Monday, August 10, 2026

Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey

crawling on the floor in a patch of light and hair strands hanging. There is light on the strange of hair. The light is bright light. yellow and blue and white light. She is wearing a pink shirt and black leggings. She is shaking and her head is pointing down, now it’s pointed up. she is moving her feet and pointing them and doing a few small push ups and crawling and standing in the shape of a t. now she is a clock winding her arms. and now she is a cross and now she is a dancer in swan lake. and she has a pointed toe like a ballerina and she is moving her head down and it looks like the rest of her body won’t work sort of like someone in pain. and there’s a blue leotard under the pink shirt. i wrote blood accidentally and deleted it. coincidentally i’m on my period. and earlier she and i were talking nonstop and moving nonstop and now she is moving nonstop. i heard her say that she would like to do drugs and get drunk and follow her pleasure. she is spinning and falling into the patch of the light but this time she’s at the lower part of the light and it looks like she’s in the water in a pool or at the beach. and she’s lying on the hot sand and now she’s doing a routine and covering her face from the sun and the window but also she’s dancing with the light and beside the light and for the light. and slowly rolling up. she is rising again and i am anticipating her coming down once she is up. but she’s surprised me because she’s balancing on her knees. yesterday i watched a video of annie baker on youtube talking about movie posters and she mentioned a movie where the filmmaker is unpretentious because he doesn’t watch movies. 


She bounces her heels up and down in a small room as chappell roan plays from outside. sh is locomoting around the space using this heels bouncing motion with her hands on her hips. She is traveling the path of light. I feel like this is all so stupid. Very curly and very interpretive this dance. Am I making dance or interpretive dance. She is using her curly hair and using the light in the room to travel a sure path and she is looking at me briefly and walking around nd trying not to smile. God I love this girl so much. She knows something about the intentionality of the gaze. Her hands sort of look like thy are in fists. She is bouncing herself forward on her hands, catapulted by the balls of her feet. She is traveling all over the place. Where is she going! She is sensitive to the light and the shadows the trees are making. I am using th second person for this. What if I am laying with my head on the ground. My toes are banging the floor like worn hammers. Right then left then right and left at the same time. MY ass moves a bit up . My head is in my hands. I am a bit defeated. I am lifting my ass to b fucked by some imaginary source of light. Maybe the birds outside the window see and like this. My hands now create a rhythm by tapping with my feet banging the ground. The song is like du du du du du dudu dudu duded du du du. IT sounds like wood. I swallow and lift my head so it can turn to the right. I use my arms to lift myself up. I do this every night. This is how I wind down for bed. I like looking at her face because there is always something happening there. She is exactly what she is. There is the sense that I do this every night in my room, only ever alone. Aloneness may be a s tate that she knows well. That aloneness which is distinct from loneliness. No attachment in what I am seeing. In this way I am a true dancer. I was born to be on the stage. I walk around the room looking for something to do to find me. Waiting for something to find me. I walk around my room often like this. I hope the time ends soon. I hope I have an open face when I am witnessing. She walks along the light again wearing white Puma ankle socks. The heels are so low but so secure on this person. She repeats the sequence of walking along the light and shaking her hair and then turning and walking backward along the light. She could do some sort of ritual. Now the hands 

she stands with her hands on her hips and he is chewing gum. i want a piece of gum. she’s holding her armpit and maybe her breast. and pivoting and smudging the floor with her bear feet. she is spinning a lot with her ass out and pulling her shirt down and moving slowiy in small jumps across the floor putting her hands on both of the walls with her palms and slowly moving on her tip toes. putting her forehead against the sharp edge of the mirror. head down leg back and out. foot leading her to the other side of the room the rest of her body following her foot. she has her arms up and out, now her finger is poking her other arm pit breast crease. she is hanging down with her arms stretched to the floor, hanging down. i want to get drunk too. she’s moving her arms back and forth. it looked like she was rolling them which reminds me of being a little kid and doing a drum roll for a magician. there’s someone outside the room that said “i don’t mind.” I think this person minds because earlier i was thinking about how i often say the opposite of what i mean. now she is rolling the bottom of her shirt up. her leg is pointed out. she is shaped in a zig zag. she is flipping her hair and bouncing on her knees on the floor. and bouncing her butt. and shaking her head to the ground and shaking her arms and shaking her head and rolling her eyes and sighing. puffing out air. now in an elegant lunge. she is doing half a split. and combing the ground with her arms and throwing her arms through her legs and rubbing the back of her kneck with her hand and curling her fingers.

A couple of jumps backward happened immediately. We start and we don’t really stop do we. slapping of the stomach. a couple steps then a couple of meandering steps around then some leg lifts and a unified position then more lumbering steps in one direction. Why am I so fascinated by this? Trio a is just one thing after another. I go into my analytical mind. The judging mind. She is missing something from the sequence. She has situated it in the room. Why is this fucking dance so much like ballet. she is resetting and trying to get this thing right. she lands on her right leg and the bottom most button of her dress strains itself. She drops to the floor with some drama. Her movement is stable and young and unconcerned with itself. It is like watching the first time. IT is dancing and it moves me to emotion. She starts over again trying to get it right. I love her so much when she is doing this. I love them all when they do this dance. I love the steps and the approximation and the commitment and the classical look of struggle and success. I love to watch the failure and the winning and the rightness and wrongness of it all. I would never want to edit that out. Will people find this humiliating? Maybe. I want these people to know that I love them. There is something about the repetition and intention to perfect a sequence of movement that is so like me. So like dance. It is dance. We exit and enter. Each time she does it differently. There was a cockroach in the corner that freaked me out. We will continue working on Trio A. I want them to feel like they have accomplished something. I wonder what this story is about. She is lonely? Why is she lonely? She is one of th most talkative and generous people I know. I love the way she is trying to perfect this spinning movement. She does not react to her confusion or lack of information. Her performance of Trio A radiates from a core only hers. I want to be specific and clear in all ways in my life and love all the time forever. 

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

END OF WINTER THIS YEAR

The spectral other, a chimera in his seat, the seat of sexual difference. I’m learning new words through you. But from. Seeing new places. I just wish I knew how to speak to you. Or a wish for writing to independently alight upon something that gives me information about you. Something like you. Because I am bold, kind, and uninterested in impressing I speak to the second person. Which is something like life. One wonders what I can do with you, for it keeps itself feeling any sort of way. I monograph about you, surrounding you. New hormones course through my body. A good friend applies to be a writing associate at Cooper Union. One job covets another. I feel like someone’s head is inside my lungs, exhaling VOCs and time-stopping substances. Epstein was at Cooper, engineering. The text forgets about itself. We wear some technology feeding each other lines, “Sex disrupts art,” (or was it destroys?) I think, each rupture leads to another. I find the places I like to write and it’s like spring. I feel wary of germs, and their possible temperatures. I identify with bacteria in this climate––surviving, and mucous. You’re floating tea leaves. Verifiable, verified. Checked blue some crimson sky. What with black being a very deep red and all. 

Yearning last winter at 25 years old as someone with S.A.D.

Since time immemorial we have been dancing, performing beings. I know this, you know this. We agree. That human beings have an ego that can, like their physical bodies, be perceived by other sensitive bodies. So too can we abstract. Our dual nature––no, capacity––to be––no, do––two things at once fills us with an emptiness that aches.

In the winter, 25 years young

My love for dance is renewed. My bedroom is freezing cold. Janet taught Cunningham. I felt myself beautiful and strong. Dance is like vitamins or REM sleep; it is only good for you. I want to always be this way when I am dancing. When I am dancing I am a traveller. How could I ever forget. A forager of sensational moments. I don’t need to have a perfect coat or notable parents. My body is the proof I wear. My torso connected to my legs is the cross I bear. That rhythm knotted to my youthful mind an ornate chair. Wooden. Nothing is wrong in this body when I am dancing. I am only. 

From This That

A––I just want to swim in the brook.

B––You’re so wild.

A––If that makes me wild, then I just want to swim in the brook and I’m so wild. 

Sunday, August 2, 2026

the constant recent

When I feel this way I know there is something happening in my body that can be explained. This way being heavy and ugly and obese with regret. I have no focus. Anymore. No one loves me. I tell myself things like this constantly recently. Plagues me like my ******. I can’t deal with the things around me. The sounds, the questions and expectations. 


I loved you. I loved everything about you. Who you were in the past. Can we please just go out to the court and play a game again? I miss you. That’s how we were together. I still have my ball and my shoes. I want to make some new moves with you. I know our boyfriends have been taking a lot of time out of our schedules, but we owe this to each other. I miss you. I fucking miss you. Call me back. I’m free Friday to play. 

Sunday, July 19, 2026

Notes

Sarah Michelson:

But separating myself from the dancers I knew was a way of allowing myself to work more concretely with movements themselves—to not rely on the “known” performance history or cachet of the performers. For these new dancers, I’ve been creating extreme, task-based series of movements that are not allowed to connect. For my own choreographic control, I’m struggling to eliminate a certain history of the dancer’s body, the part that comes through rhythm or a performer’s interpretation of how you get from one thing to the next. In this dance, I’m trying to create performers from scratch; I’m attempting to own and objectify them.

 I recall having said, “I wonder if it’s possible to get away with reciting a poem during a dance—without being cheeseball.” So that was in the back of my mind: How could I make a dance that would support the structure of a poem? 

My process thus far has been subtractive: Of course I’m going to make a dance featuring a limousine, but I don’t have to do that again, and now I’ve taken that away from myself. And now what’s left? Take away the limousine, and you get middle-class hunting scenes.



she literally recasts and restages the piece as she travels from place to place, retaining the strongest elements of the previous performances but allowing the character of the new dancers and new locales to shape the piece as well. Each “module” remains complete in itself, but only one element in the work as a whole.

 “These dancers, this music, here, now,” Balanchine used to say,

“The shows themselves aren’t just about dance steps,” she tells Gia Kourlas in 2003. “They’re about the people who are doing them and where. If it works, it’ll be a little bit magical. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up, but I really like surprises, and I think that undoing the expectations of your own theatrical community is important.”

- MODULAR DANCES: whole works that can be cut and pasted into other dances.

- "The first twenty-some minutes feature Rebecca Warner, as the Narrator, dancing as Michelson reads a long prose poem—a reworking of Genesis and the birth of Christ adulterated with personal reflections—written for the occasion by the playwright Richard Maxwell."

Jim Fletcher (Adam) and Eleanor Hullihan (Eve), recalls Tharp’s choreography, though “Dance IX” has by now given way to a driven instrumental score by the composer Pete Drungle. The Adam-Eve duet is one of the most powerful and memorable dances in my memory: a twenty-five-minute-long, athletic pas de deux of sprints, jetés, stunts, entrances, exits.

- Normal Kamali costumes for Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room


https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1292/installation_images/37322

-Michelson has the advantage: She knows how to make a box sing. The Whitney space is configured in a way that recalls the setups for both Daylight (P.S.122) and Devotion (at the Kitchen), with the audience seated on risers set against the longest wall, and the dancing area wider than it is deep, creating a shallow depth of field that stretches on and on to the left and right.

- George Balanchine in 1937:  America has its own spirit—cold, crystalline, luminous, hard as light. . . . Good American dancers can express clean emotion in a manner that might almost be termed angelic. By angelic I mean the quality supposedly enjoyed by the angels, who, when they relate a tragic situation, do not themselves suffer.

 This dancer lives, with a special intensity and literalism, the internal split that arguably haunts every member of the precariat, every freelancer, every artist—the split between self and image, body and brand. Repetition, seriality: the lot of those individuals who market themselves, who “become brands,” who are expected to give the people what they want, over and over again.

But while there may be humor here, and a distance to how the words are framed, there’s no evidence that she is engaging in deconstruction or critique. Nothing about Devotion Study #1 or the earlier Devotion evinces irony, pastiche, or irreverence. Their greatness in part is a function of the way they give dignity to the small, inexplicable texts and gestures they set in motion.

We begin with habitation, a neighborhood, perhaps a place with which we connect—the Kitchen, P.S.122. And from this might emerge a habitus, unique sensibilities, attitudes, ways of moving through something we might call technique or simply the daily work, which might live for a little while in something brief called a dance. It comes out of and becomes a way of life, reinscribing a social world, or a psychic community of historical addressees.

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2011/01/01/sarah-michelson/

Then I became interested in the culture of dance, and in questions like, When does someone start to become a dancer, or How does information go into the body? What does that look like in a little girl in Wales or New York? And what about the older, trained dancer? And what happens if you see those two together? I just got curious about training and the body and culture—my own culture, I guess. 

There’s such high intellect but such naiveté or simplicity. It’s not always good, but seeing that manifest in the performers’ bodies was very beautiful to me. Sofia Britos, who was the little girl in the cage, had already such a different, pop understanding of her body. I just became curious about all that. 

And then all of my questions: What is theater? What are we looking at? Who is a star? What’s virtuosity? Why is virtuosity sometimes exciting and sometimes repulsive? That’s a very interesting question. There’s something automatic about virtuosity, sometimes. Also—and this is probably not something that you, being generous and open-spirited, would ask—there is the question of authorship. I’m curious about authorship in my time on the planet, in the studio: What am I making? Who’s making it and where are these ideas coming from?

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Learn with Anna and Lucie, and Malia?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLxIM2OpCdc

Do these 8-person formations with basketball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbNvhuiKo7A

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The first dance I saw at Pageant was Ayano Elson's. She had divided the space with fabric curtains and there was an entertaining (to me) reveal. One of the performers had to move through the audience, seated on the floor, to get to her destination. The audience had to decide (starting, admittedly, with me) to stand up and walk to the new set of seats in the revealed space. The entire work had begun outside on the sidewalk across from the venue: we all gazed at a dancer and her shadow as she traversed the windowed edge of the room. 




This influences me. 

Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey

crawling on the floor in a patch of light and hair strands hanging. There is light on the strange of hair. The light is bright light. yellow...