"I think you can use everything for everything."

Once upon a time in dance school, there was the most wonderful teacher a person could imagine. She had the strange habit of sweeping into the university for a whirlwind week of intensive physical exercises and soul-rending dramatic exploration, only to vanish at the end of five days, abruptly, into thin air, leaving behind a shimmering cloud of tearfully stalwart decisions, bravery, and disorienting exhaustion.

Her name was Milli, and this is a story about how she broke my brain.

Milli made a solo, originally choreographed for another dancer, which she later adapted to perform as her own. The solo is a set of tasks, roughly fixed in time and space but not in execution. In other words, a structured improvisation. Examples of what I mean by tasks are things such as, "Talk about whatever is running through your head for three minutes without gesturing, then gesture like you're speaking for three minutes without saying a word, then talk and gesture at the same time;" "Freak out;" "Dance beautifully;" "Repeat the same movement three times with a different emotion each time, and be dissatisfied with the result;" "Wave to the audience;" und so weiter. As for music, there were three versions of "Ne Me Quitte Pas" (Nina Simone, then some woman who talks through it, then the guy who originally performed it except redone in Dutch, his native language) each played through once. Monday through Thursday we practiced each task separately, observing, clarifying, and understanding it as a distinct dramatic unit. And on Friday we performed for each other--three intensely focused hours since there were fifteen of us--the final task being, essentially, to assemble all the work we'd done over the course of the week in an accessible way, making some sort of sense out of the wild and deep emotional palette the solo demanded.

I have absolutely no idea what it I would think, if I saw a solo like this performed on a stage, in a theater. I don't know if I'd react with contempt, respect, amusement, or boredom; if I'd think it worthwhile or another frustrating waste of a stage and lights and design and money. What I do know is that over the course of the week, our tight-knit group of fifteen dancers was asked to exercise will, sincerity, and belief through means unfamiliar, for the sake of displaying, very directly, the undertaking of these self-same endeavors. In the context of our little dance studio, this meant there was an attitude of respect, a reverence for the acts of bravery that were to be witnessed. There were stakes, and everybody was sensitized to that because everyone was a performer.

My brain broke near the end of my performance. I was standing there in front of my classmates, having just finished the "beautiful dance" section, relatively still from the neck down and running my face through a series of emotions. There was a pop--I was removed temporarily from what was going on, and in a lightning quick moment that I stole from the performance, I took stock. It was a foreign sensation of supreme arrogance, a truly complete assuredness, and I used it to surveyed the faces watching me. They were smiling, wide-eyed, more than one tearful, and I knew that they were completely, 100% rapt in what I was portraying, knew to the extent that I didn't have to look, but chose to anyways--a king surveying his kingdom. They were watching me and there was nothing in their minds, in their gazes, that wasn't full of the thing I'd just created, of me. As full of knowing as this moment was, it was also solitary in a way that surprised me, a little bit sad. I finished, came back to sit down, and I didn't need to wait for feedback to know I'd brought the house down, but it was a couple of minutes before I could look anyone in the eyes.

It's been over a week now, and I still don't know how to evaluate the experience--especially after watching 14 other people go through something similar--or how to contextualize it in my conception of performance, or how to qualify it as good or bad or something else. When I say something broke in my head, I'm still unsure as to whether that happened productively or or in a damaging way, as in, was something violently unstuck or did something get torn. Although now that I type it out a week and a half later, after the exhaustion and re-orientation of perspective, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that it's the unstuck bit. Like jamming your knuckle into one of the sensitive spots on the spine of your foot until your eyes tear up.

At any rate, we were talking for a bit after one of the performances and Milli said: "I think you can use everything for everything." She meant in the context of performing, which she clarified, though we'd all known what she meant immediately. Because dance, even if we talk about it frequently in terms of high abstraction, or treat it as interpretive and form-based, is actually quite brashly specific, tied as it is unshakably to a set of moments in time and to the uncompromisingly physical body. This for me is the grounds for integration, where the first "everything" in Milli's sentence--all the nonsense and attendant emotionality of the things we perceive; the inescapability of the ecstasies and betrayals which, by mere virtue of living, we are subjected to--is linked to the second "everything": the noise we make; the emotionality we produce; our attempts to trim edges or call attentions to patterns in order to affirm certain values, or the value of values. Using everything for everything, like an eternal dynamic compromise for stable living negotiated through performance.