So let's pause here for a moment and discuss what this money that we're seeking actually pays for. How much does it cost to make a dance? Well, let's start with how long it takes to make a dance. In my experience, it really depends on how an artist works. In the experimental scene, it's pretty common that you work in chunks of time stretched out over longer periods of time. So for example, most of my evening length pieces and evening length just means a piece it's like 45 minutes or longer. They take about 20 to 25 weeks of rehearsal spread out over the course of about 18 months. I don't work in ballet, but I know that those choreographic working periods are much shorter, like you might get three weeks to make a new piece. So we're going to do a thought experiment where we build a budget for a piece that takes 10 weeks to make. And for this budget, we're going to talk in ideal numbers mostly. And to do this, I'm going to bring in my manager, who's also the managing producer of this podcast, Michelle Fletcher. Hello.

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I crave abduction by aliens. I want to be probed, to find out what kind of specimen I am to an advanced species. It might not be so scary –– I’ve touched and been touched by hundreds of men, most of whom I didn’t know. I’ve descended stairs carved out of stone, wearing nothing but socks and sneakers, to end up in a basement where naked men fuck in dark corners. The walls were probably seething with germs. Abduction can’t be much riskier than that. So yeah, beam me up.

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He looks like he’s had cheekbone implants, but it’s just his face. His lips are always wet because he licks them a lot. He starts slowly on his bed, t-shirt on, smoking a spliff. His eyes get heavy from how stoned he is. There's a massive portrait of Amy Winehouse above his bed painted in thick strokes of purple, lilac, burgundy, blue, and black. It’s hideous. He welcomes guys as they enter, casually, betraying no excitement, but you feel seen. You almost forget why he’s there in the first place, but then you see the tip scales in the chat interface on the right and left quarters of the screen. When tips trigger the “lovense,” his anal toy, you begin to understand his appeal. His breaths deepen, stop in intervals that match the rhythmic intensity of the vibrations, and come out in choked exhales like he’s bearing down on something, giving birth to pleasure. His breaths echo the rise and fall of the pulses and indicate that desire is an inside job. You don’t even see the toy for most of the session. After he hits the first tip goal, the shirt comes off. Eventually, his massive dick comes into view. Big, but not freakishly big. He cinches it with his fist like a tourniquet, distending the shaft into pinks and purples that stand out against his pale white skin…..

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Hi I’m spending over a hundred hours of unpaid time to hopefully make it into the three percent of people who actually get funded by your organization. This narrative, or, “the fucking Grant I have to write,” as I’ve come to call it to my friends, my family or any random idiot who I hijack into conversation about it, may come off a little disjointed. That’s probably because I worked on it after rehearsal, exhausted, or on the subway as I headed to rehearsal, or during the afternoon instead of rehearsal, or on a weekend night while looking out the window with all the longing of a melancholic woman in an 18th century British novel watching all the carefree 9 to 5’ers cavort through another fun-filled weekend.

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As with so many experiences of erasure in real time, I am thrown off balance, into the incongruence of two perspectives that cannot meet. I shuttle through a lifetime of situations where this erasure is practiced—a lifetime of going to dance classes and concerts, looking around the room or the audience, seeing that the majority of folks are white, and thinking, “Who is not here? Who is not here?” READ MORE

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The perfect dance critic does not exist.

The perfect dance critic works for the perfect arts editor, who does not exist. The perfect dance critic writes in the perfect arts publication, which also does not exist. The perfect dance critic doesn’t secretly wish that everything was the way it used to be. The perfect dance critic doesn’t secretly love ballet more than anything else and feel like she’s just slumming when she sees “downtown” work.

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I was invited to speak on a panel on touring abroad for Dance/USA Winter Council, held in Washington, D.C. February 2006. it was definitely longer than five minutes.

Thanks for having me here. I have five minutes and I intend to fill them.

I am on this panel because of my experience as an artist in relation to the topic at hand. I will take advantage of the culturally sanctioned understanding that artists can and should say what they wish in order to speak plainly. It’s not that I think that people here at this conference or on this panel aren’t speaking plainly, it’s just that lately, as an artist, I am committed to pushing past or through, if you will, the professional niceties that subtly regulate the way information in this field is expressed or disseminated. let’s bring the back room talk to the front room. it’s what we all want to know anyway.

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This is an online blog that I add to very sporadically where I detail the emotional spinouts I have when I see celebrities in person.

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