentlessly, methodically, the moves that hold together
You turn up the dial—smooth turn with just enough resistance, a reliable knob—to slowly, gently, ascend a slope with the trail of beauty always at your fingertips, your knees, your eyes, tracing the circular headwinds of expectation in any dance, virtuosity as tether and lifeboat
You climb into, step by step, an erupting watery madness made of joyous shocked and awed screeches and a head bob to the heavens and a bare ass on the altar, pointing, laughing, leaving, returning, doors are joke now, this white veil a joke now, this charade of unaffection a joke now, overflowing
Until you bow, and bow, and bow, and bow
Ellen Söderhult at Judson Memorial Church (January 27, 2026)
Here explodes the energy of what is dead and not gone
Feminine, gauzy, streaming, and a shadow of a leotard, sketched out in a rush, and a shadow of a ghoul serving sugar
Here the altar splits in the face of the bottomless ballet, a true form, a travesty