This letter, from frequent loveDANCEmore contributor Emmett Wilson, is a few weeks old. Emmett left Salt Lake just a little while ago to persue dreams of performance and activism in Baltimore and Philadelphia. I have a feeling that, like most of us who are washed away from SLC and its dance scene, Emmett will eventually be washed back. Still, the things they say here are thoughtful and timely. Farewell.
– SBH, editor
Dear ones,
I’ve been avoiding this. This writing around movement of The Movement is like the experience of trying to lick your own elbow — you never see it head on, and can’t quite touch it with the part of yourself that’s equipped to interpret the flavor, and you might not like how it tastes anyway.
A still from the author’s performance, originally at Moab Pride, later shared via Queer Spectra 2020
I just submitted footage of a piece I made last year to be presented at Queer Spectra this year. The piece is called Samuel Beckett Does Drag and I guess it’s ‘about’ muddled moments of performing gender and forgetting who I am in the act of presentation. In the spirit of Queer Spectra’s theme, risk of representation, I feel compelled (and safe?) to say that I was a so-called woman and ‘queerious’ when I moved to Salt Lake 9 years ago and now I finally know (in words!) that I move through the world as a fluid freak with a girly boy flavor and that most aspects of identity are a construct created to silence and kill some and spare others at the hands of a few.
I’ve always felt most myself when making a breeze with my body. I’m grossly grateful for spaces, such as the physical and digital pages of this journal, in which I’ve gotten to figure myself out, and to be responsible for what I’ve figured out.
Thank you for reading these thoughts in a muddled moment. Thank you to Ya-Ya and Brook for writing into the known unknown with me and gently holding my heart in your presence. This piece is a parting note (to self, and to y’all) as I prepare to move away from Salt Lake as well as an introduction of writing to come from Ya-Ya Fairley and Brook Neilson, all three of us unpacking the movement of this moment in Salt Lake City. We are treading into an ocean of processing how the past exists in the present, politically, personally, and potently, as local and global performers in so many ways.
Like Ya-Ya has done regularly to connect audiences here in Salt Lake, whether at a dance party, a post performance Q and A, or in a classroom, I invite you to take deep breaths whenever you have a mind (and body) to do so. Inhale and exhale, for real. I invite you to thoroughly think with your whole body, as Brook does, about your position in space right now and take responsibility for what you come up with, own it with care for yourself and those around you.
A dear mentor of mine, jhon stronks, recently spoke of speaking in circles and I realized that was why I learned so much from this person, this goddess, because I learn and live in circles. Here are some circles on the movement of this moment.
I am humbly inspired by Audre Lorde’s writing in The Cancer Journals:
May these words serve as encouragement for other women to speak and act out of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death, for silence has never brought us anything of worth.
Silence has never brought us anything of worth. You may not get to everyone in breaking the silence, but there is life in volumes heard by those who listen.
When the plague became ‘real’ in this valley, I wrote:
‘What is the half life of touch?’ asks a friend who was previously asked by their friend. The harsh light of that question hadn’t dimmed or been reduced to a half life when it reached my touch-famished ears. What sort of dance and body-based artwork is being made and received these days? Asking for a friend, for myself, for the virtual/proverbial people, in a time when close proximity between loved ones can transmit an often asymptomatic virus and the most recent image in my mind of two bodies touching is terribly familiar and state sanctioned, lasting longer than 5 whole minutes and ending lethally.
Now we know that Derek Chauvin committed murder by kneeling on George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
When the times’ change, yet history repeats itself, hearing ‘I can’t breathe’ from the lips of Eric Garner to George Floyd and knowing that Anthony Fauci attempted to advise presidential administrations from Reagan’s during the onset of AIDS, to the current administration in response to the novel coronavirus (yes, the very same epidemiologist advising both administrations during public health crises), it is clear that denial is deadly. We are perhaps all weathering the same storm, but it’s turned into a hurricane, and some folks reside in untouched homes at the eye of the storm while others are jailed in the most severe part of the hurricane: the wall around the eye, and they’re right next to each other, yet with vastly different experiences of the storm.
That was before Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal was brutally murdered by SLCPD. Before the West Bank was annexed by Israel (reminding me to continually think about the American ‘dance world’s’ obsession with Israeli dance, often eclipsing dance happening in other areas of the Middle East), and before Palestinians in this city organized a march that connected so many struggles, invoking the words of Assata Shakur:
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Now I think of ‘Being Queer in America’ (and in Utah, specifically!) and David Wojnarowicz’s words are what I would try to say if I hadn’t just read Close to the Knives:
I think my life sometimes has a nightmarish quality about it because of the society in which I live and that society’s almost total inability to deal with this disease with anything other than a conservative agenda…
This is not to co-opt the processing of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but to connect that struggle to that of COVID-19, with Black and Indigenous populations bearing the brunt of the political response to this virus, and to also point out that conservatism exists beyond the republican party. This feels pertinent in the state of Utah whose police forces kill the most Black people in relation to population size (1% of people in Utah are Black, yet 10% of police murder victims are Black). All while liberal city officials commission a mural saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ under the condition that ‘Black lives’ and comrades are peaceful and in the minority. Also while initiating a fundraiser* to ‘help city residents most affected by COVID-19’ as if medical racism and classism were just popping up for the first time because of the virus.
I think about stories of friends pursuing dance master’s degrees while Black, and of online interactions with past professors in academia, and the beautiful insistence of a peer of mine to ask me to help write a letter to our alma mater dance department confronting how utterly colonized it is.
We’ll only pivot back to violence if we continue starting every day with ballet and slipping in ‘African Dance’, generally speaking, whenever it makes the institution look ‘diverse’ and ‘healthy’ with a ‘well-balanced’ dance diet. And making queer art without confronting whiteness only erases queer people of color.
Attending a discussion group to confront anti-Blackness made me realize I rarely encounter the phrase, pro-Black. There it is: PROBLACK. With that I hear what Harlem bookstore owner and civil rights activist, Lewis H. Michaux, said:
Black is beautiful, but Black isn’t power; knowledge is power!
Black is beautiful; knowledge is power; and there is knowledge I have no idea about in Blackness and blackness and in being Black.
I haven’t seen it yet, but jhon recently put this out there- watch: Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance. One part of decolonizing dance is filling in the plot holes of the stories we were told.
There is also a film called Quiet Heroes that I have yet to see, but feel like I should reference here because it tells the story of care during crisis. Dr. Kristen Ries and her assistant, Maggie Snyder were the only people ‘In the entire state and intermountain region...serving all HIV/AIDS patients.’ The film is ‘the story of her fight to save the lives of a maligned population everyone else seemed willing to just let die.’ It includes an interview with Ballet West’s Peter Christie, an AIDS survivor.
A YouTube still of Ballet West dancers performing at a protest in Salt Lake City
I think of the two Ballet West dancers who performed at one of the weekly protests against police brutality called #dancedanceforrevolution. There is something about using the dance of a colonizer to disrupt the norm. The message is clear: ballet can be a useful tool, but what else? I was inspired to witness an unpacking of some of these issues at A Shedding, organized by Dominica Greene.
This is all to say: keep unpacking and breaking down oppressive institutions, but keep going with the art forms that happen to exist within them. There is so much more to say. Keep moving through this movement, making breezes with your bodies that blow minds and hearts and dusty ideas away.
With love,
Emmett
Emmett makes performances and is moving away from Salt Lake, so they are now one of those tri-city-dwellers (Houston-Salt Lake-Baltimore).