optimistically engaged to dance
Welcome to whatever this is! Plus a response to Juliana May's Optimistic Voices.
Thank you for being here!!!!!!!!!!!
It feels a little dramatic to create a substack in large part because I wanted to write about one dance (and didn’t find the right place for such writing to get published). But this one dance, Juliana May’s Optimistic Voices, was dramatic too, drenched in urgency towards making. So, it feels right that I am urgently making too, trying to come up with a name for this thing late on a Friday night.
The title I landed on, “engaged to dance,” is inspired by an introduction I received about a year ago. I was sitting in a circle of friends at a picnic. Someone was introducing her new boyfriend to the group. (This is a group of friends of mine from college, mostly straight, who are, now in their 30s, majority fiancée’d). My friend went around the circle, explaining: this person is engaged to this person, and that person is engaged to that person. She got to me, paused, and said, “and this is Nora; Nora is engaged to dance.”
I accept this betrothal. I am committed to dance.
If you know me you already know that my commitment often manifests not only through my dancing and performing, but also through my writing. I write about dance in many ways. Like most dancers do, I am taking notes in classes and rehearsals, I am writing in my journal about how things feel in my body. I am also a PhD candidate just beginning to write a dissertation framed around “impossible tasks” that circulate in the particular dance world I live in and love in. I write reviews and interviews and previews for press. I also write grants, trying to help artists get funds to make their work and trying to supplement my PhD stipend.
I’m so grateful for all these formats to write, and I’m also trying to let all the writing breathe more, intermingle with others. I know that for my writing to get richer it needs to go beyond me and open more intentionally to the many bodies that already inform it (“my” is a myth, anyway). I think this is true even, and maybe especially, for the writing that I do that is a little unfinished or a little less academic and doesn’t have an obvious place to be shared. This is the writing I’ll share here. The work of writing poems after every show I see, a practice/habit I’ve had since 2020, plus some essayistic responses that don’t find another home in the official portals of “press” or “journal.” (I’ll link to those too, though, when they happen).
Thank you for joining me in opening up my relationship to dance.
First up, a response to my dear teacher/friend/idol’s new work, Optimistic Voices.
Juliana says that optimism is “kind of impossible” (according to The New York Times preview of her piece).
I know that proclaiming something impossible doesn’t stop us from moving towards it, picking it apart, trying to see its underbelly. (This, I think, is the mysterious pull of dance as a practice, but that’s a longer, dissertation-related discussion). This means we need strategies to reckon with whatever seems so unthinkable about our goal. If we acknowledge the (kind of) impossibility of something, how do attempt it anyway?
In Juliana’s Choreographic Idiom classes, improvisation sessions I’ve been attending for a couple of years, performance itself is a strategy. Participants are often encouraged to shrug off any demands for authenticity, accept the performativity inherent in being watched dancing, and use the absurdity and inventiveness of performance–playing characters, putting on a show–to follow their interests. This moving as if, acting as if, can offer transport to another logic, or maybe reveal something about what’s already here.
In Optimistic Voices, presented at BAM Fisher November 5-8, 2025, I am pulled back and forwards in time at once, into and out of this world. I am thrust into the nostalgic newness of elementary-school-aged desire, carried there by six adults (Justin Faircloth, Wendell Gray II, Lucy Kaminsky, Gwendolyn Knapp, Kayvon Pourazar, and Anh Vo), who sing and dance on a giant red carpet. The thud of their jazz-shoed feet on the cloaked stage, plus the repetition of words like “attic” and “back stairs,” makes me feel definitively in a domestic space, a play zone that is not the living room nor the dining room, but rather that place the kids can get up to whatever shit they want before their hear footsteps. (I am thinking of the sleepover in the basement where we got naked and covered each other in shaving cream and ran through dark suburban streets; I am thinking of the sleepover in the attic where we concocted a game to sing harmonies on the spot by reading each other’s minds; I am thinking of the sleepover in the den where we practiced lap dances). These adults wear clothes that evoke the 1970s, while their words call up an associative psyche of a mother and a choreographer and a child of today, scrambled narratives that betray fear and want.
We’re in this somehow very tight, neat pile of repressed memory and yesterday’s diary and gossip and 5-6-7-8 and a recurring dream. The stack is full of unexpected shit but it’s got clean edges. (The dance is full of unexpected shit but it’s got clean edges). And it feels rife with guilty pleasures–something like the deliciousness of a punch in the gut, the feel-good of an intrusive thought made into a just barely acceptable action, the perverse delight of squeezing anything out of anything. This dance is old, digging itself out of a grave of memory, and really so alive in its material sensorial landscape. Fists rolling in the taut zone of the waistband of tights; shoulders touching shoulders and bodies straddling bodies with uninflected purpose; hands shaping air into figure eights; sweat, sweat, sweat. There’s a water break. These are real people, after all.
I see strategy here. Inside an impossible optimism, which maybe is just a more complicated kind of hope that I presume one has to muster as a parent, is generative imaginative rigor. Juicy pretend, acted out for real. The dancers walk a pretend walk (arms exaggeratedly swinging, feet kicking out, declaring their steps) and sing in a pretend voice (high, like when you were a boy, or round, like a cartoon) and pretend-drag each other (the one dragged helps the dragger, walking behind while leaning, just a little, to complete the picture). This self-conscious pretend layered on pretend while still indulging in the utter materiality of moving (again, the sweat, again the water break) lets us embrace the stage as the place we can practice pleasure. This zone, a lot like Juliana’s improvisation class, lets us mash up stories and characters and steps and moves and wishes and forms–the musical, the postmodern dance, the a capella concert–to find out how to be honest about what we want, clear in what powers a drive to be alive. Dense and complicated and actually not that guilty about locating the comfort and thrill of what can happen in an attic.
Thank you Juliana for this thrilling comforting dance, and the thrilling comforting improvisational spaces you generate for dancers in so many ways.