This is called "Eclipse Context,"
and it was very, very heavily inspired
by a recent dance performance that I saw by the Bill T.
Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
The name of the performance that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane
Company did was called "We Set Out Early,
Visibility Was Poor."
And it was a lot about--
or at least Bill T. Jones said it
was a lot about, for him, the century growing old
and what that means.
So, I was thinking about the century in the millennium,
as is everyone right now, I think.
Prologue.
"The curtains rise.
We see the dancer is already a locus and rocks back and forth,
hunched into, as a newborn attempts,
small, meditated steps outlining the trajectory of our sojourn,
is political as a body, is simultaneously
creation and creator of context.
The curtains fall.
We allow ourselves to shift closer, to be witness
to a self in lieu of another, and to adopt a vicarious laugh
or cough in someone else's seat.
For the theater is not full, and do we not
belong in the center?"
Body of the text.
One.
"All movement is greed or speed, an attempt
to impose converse of compose.
The Black dancer brings popular culture to the picture.
To break at the hip is antithetical to ballet.
Broken hip, we swing.
We are smooth fish.
Our instruments say yes, no, and often
pause in an occasion in medias res of response and say,
my music has a history.
It's constantly broken, branched, a blue note.
I claim Black and white ancestors,
enveloping as the French envelope desires
to draw the ocean into the self.
At this stage, a woman turns, perpetual conscience,
perpetual body on the stage, multiplied,
beckons us to continue dancing, infinitesimal amendments,
gestures, swinging in a stream of earthshine,
the problem of the 20th century.
A loose hip is key to the narrative's arbitrary ending."
Two.
"Dear reader, this is new terminology
for exacting meaning from movement.
I am attempting a dialogue with context.
Please bear with me.
I desire a structure into which I may insert myself
appropriately.
I ask for a few hours of sleep every evening.
Knowing the word edemic, I am not opposed.
Perfect pitch is a cut and paste.
We can read this without faith in binarisms
and expect a string of possibilities
to converge in words, in the humming an electron creates
to suspend in multiple locales.
I learned a Lewis dot structure, which
fixed deficiency to a page.
I fight to erase the two-dimensional imagery.
Reader, the oscillating inquiry, never knowing
the exact position and its velocity, either/or,
how things move, apprehend, change,
a sudden uncharacteristic.
I want to be more than two things at once, understandably
swollen.
I amass rocks, shells, detritus, irony, baseball, and piano.
Dear reader, turn the page.
A page is a page.
Easy tautology."
Three.
"Deflated pretense, a fledgling meditation.
To impose the metaphor of the century on a body part,
anorexia nervosa.
California sea of black hair is a Chinese sea, a Japanese sea,
an Indian Ocean, nervously.
Certain currents, certain curtains pulled back
beyond reachable, echoed fault and logic.
We rest on hip and back and wrist and eye,
catching an initial momentum.
Wave reappears as a possible way to describe the ethics of
lost and found, irreplaceable doll.
Or in other words, my first word was exoticism.
The second was spinach.
I do believe it is our strength and our stubbornness,
and the still unplowed frontier that
was de Tocqueville's urgency.
Lay claim to more stage, expanding
the area of the theater in every direction,
remarkably, exponential growth.
Plant mangoes in the corn soil.
Disguise the weather by wearing goggles and overalls.
Ask a Hindu priest for baptism.
You'll see.
Are you the choreographer?
Did I hire you?
A sickled foot is a misalignment.
Putting yourself in the middle of things, ridicules.
Amend displacement.
Overlay patch onto the already busy patchwork.
Stitch in one more wrong direction, wrong impulse."
Four.
"At stake here is the body, inertia of incipience.
Thrust trust into a hemisphere.
Smaller, circumscribed as a golden locus upon which stands.
The shape, which is made when two or more circles overlap,
for example, a Venn diagram highlights the intersection
between group A and group B. A equals America.
B equals other immigrant country.
The mathematical equation is prepared to support
the exact arc, the exact inquiry.
Garbled terms, almond croissant, crescent,
bi-section, bi-sexual, immaculate conception.
Now, look, there is an underlined space
in which you may insert your deliberate, delicate body.
Success is dependent upon the condition
of existence, the push and shove of this will to fit.
I throw a fit because you don't listen.
I spit on your shoes and bite your toes.
The choreographers thought in-casting is not
the postmodern condition of race or gender or other marginalia,
choosing instead, by limitation and possibility
of each physique.
What intersections occur, occur because we are
unable to suggest otherwise.
Blond man, Black woman, coupled, intertwine as a force.
I glance at my lover in the seat beside me.
The context is a book, is a dance,
which allows said brown girl and said
white boy to occupy a blank.
To efface the spot as reserved for an irreality, token,
realism.
Hesitant vacancy, the dancers enter the stage
in a messy swarm, though parallels
are suggested by the chorus dancing in syncopation.
The heightened realization of the individual as a player,
as active filter, positioned positioner
in a landscape, a maze.
I come out in a rhetoric of activism.
I parallel myself to sustain a chord for myself.
A tree is waving at me."
Epilogue.
"The dance ends as an ultimate rehearsal.
Though a finale, not a finale.
A change will occur within the system.
The galaxy will expand as new stars
are found, just as retrospectively
the striking crew will find a watch on stage.
We will investigate new propositions
about the dance we witnessed.
Did the lighting flicker when the music
stopped to keep a rhythm?
Into the years, the folklore, color of the costumes,
blue, length of the dance or its mimetic origins,
the cold, metal prop, which was transformed into a carriage.
In one version, it will be a car.
In another, a horse.
Allowed to remember, we will turn up the volume
and invent with precision every dancer's jutting bone,
every narrative possibility.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]