Ann Glaviano is a dancer, DJ, writer, and born-and-raised New Orleanian. (@annglaviano)

It only took me about thirty years of intensive dance training to understand that dance is a visual art. I was disheartened to realize it, because I self-identify as Bad At Visual Art.

Alas, you cannot know that I am dancing unless you are looking at me do it. (And immediately I want to contradict myself and say we could make a case for a dance performed in total darkness, where all you can perceive as audience is the sound of footsteps and breathing. I should make that piece. Actually, I feel confident someone already has.) The space in which I am dancing is part of my dance. The room is part of it, the composition of the room, the lighting of it, and how I am positioned within it over time. All of this is visual material.

Still from rehearsal, Short Piece for Swimming Pool, with String Quartet. Co-choreographed and performed with Shannon Stewart. Commissioned by Robyn Dunn Schwarz for SweetArts, a fundraising dinner at her home benefiting the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, October 2020. — *Still from rehearsal,* Short Piece for Swimming Pool, with String Quartet. Co-choreographed and performed with Shannon Stewart. Commissioned by Robyn Dunn Schwarz for SweetArts, a fundraising dinner at her home benefiting the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, October 2020.

As it turns out, I am Bad At Visual Art, but I am obsessed with space, and starting in 2015, I more or less abandoned the proscenium frame in favor of non-traditional venues—cabaret space, art gallery, warehouse, swimming pool—and then built pieces that subverted whatever tenuous assumptions the audience might have of how that space would be used in performance.

So I guess it was inevitable that I would, after some years of gleefully breaking it, come back around to reconsidering the proscenium as frame, and also reconsidering the element of dance that is not the space around the dancer but the dancer herself.

Ugh. It’s me.

I am the visual art.

ENOUGHNESS AND VIRTUOSITY

Just as I needed, after thirty years of understanding dance as something that happened within a proscenium frame, to explore what could happen beyond it, I’ve also needed time to explore what constitutes a dance beyond virtuosic physical display.

Deborah coaches us in workshops on what is “enough”—that just your presence as performer in the space is already transforming the space. It’s counter to most of the messaging we receive as dancers in training, and so to grapple with this idea of enoughness, I’ve chosen to really live in it, to commit to it—to believe that walking through the venue, wiggling my fingers and making an odd, ugly shape with my body is enough to change the room and captivate the audience. The thing is, if you believe it, it’s true—you do command the space as a performer, you do charge it with your presence.

But Deborah also coaches “bring her with you.” Deborah is not anti-virtuosity. Deborah would argue, I think, that every moment you are meeting your practice of performance with your attention constitutes an act of virtuosity, and you are invited to attend every moment with any and all parts of you, including the part that makes ugly shapes and also the part that balances effortlessly on one leg.

So I confess: the part of me that still resists showing up to my practice of performance with dancerly virtuosity is not resisting so I can continue to learn. It’s resisting so I can continue to hide.

I started making my own dances in 2013, not because I had any desire to choreograph but because I desperately needed to perform, and no one in New Orleans at that moment seemed to be making the kind of work I wanted to perform in. I made work with ensembles, because I wanted to hide in a group. I am very trained, but not very confident as a dancer. My need to perform is not the need to be seen. It’s a different need. It’s an adrenaline need, I think. It’s the high-wire act. I don’t dance because I think I look great. I do it because it’s hard. And when I am doing the hard thing well, I feel crazy and free.

I think this is why humans respond so powerfully to moments of virtuosity. It’s not about the impressive display. It’s the thrill of watching someone barely hanging onto control, of seeing their own amazement as they push against the edge of what their body can do.

This is as true of musicians as it is of dancers. Though Deborah catalyzed my reframing of virtuosity as a tool in performance, I didn’t solidify my understanding of it until I watched Sam Yoger play drums for the Shitty Stones at the Spellcaster during Mardi Gras 2020. Sam was laughing as he fought, with visible effort, to hold down a tricky part. It was a display of mastery and what happens on the other side of it, when you’re not really in charge anymore. I loved watching him play the same way I’ve loved watching certain dance performances, the recklessness and joy of it.

Two minutes of improv, bringing her with me: the pretty version

So here I am, working on a solo, and I am the visual art, practicing being enough, trying to bring her with me, all of me. Including the me that wants to show up with pretty lines, to be athletic and reckless and to move big. Including the me who is afraid to show up that way, who is afraid to show up alone, who is afraid that you will find me insufficient.

BEING SEEN

One of Deborah’s tools is “what if I presume to be served by how I see?” Part two of that tool, which enables part one: “Remember to turn your fucking head.”

These tools—for really seeing, not getting fixed in your seeing, refreshing what you see—are meant to keep dancers alive and awake in their performance practice, instead of retreating inward to concentrate on Doing Cool Tricks, and instead of getting bored with their many, many, many hours working in the studio.

After my first two-week workshop with Deborah in 2017, I tried to practice the tools on my own. I went out to the lakefront to move around. Every time a passerby approached, I froze up. At the next workshop, I asked Deborah about it. We discussed the corollary to “what if I presume to be served by how I see,” which is “what if I presume you are served by how you see?”

Though I had practiced this idea with the other dancers in the workshop, I had not yet applied the idea to audience. What if I presume the audience is being served by how they see? I realized that I had in fact presumed the opposite. I had presumed that my relationship with the audience was, at baseline, adversarial. This was unconscious on my part: I had presumed they were waiting for me to prove myself to them, that they were anxious I would waste their time and disappoint them. For me to presume that the audience is served by how they see me dance is a radically different starting point. (Deborah says she presumes even the man napping in the audience is, in his way, being served by how he sees her dance.)

BEING SERVED

This week I didn’t have access to studio space, so I went to the park. Whenever a passerby approached, I was irritated to notice, again, still, after several years of practice, the impulse in me to shrink, to freeze, to feel ashamed.

So I picked up the tools. I presumed these people in the park were being served by how they saw. I presumed they were being served by my dance.

“I have to get used to audience”—it made no sense to say it out loud to this couple, but it’s what I was thinking to myself as I looked at them.

TURN YOUR FUCKING HEAD

I’ve been playing with different ways to incorporate jumps and bigger gestures into my solo, trying to refine some aspects of my movement quality that have been bugging me. It’s hot outside, even in the shade, and at the end of six minutes of continuous movement I am sweaty and out of breath. I don’t watch the video playback. I hit stop, and I hit record, and I do another one, and I do another one, and I hope every improv isn’t more of the same. I hope they aren’t getting worse. I presume to be served by how I see. I can see near, midrange, and far. I presume this girl jogging towards me is served by how she sees. Later I will stand behind her in line at the coffeeshop, I won’t recognize her but we will both be dripping with sweat. And I will say how glad I am that she’s also very sweaty so that I’m not the only one, and she will say that she saw me dancing in the park. She tells me she used to be a dancer. She doesn’t seem offended by my dancing in the park. I am emboldened by our meeting. I go back to the park, and I go back to the park, and it’s been a long week, and I am tired, and I do another six minutes, and another three, and another three. Another six. Another six and in the middle of it I remember to turn my fucking head and this time the ship coming down the river is called

PHENOMENAL DIVA

and so now my dance is one hundred percent about it. And I spent all week trying to bring her with me virtuosically, in all her pretty lines. But to my surprise, when my phenomenal diva appears, she shows up full ugly, funny and gnarly and warped.

Two minutes of improv, bringing her with me: phenomenal diva