Category: Blog!

I fucking love my bicycle! FUCKING LOVE IT! I know, not that shocking. But bear with me while I jizz all over the internet in favor of bicycles. It’s something I think about a lot. It’s something we’re talking about with regards to our All Sparkles, No Heart dance, and I need to articulate what it is that makes me want to cover the stage in bicycles, since Monica and Tara are enthusiastic cyclists, but are not necessarily in favor of a giant bike race in the middle of our show. (Maybe if we could convince our dancers to be naked whilst biking, they would get fully on board.)

Let’s face it, bicycles are sexy, even without naked people riding them. The bicycle appeals to both my sense of individualism (blame my ‘Wild West’ upbringing? or my early exposure to Ayn Rand?) and my value of sustainability. If the automobile is the symbol of the American dream, then the bicycle is MY ultimate American dream, without all the imperialist patriarchal bullshit. It makes me feel like I’m the master of my own destiny. 

See now, my bicycle makes me giddy! It makes me use words like “destiny”! I start to worship my golden calf. But the golden calf here is not an idol- it’s a means to a greater realization of a greater god- ourselves. 

My bicycle makes me feel like I own my body. Like I am whole. Like I am in control. Like I am a god. My bicycle makes me feel beautiful. My bicycle makes me feel happy to have the body I have, to be the person I am, to live the life I’m living. My bicycle brings me joy, even when I’m not totally enjoying it.

This is why my bicycle is a peaen to my feminism. In a world where women’s bodies are commodities, historicallyproperty,  in a world of constant objectifying, where agency is undermined, in a world where discontent with body is fed to us in lieu of bread, in a world where anorexia is the new way to be in control, in a world where women are silenced, told to be quiet, take up less space, stay inside, the bicycle is a FUCKING CALL TO ARMS. This is a revolutionary tool.  

I think this is part of why I’m interested in the suffragists as well- the way the bicycle was such a revolutionary element of that movement. Suddenly these women could transport themselves, did not have to rely on husbands or carriages to organize. And the bicycle not only allowed women to be self-sufficient, it also asks a certain self-sufficiency. In the age of corsets and smelling salts, bicycles require physical stamina.

I love that about my bicycle. It puts me on my own schedule, with my own responsibility and makes me rely on myself. My bicycle asks me to be self-sufficient and provides the tool to do it. It may sound over-the-top, but it’s a truth when I say: my bicycle transformed my life. The sense of agency it gives me permeates everything. It’s more than just a feeling, and it works in tandem with my other efforts to reclaim myself, to own myself. What a Western concept, I know, this owning of self, but the more I own myself, the more I love myself. And I love that my bicycle makes me love me.   

It’s a delicate line, this feminism that includes reclaiming femininity, owning sexuality, subverting object/agent relationships in that confusing and complicated way that third wave feminism has taught us to value. We’ve got the tools, the questions have been asked, but there’re no easy answers. Questions lead to more questions and we have to fumble around with the rest of this fucked up world, finding the right questions to answer the questions we’ve posed.

This sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo masturbatory academia side-spill, but I am coming from a concrete place.

I know it’s hard, that I am a young woman, a feminist, and sometimes I like to wear short skirts and hoist my boobs a little. Sometimes I put on hobblingly high heels. Sometimes I like to look sexy, and sometimes my sexy conforms to something that is also distasteful. Sometimes there’s a Slutwalk and no matter how privileged and white it is, it’s still important to remind the world that no matter what we’re wearing, we’re never asking to get raped, assaulted, or verbally harassed.

I know this, but the world at large does not always. And of course, I have to remind myself that that is the most fertile space. The space of conflict, question, and discomfort. (The importance of discomfort is a constant obsession: thank you Young Jean Lee for your Artistic Statement.)

I want to “reclaim” the femme look without feeling like I have to always put on an uberfeminine outfit. I want an uberfeminine outfit and an ownership of body and sexuality to not equal objectification. I want to acknowledge my sexuality and be more than it. I want the meaning of “slutty” to change. I want to play with gender. I want to go to extremes. And I want to learn about the subtleties too. I want to have my cake and fucking eat it too. And I’ll be an idealist; I want to think that can happen.

It’s a tricky tightrope, but then so is looking butch, or wearing anything, or going naked, for that matter. Dressing ‘dowdily’ or covering it all up or pretending there is an unsignified look doesn’t fix the problem either. As every female presidential candidate, first lady, and female politician has proven, it’s always about what she wears.

I’ve been reading some speeches by the suffragists lately. It feels antiquated, this push for the vote, but ultimately it always comes down to something more basic than that: recognizing women as whole people. It’s been a hundred years, and we’re still asking to be seen as people. Three waves later, and we’re still asking to be seen as people. 

With everything, it’s fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t. So let’s get fucked in the good way. Let’s fuck some shit up. This is what fascinates me about Lady Gaga (not that I can give her credit, but she functions in such a way that we can put this read on her): If you exploit your femininity and sluttiness to an extreme degree you can shift where the discomfort lies, you can take power in a specific way while also selling the stuff that suppresses you. (I use the phrase “commodity feminism” all the time now because of this article on Gaga Stigmata). It’s not the only answer, and it’s not a perfect answer, but a fucked up world calls for fucked up answers.

It’s related to what Mad King Thomas always talks about in rehearsal- pushing something so far into itself (or parody) that you explode it from the inside. We have to ask ourselves a lot, are we commenting on these issues, or are we just reproducing them? And, as usual, the question is not always answered. When am I buying into the thing that sells me out?

I’m not going to ignore the question of dress, even if that’s what I’m asking the world at large to do ultimately. And, no matter what I said about believing it to be possible, the world isn’t going to let me have my cake and eat it too. So I’m going to try to believe in utopia, hope for the best, and live in the present, which is a messy complicated reality. But that’s where all the fun and frustration is. Heels, ties, gender signifiers and all.

Sometimes I love the superficial.  I get off on aesthetics, adore the decorative.  I revel in excess, swim in color and pattern, and go on marathons with texture.  Hours of life spent beyond pleasantly in unnecessary dialogue with form.  There is an intensity and a delight in this for me that is deeply satisfying and somehow meaningful.  Sometimes the superficial seems to carry import.

Other times things happen and the superficial just seems superficial. 

Anyway, I love these shoes:

Holy whoa amazing, no?  Death, glamour, violence, unicorns. A golden pistol and pearls.  A piece of devilry.  Shall I taxidermy it for you?

They are called “Gun Hoofs” and by Iris Schieferstein whose work is creepy and provocative and sometimes very beautiful.

Guys, I am size 7.5. Pretty please.

So I’m kind of failing at this “blog-once-a-week” thing. Not as egregiously as Monica, certainly, but markedly nonetheless. It’s not that I’m not writing- I have several half-finished entries that I’ve written over the last few weeks. It’s just that if I don’t do it all at once, I can’t return to it without feeling like I’ve missed the moment, so then i have to re-write it, but it’s still no longer relevant, and blah blah blah. The moral of the story is, I’m taking this way too seriously. What happened to that “anything goes” blog mentality?

I hereby reinstate permission to be stupid! Silly! Frivolous! Half-formed, barely-thought-out and downright dumb!

Thank god.  It’s so easy to get trapped in the heavy shit that makes up this world. And it’s so easy to feel like everything has to be taken seriously, that Important Things should be treated Importantly.  I need a little fluff! A little fun and cotton candy.

Of course, the beauty of it is that silly frivolous things are important too. I fundamentally believe that the fluff of life has profound meaning, and that silliness is one of the best approaches to serious subjects. How else could Mad King Thomas make such ridiculous dances and still be in earnest? 

We’ve talked about it before: how we take humor very seriously. I don’t really like putting it that way; it makes us sound like assholes. Maybe it’s more like humor takes us very seriously. We can’t not laugh in the face of everything. I think if we tried to take serious things seriously, we’d drown in despair and pretentiousness. We can’t really help ourselves; silliness is a survival strategy.

Humor is always a good way to take things down a few pegs, and maybe there’s a bit of cowardly self-defense in this approach- if we are constantly making fools of ourselves, no one else can do it for us. If we ask you to laugh at us, then we can’t be humiliated when you do. But I think there’s more to it than that. It’s not just humor, it’s absurdity. There is meaning-making in the absurd, the ridiculous, the irreverent, and odd that cannot be accessed by logical means. It goes back to the root of why we make dances- there is something to be discovered in fractured para-linguistic exploration, in letting go of the patterns that make sense. The fact that it makes our logical minds laugh is only part of its power.

The body is often set below the mind in our hierarchy. (It’s an interesting feminist critique- that bodies and emotions are associated with femininity and minds and intellectualism and logic are in the masculine camp… but that’s a tangent for another post.) We think our minds tell our bodies what to do. But our bodies are so smart. If we listen to the ‘dumbness’ of our bodies, how much more can we know? I like the idea of practicing dumbness. Let’s not relegate that only to our poor beleagered bodies, let’s let ourselves be dumb all over. (We are whole people, after all- this is a false divide, between mind and body.) What kind of brilliance and release can we find in stupid silliness? 

There are so many options to being dumb, silly, and funny, it’s almost wrong to talk about them all at once.  I could obsess about each for another couple of blog posts. But that wouldn’t be practicing dumbness. So now I feel compelled to go grocery shopping in a tiara and wings. Or beat my head against a wall repeatedly. Or just lie here and sing with no words, la la la for half an hour.  La la la. 

So, I’m slow, but I’m working on it… 

Suffice it to say, Beyonce is fucking amazing, and I could never sing and dance at the same time. (Tara’s seen her live, where she does this dance whilst singing.) I can’t even sing.  One might even say I can’t even dance. 

I may kind of hate this song and it’s hetero pro-marriage monogamist assumptions, but I am still a sucker for the cultural phenomenon. And I am delighted to be learning it. 

For those of you not clued in: Nick Leichter Dance presents The Whiz: Moneyapolis! in which we will have some polar bear action next week.  

Um… I haven’t written in a while. I blame Israel and the fact that I was there for three weeks. Now I am back and I’ve been home nearly two weeks so I really don’t have an excuse anymore.

So let’s grab the bull by the horns.

I think it is awesome for Mad King Thomas to be blogging; I am not sure about doing it myself.

I have really mixed feelings about writing and putting it out for anyone to read. It is an uncomfortable thing. Exposing. There is already so much of me that is available for public consumption, both because of this here digital era and because I decided to be a performer, and more specifically one who makes those performances and makes them about the things she is thinking about in her once-upon-a-time personal life.

I tried to be a grown-up for a while, keep things to myself, answer my own questions, make decisions alone. I stopped liking all my friends, so I stopped. In performance too, it seems a rare occasion where holding things close is an effective technique. In performance, it seems the more of myself I can give the better it is.

I used read blogs because they give me fodder to like the author less, which was awesome when I already disliked the author. And now I am authoring a blog to give you (some vague you, which is perhaps someone but perhaps not) fodder, I guess.

I have a desire to control how much of me is given but I am not sure that is going to work in my life, on this blog, on stage. And it seems that a fully embraced life creates the opportunity for a lot of exposure and takes a great deal of vulnerability. And I do want to embrace life fully, right?

So, here we are. Reservations have to be put out for the wolves. They are hungry. It was a cold winter.