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

In last week’s post I chronicled my arrival at the moment of—I wish I had a nicer word for it but I’m gonna call it what it is, which is resignation—to the inefficiency of experiment. And afterwards I had that good hangover, the one where you’re like, “Oh! Well, if I’m probably going to discard this material anyway, if all that matters is my experience of the strategy—then fuck it, let’s go.”

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I do mean strategy here, and not process. There’s something focused and analytical about strategy that feels like a subset of process to me. Process can be something to swim in. I’ve been in the process of making this solo, in various iterations, since December 2018. The bazillion improv studies I’ve made during the pandemic are part of my process. Process includes open-ended exploration. I recall a useful analogy from Liz Lerman’s absolutely wonderful book Hiking the Horizontal, where, at some point in her dance-making process, she decides it’s time to “flip the funnel.” She has to stop letting new stuff in. She needs to narrow her focus and work with the material she’s got. Otherwise she will go on exploring and collecting forever. Which feels great. Some days you need to be a dance-explorer. And some days you need to be a dance-maker.

THE SHADOW

For the past couple years I’ve been working, in terms of my own personal shit, with Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. The premise is that all humans have all parts of humanity in them—the “nice” parts that are “good” and also the “nasty” parts that are “bad.” Generosity! Greed! Desire to nurture! Desire to brutalize! All the parts. We own the ones we get approval for. We pretend we don’t have the “nasty” parts, and we privately wonder if other people can see them. (They can, and in fact they can see them better than you.) As long as I’m denying the part of me that is petty, or attention-seeking, or loves to be a slob, that part of me is unchecked and unharnessed and often is running the show. The goal here, per Jung, is integration: Claim all the parts of me, appreciate them all for the roles they play.

In week 1 of this residency, I talked about the tool of “bringing her with you” (and it only occurs to me now, as I write this, how well-aligned it is with shadow work). In week 2 I talked about wanting to show up virtuosic. In week 3 I talked about the hypnotic effect of conventional physical virtuosity as it plays out in contemporary concert dance, how that kind of virtuosity, without very thoughtful attention to structure, is not enough to sustain a twenty- to forty-minute solo (or even, say, a five-minute solo).

So here I am talking shit about how I don’t want to choreograph “momentum-motored phrasework that I would learn in a contemporary class.” But the truth is, there’s a part of me that believes I’m not choreographing pretty, juicy, virtuosic phrasework with a lot of flow to it, not because I grow tired of watching it onstage, but because I don’t think I can actually generate and execute it.

And I decided my task this week was to murder this part of me.

Yeah. That’s . . . uh . . . not really the approach Jung endorses toward the shadow.

But it’s not an overstatement, either. It was a clearly articulated thought and feeling. My “fuck it, let’s go” energy? It was murder vibes. (I suppose my murderer is also part of my shadow.)

I decided to lean way into it. Time to settle the issue once and for all. It’s worth noting here that I don’t in fact teach contemporary phrasework. I teach improv. But this week I decided to pretend I was teaching a contemporary class. And I made up a damn class combo.

I devised the gestures in short bursts, out of sequence, which was an exciting discovery in terms of strategy. I have literally always choreographed this way when setting movement for other people, but for some reason when I have to generate movement for myself, I am convinced I must come up with a series of gestures in sequence from start to finish. Why? I don’t know. It’s silly. After a few moves my choices start to feel rote and I get bogged down and demoralized. Starting fresh with a new impulse kept my choices more interesting. I videoed each burst and then used iMovie to figure out how they might fit together (a rough sketch—ultimately you have to work it out in your actual body).

I choreographed to an eight count, in silence. To really play out the class vibe, though, I figured I should do the phrase to music. So, after I set the phrase, with zero attachment to a particular song, I scrounged around on Spotify, trying to find a decent tempo and feel. I tried a Billie Eilish track, hoping there would be some funny contrast, but the result was extremely emo. I tried a track by Shintaro Sakamoto, but it was too slow. I tried one by Star Slinger, and it was also a little slow, and while I loved the vibe of the song, the movement was not sitting right with it. Finally I tried a song called “Different This Time” by Cornelia Murr—in waltz time, of course, not in 4/4 as I’d originally set the movement—and that’s when I realized I’d made up quite the dainty little combination. Oops.

Yes, here’s all my ballet shit and my mid-twentieth-century modern dance training from high school and college. You got your Paul Taylor swing, an unnecessary grand plié in first, some very feminine looking sautés despite my best efforts to be meaty and/or casual. I threw in a shoulder roll because I’ve always been bad at them and this whole experiment is about proving a point to myself.

NOT IMPRESSED

Last week’s experiment was to assemble a semi-virtuosic, semi-bizarre, intentionally disjointed phrase. It was a stab at putting together a kind of choreography that I might want to perform in this solo, even though probably I will never perform that particular phrase onstage.

As I prepared my post from last week, I watched the video playback.

A part of me whispered, “This is ugly.”

A part of me whispered, “You spent way too long making this. And it’s ugly.”

A part of me thought about my dancer friends, what they would think of it. I have two friends in particular whose taste I respect and who are very discerning, I thought of them watching it, I watched it through their eyes (I imagined), and I was not impressed.

BE IMPRESSED

This week I got very clear with the part of me that wants to look acceptable onstage, that wants to look legit. I got clear with the part of me that wants everyone (by which I mean “myself”) to know: if I look like a gangly alien creature in my solo, it’s not because I’m not a “good” dancer. I look this weird by choice. On purpose. And also fuck you. Please enjoy my imaginary class phrase. Appreciate how I hit the musical accents. Because I am very musical. But you’ll never know that from watching my solo, which will be performed by me alone onstage for twenty to forty minutes without musical accompaniment.

THE NICE THING ABOUT DANCE

On Sunday I split some charbroiled oysters with Laurie Uprichard and described all this angst to her, and she said, “Surely you’re being harder on yourself than those dancer friends would be.” You know how this conversation goes. “People aren’t paying that much attention and they’re not being as judgmental as you imagine they are” et cetera.

And I cracked up. I was like, “I don’t know, Laurie, dancers are pretty judgmental. Myself included. These two dancers I’m thinking of have, uh, very high standards.”

I described to her another feeling I have—it’s one she knows firsthand, because she comes from a dance performance background. It’s the feeling dancers get when they watch someone else moving. In fact I think it’s a universal experience for anyone who has a body. You watch someone moving and you think, “That looks cool,” and you think, “I bet it feels good to move like that,” and you think, “I want to try it.” It’s why kids learn dances from music videos.

And I’d venture to guess that any time a grown dancer watches another dancer moving, a part of them is evaluating the movement to determine if it’s something they want to do with their own body. I think it actually makes up a substantial percentage of a dancer’s “yes” response to any dance they see. We appreciate the composition, the structure, and also—there’s that hunger to move. Does your dance make me want to move? Do I wish I were moving like that right now? That “yes” is a big compliment.

I told Laurie—there’s a part of me that isn’t happy unless I’m generating movement that other dancers say “yes” to.

She paused over that. And she said, “Well, maybe that’s not a bad goal. You know they say about some choreographers: ‘She’s a real choreographer’s choreographer.’”

“Yeah,” I told her, “they say it about writers too.”

It’s funny, though—when writers say it about writers, I think it often comes from a (loving, joyful) place of “ugh, why do I even bother.” I read Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God and I put my face down on the page in bliss and longing and I think, “Give up, she’s done it all already.” I emailed my BASS story “Come On, Silver” to a writer friend for feedback before I sent it out for publication, and she told me she was jealous, she said she wished she had written it. I knew exactly what she meant. And it’s basically the highest praise you can get from another writer.

The thing about writing is that it’s solitary, and in theory, what you write is not meant to be reproducible. If I write a sentence, you are not invited to “experience” writing my sentence in your own story. I wrote it. It’s mine now. You’ll never get to write it yourself.

But dance is built to be shared. Built to be transmitted from body to body. There’s a convention that you teach your phrases to others. There’s a precedent in which you set work with a lot of bodies articulating the same phrase, and then you re-set the work so that the whole dance is experienced by a new group of bodies.

As a reader, I read a great sentence and I think, that sentence is so beautiful. As a writer, I read a great sentence and I get nervous or despondent, because that sentence will never belong to me.

As a dancer, I see a great phrase, and I think, “Teach it to me, I have to learn it, I have to know what it feels like to articulate it myself.”

It’s a little bit like reading a good poem aloud.

But I think it’s more like learning a song you love by ear, and playing it.

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NONMURDER

Of course the questions are never settled, and the parts you think are ugly never die. The goal with shadow integration isn’t to murder (or denigrate) any parts of you; it’s not even to shut them up forever.

The goal is bring her with you. Including the me who loves flowy virtuosic movement, who craves it, who knows very well she can do it. And the part of me that wants to lie down like a baby and say, “I can’t, I can’t, please do something else because this will never be good enough.”

What is the function of this part of me?

Maybe it’s two parts: the one that is never satisfied; and the one that is too scared to move. The part that’s too scared to move is trying to protect me from hurting myself, physically or psychologically. But that part has really been getting its way for a while. It won’t die; I wouldn’t want it to; but perhaps these past few weeks I enticed it to go take a little nap while I worked in the studio.

And the part of me that’s never satisfied—that’s one of the motors that keeps dancers engaged throughout their professional careers. It keeps sending them back to basics. Back to plié, back to tendu, back to How Do You Even Stand On One Leg. It’s the part of me that whispers incredulously to my friend Kaylin, in the middle of ballet class, “I did this twerk tutorial from YouTube this morning and it’s making my pirouettes much better??”

Kaylin immediately demanded I send her the link. Because that part of us that’s never satisfied—it can be an asshole—but it’s also very curious. And curiosity, I have learned, requires both faith and hope.

NONSOLO

This solo process has been supported by a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (working with master artist Deborah Hay); Jarina Carvalho / Live Oak Dance; the Schramels at New Orleans Ballet Theatre; Shannon Stewart, who invited me to jump on a bill at Siberia in December 2018 and thus jump-started version 1.0 of an animal dance with a deadline and performance space; the other artists of re:FRAME, a new choreographic initiative spearheaded by Meryl Murman wherein New Orleans dance-makers create solos while working alongside each other in a cohort for resource-sharing and moral support; Reese Johanson / Art Street for first giving re:FRAME a home; Laurie Uprichard for connecting the re:FRAME cohort to crucial resources; South Arts, which funded the re:FRAME commissions; the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, which provides space and time for re:FRAME as artists-in-residence and will premiere our solos in fall 2022 (shoutout to Jen Davis in particular). And, of course, Southern Heat Exchange, which has given me dedicated time and digital space to think out loud through a sticky spot in my process.