Time Is A Natural Disaster

Foreign Exchange Program

Written in collaboration with Amelia Heintzelman and Sacha Vega

 The lights are on and it doesn’t look very good nor feel particularly nice

We’re in the center of something

Someone’s in power

Thumbs and ribs are in power

No one’s in power

No one has thumbs

We live romantically now

Long hair reigns

Back in the center

Cleaning up the house

I am the house

I don’t like my house 

I’m in power

You live here now

This is the family you’re assigned to

Clean up your room

You are the room

Plant a flower in your room

Long hair reigns

We’re in power now

Not in the center but we have thumbs again

I’m sleepy and it’s serious

I don’t like my room

I am my room

I’m in power

My ribs love this room

My knees like you in this room

In this foreign country on this foreign exchange program

Living with this family you’ve been assigned to

No one is in power

You’re on a foreign exchange program living with a family you’ve been assigned to

You don’t like your room

The country doesn’t matter

My ribs don’t like my room

I’m going for a walk around the neighborhood

In this foreign country

The bulls are fighting and someone is about to lose money

I’m in power

There is no center

My arm is the center

I love living in my arm

I like this neighborhood

I am this neighborhood

I like this country

I’m the bulls 

I’m the money

I’m about to lose my shit

In this foreign country

Living with this family I’ve been assigned to

The Choreographer Goes First

Written in collaboration with Amelia Heintzelman and Sacha Vega

Walk across a room with multiple pants on 

Why did you put these pants on?

Touch your hip flexors with straight palms shift in a circle

Pull something with your spine 

Stirring something with outstretched fingers 

The choreographer goes first

Walk to the wall with an order

Go to the other wall with three fingers 

Remember your order

Walk in a diagonal back to where you began

Remove one of your pants

Freer bringing your hips to the middle of the room

Fall and throw your order in the air

Catch it or don’t

Fingers stretch

Walk to the wall in a non-obvious way

Remove one of your pants

A dead baby body

Remember your order using feet

Where are you in the room?

You’re the room running home to your room

Look at your order

Shoulders gaze at ground

Spin in a circle in a gradual manner 

Shoulders gaze through back toward ground

Remember your order

Remember dead baby body

Think about something

Think into something

Look at someone over there while traveling to your room

Look at your room while traveling over there: someone

Look, someone is over there in your room traveling!

Get into bed. [wire]

Take it easy.

Do your night routine

Go on a vacation to a tropical location

Clean the kitchen

You are the kitchen

Go back to your room. 

[standing where you began]

Feet reach toward home

Wellness Spa

Written in collaboration with Amelia Heintzelman and Sacha Vega

 Everything is very serious

Waking up night

Nothing to focus on and nothing to hear

One thing is that the floor is dirty

I can’t figure anything out

There’s hair everywhere

Forty five presidents

Deborah Hay

Spinning wheel 

A blanket made of hair

Trendy people never die

In a room we come to clean attention and enjoy a meal

We are chefs and teachers

At the most expensive wellness spa in the world

At a hot spring in fucking Reykjavik

I am bjork

My foot is bjork

There’s lemon bars at this hot spring and you’re trying a drink you’ve never tried before

The doorman brings you your key bu7t you’re in the sauna so now you’re sitting in the sauna with a key in your hand

Now you’re sweating in the sauna with knowledge of a way our

Now you’re blinded on the floor with your mother’s worst fear

Now you’re your mother’s aborted baby on a massage table 

Now you’re a massage table

Now you’re fighting with the waiter in a foreign country

Now you just want to go back to the wellness spa

Now you’re soaking in a mud bath in a bespoke setting

Now you’re cleaning your enemy’s floor for a handsome fee

Now you’re training for the audition to play your mother in a new dance

Now you’re traveling home for the holidays on a faulty plane

Now you’re dancing in the club and something’s going down with the DJ

Now you’re doing the dishes and you’re taking someone’s order

I can’t stop thinking about my mother and also about computers

Watching you i feel so proud

I am so proud of us

I love watching you dance

You have the best ideas and your arms are strong enough to hold them all at the same time

I’m not scared when we’re dancing in this room

I am this room

You decide to open a wellness spa that caters to the future. No one cares how it looks and no one wants to talk about anything. You just get in a mud bath in this bespoke setting and you have a million good ideas. 

You’re excited; I can tell. When I talk about this wellness spa you just want to go there. You don’t think about the wellness spa when I talk about the wellness spa. We will go to the wellness spa and being in wellness we will remember every good idea we ever forgot. You don’t need to know any words to go to the wellness spa. 

Cave Of Silence

Written in collaboration with Amelia Heintzelman and Sacha Vega

So we’re wearing green today

And we’re three people today

It’s very serious

Something is happening with vision

And silence

In a cave

Of silence

Sweetie, your mom and I met in a cave of silence.

We were only 13 years old

And it was completely silent

I remember thinking, “She has such beautiful eyes,”

But I didn’t because even thinking was silent

This is a cave where everything is silent

We were silent 

We were the cave

And we fell in love.

Then we found a beautiful rent-controlled apartment just 20 convenient minutes from the cave

And you were born

But you were blind

You were born in the cave

And you are blind.

You are a cave of silence

And you are blind

You were born in a cave of silence 

And we were in love

We raised you as the cave we always knew you to be

You are silence

You’re living dangerously these days

You lack cave

You live an unexamined life

You’re noisy, you never shut up

You’re always running away

You forget you were born in a cave of silence

Make the fucking commute back home

Shut up and go home

Come back to where we fell in love

Stop running away all the time

We love you in this cave

You look so beautiful in your cute silent outfit

I’m sorry

We could’ve given you more silence when you were growing up

I thought maybe you would learn about it at school 

But you never wanted to go

You always forgot your lunch

You were always falling off structures and running away

You treasured the wrong terrors 

You were born in a cave of silence

One day, you woke up and you wanted piano lessons

You also had diarrhea that day

And the divorce papers got wet

Arrows

She's always hitting her head

Her hair is falling off her head

She can't tell left from right, up from down, empty from full––she only tells the truth

She can't tell shoulders from hips

Her knees are made of iron, ironclad

Matcha Shop After Rehearsal

At the end of her life, four women looked at their faces.

NO

I just finished making a perfect plate. I put an orange and cup of matcha on a mild-mannered wooden tray. My grain is palpable in this one day. I'm unafraid of words. I can cope with anything's gaze. Nothing to negotiate when I see my mind. Our beautiful time loves to live gold-plated lives in the cloud. We feast on memory multiplied by godly hands; doing this wounding art I love you. I love living in this city with you, watching Youtube videos on the sidewalk. Don't forget me like this. Put me down. Pick that up. Place your attention on my sacrum. Sensitized and scrubbed clean my awareness only wants your clear words. I am not an object. I object. I subject. I am matcha. I love these people. No object, just flowing. Looking for something in my bag. I wonder what lives here. I wonder who lives uptown. I want you to be here. Quit being so elusive and just enter when you enter. Eat any dinner. Go be by yourself. Stand behind yourself in line. Be the line. Be an asshole in line. Don't think about dancing. Go on, we want to know. I loved dancing and seeing you these past three days. Men in beanies walk past me as I feel this way, being matcha in the matcha shop. I want you to see this work. 

I rehearsed with Amelia and Sacha for 8.5 hours in total over the course of three days in December 2023 at Pageant. We communicated at first by email, then text. We came into the studio, disinfected the space with kind opening words, learned about each other, then––seeing and opening, seeing and opening––each other. Happy to finally be in Pageant, we brought our all. Practicing a seeing that never objects brought us into closer relation with each other. We talked about all sorts of things, from performances past, to artists admired, to families, to hometowns, to days, to nights, to jobs, to apartments, to money, to experiences present. I felt at first hesitant, then quickly greedy. Drinking it all in. Sharing characters and switching roles, we pretty much basked in the indeterminacy of process and the ecstasy of being in it and the ease of turning your fucking head. 

Palaver

I'm worried about everything I've been avoiding. I feel too old to have solvable problems. I need a real therapist, not an experiment for a life. I think it's probably abnormal to be this loved and this tired. 

Poem in all caps

SHE IS VERY INTERESTED IN PROCESS. SHE WORKED IN A FLOWER

SHOP

SINCE

FER TEENAGE YEARS.

SHE

WRITES

WITH BOTH HANDS. SHE

SMILES

AT BABIES

ON THE

TRAIN

AND OLD

MEN

ON THE BUS. SHE IS 

NEVER CREEPY.

SHE

SITS IN HEALTHY

POSITIONS.

HER EYES ARE VERY BLUE

WHILE ALSO

BEING

COMPLETELY GRAY

AND

SOMEHOW INVISIBLE. LOOKING, INTO THEM YOU SEE A SMILE. 

SHE DRAWS HER LEGS UP BENEATH HER

AND STANDS

WHILE

FIXING HER GAZE

ON THE GROUND.

WE ALWAYS WONDER

ABOUT THAT WHICH TRANSFIXES HER. SHE

BUYS

A

GIFT

IN

A STORE, ALLOWING

A SALES ASSOCIATE TO HELP HER

HELP HER—

NOT THE EASIEST THING 

TO DO.

SHE HAS WONDERFUL

EXES AND A BEAUTIFUL

HOME. SHE UNCROSSES

LEGS WITHOUT FANFARE

IN RESPONSE TO A DISTANT CALL. SHE IS

HAPPY, WE THINK,

BUT

WE DON'T

KNOW

WHAT HER GAME IS. SHE IS A TEACHER OF PART-TIME MAGIC 

SHE'S

PATIENT

AND

COMPASSIONATE

AND

LOVES TO

SHARE.

SHE

REMOVES

A

STRAY

HAIR FROM

THE SHOULDER

OF HER CASHMERE-WOOL BLEND

TURTLE

NECK UNCEREMONIOUSLY WHILE

BALANCING ON ONE LEG. SHE

HAS

NO

APPS

ON HER

PHONE

SAVE THE

PERIOD TRACKER. 

SHE'S

NOT AFRAID TO CLOSE THE DISTANCE.

YOU

OFTEN

SEE HER

IN

DOORWAYS OR

AT THE TABLE. 

HER HEAD EMERGES

FROM SOME BACKDROP AS WE WAIT TO

HEAR HER

STIRY. DID WE KNOW SHE

PLAYS THE PIANO? SHE LOVES YOU AND

WE WISH WE COULD BE MORE LIKE HER.

SHE SEES

WHAT

THERE IS TO

BE SEEN

IN EVERY

ENVIRONMENT. 

A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH A CURSE LEAVES HER BED-RIDDEN FOR ONE

WEEK EXACTLY.

SHE STRIPS THE BED

WITH

THE HELP OF HER FRIENDS

AND

HER EYES REAPPEAR BLUER

THAN

EVER.

SHE'S PART OF SOME EXPERIMENT.

SHE SEES AN OPENING AND PURSUES A TURN. 

"BOLDLY,"

SHE

THINKS. SHE

COULD

DO THIS

FOREVER. SHE LOVES

YOUR

COMPANY

AT EVERY JUNCTURE. 

THERE IS

ALWAYS

ENOUGH ROOM.

SHE

DROPS HER

HEAD TO THE

LEFT

WHILE EYES ROAM THE

CEILING. HER FAVORITE BODY

PART

IS THE SKULL. SHE

LOVES YOU

IN THIS

LIGHT. SHE

CARES ABOUT

EVERYTHING. "SHE IS THE LAST PERSON ON EARTH WHO BELIEVES EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE," YOU THINK.

SHE'LL ALWAYS

BE HER. TWIRLING

PALMS BETWEEN

FINGERS, SHE LEAVES THE TABLE TO

MAKES

AN

IMPORTANT CALL. BENEATH THE DOORWAY SHE TURNS TO

WINK AT YOU. SHE IS COMFORTABLE

EVERYWHERE. HER BODY IS EVERYWHERE. 

Some Scores

- Broth: Seeing what's far far far far away. Seeing through surfaces to see that far away. Dancing to there. Sensing that everything in between my body and that far far far away sight is affecting my seeing without touching me and without even being the object of my sight. Affecting me like broth. 

- Apples: Refrigerate a honeycrisp apple for at least 24 hours. Unimportant whether you paid for it or not. Remove the core, seeds, and stems. Slice the fruit with a sharp knife into thin sections. Arrange the slices on a plate or in a bowl. Squeeze half of a lemon's juice onto the slices, ensuring that each piece gets some juice. Toss the slices around with your hand to make sure this happens. Cold, sour, sweet: eat and sense the mischief of a pitch-black sky at 4:00pm. 

- Practice: Write five questions everyday. Don't think too hard. Imagine that they're the clothes you're living in. Pick out an outfit. 

- Five: Record five paradoxes everyday in the form of "x and y" where x and y are two distinct things that can be both true and false at the same time. Test it out by feeling them in your body. Operationalize your intuition. Do it all with a smirk. Don’t think that words describe things, just think of things. 

- Room: Every night, take your clothes off and look in the mirror. Step out of your questions and dance answers. Feel really profound about it all. Put your clothes back on and write in your journal without lying. 

#latenightthoughts #uup

"Here, then, lies the difference: modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.1 

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always begin too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).2"

Jean-François Lyotard, What Is Postmodernism?

Announcement

I will never give up on myself. I have to make peace with this fact.

Room Intervention

I want to make my attention visible

I want to make my attention clean

My lore is obviously balletic

My lore is obviously dharmic

I want to be a mirror

I want to be a window

I want to be a camera

I want to be an eyeball

I want to be a practice

I want to be a bedframe

I want to be a lamp

I want to be a room

I want to be a studio

I want to be a trash can

I want to be a New York City apartment

I want to be a mattress

I want to be everything I throw away

I want to be able to afford it

I want to be monthly

I want to be included

I want to be free

I want to be a broker's fee

I want to be free

I want my mom to love me

I want to email my idols

I want my lovers to love me

I want my kitchen to be clean

I want to be a kitchen

I want to be curtains

I want to be mold

I want to be a yoga mat

I want to be cockroaches

I want to be bullshit

I want to be a dancer

I want to be rich

I want to be true

I want it to be possible

In this city I want to be possible

In this room I want to be me

Rigorous Truth

About a complex issue

Man Poe m

What do I want to say to you? Feet on steely chair, a massage travels two ways. Don't eat a sandwich at 10:30 PM. A message travels through itself. Opportunity misses you. I miss us. No time for parties. I can't talk to her anymore. I can talk to you anymore. I can write a word anymore. Small baby hand holds itself up to white light. Into softening belly I press send. Now we hope.

Protegé

What would the name of the world where i can go in two directions opposite at the same time three ways underneath one light continuous as long as you can see it evaporates as short as the minded eyeball imagines how do we build that world? What language will we speak there and will i be invited? Am i real enough to see? New york news the real city accelerates toward the 19-year-old son while twenty versions of three me's run late and a long rehearsal happens five times / an invitation faked should have a different name so i can call my writing something mine when i hate it so i could refer to that thing which rips feathered gaze toward ongoing treasure situated jointly between being and being a dancer and living an edited life and your tall body and a small body and forty million beautiful hands in forty million poker games wielding peppermint hope in this one night