Call it dance — Abigail Levine

Let’s look at these dances I look at.

Let’s call dance what you do to respond to the world, the parts of the world that won’t let you go. Let’s call dance the times when things fall together, when light comes in and hits a table and you think of loving, or living, and your breath changes. When I say dance, I mean walking and writing and pushing stones and pressing yourself into a wall and sex. It all passes through the body from experience to expression, and it is all choreographed, by which I mean, ordered in space and time according to itself.

Let’s call it dance when people gather to show their resolve. Call it a dance—or a reason to dance—when your relatives get up at a wedding or a bar mitzvah and reach for the ecstatic, even if generations at the writing desk have made it a humorous and ungainly affair. Call it a dance when you hear the rhythm and music of words before you hear their meaning. Thinking as dancing, not fearful or opposed to it.

Dancing with memory. Dancing without remembering, just doing dancing. Dance for no money. Or dance, and thank you for the money, because I still have to pay the rent.

I like daily things most. Daily, necessary movements. The body at work—long-practiced and sure in its skill—speaking about living in the world, about commitment, purpose, humor, error, and shared effort, which is love. I make systems of these movements. I can’t resist. This is simply what I do. The systems themselves are playful—arithmetic variations, intervals of time laid over space, repetitions (that don’t quite hold) to move through and decode. These structures can be tighter or looser, crafted in exacting detail or elaborated in the moment of performance.

But what exceeds these systems is what I’m after—emotions that come off their forms, the grace that emerges with exhaustion, the potency of treating each gesture, movement, action, or task as all there is before you. The excess is what can’t be planned or controlled or taken on intentionally. It emerges of its own accord. It is defiant, sensual, and exposing. It reveals possibilities, perhaps not conceived of or desired. Don’t watch the dance. Watch what escapes it.

—Abigail Levine 2021