It is a truth universally acknowledged that an artist in possession of any kind of fortune will at some point experience impostor syndrome. I don’t think I ever have a conversation with a fellow artist - assuming we get past a baseline of transparency, but also often even if we don’t, because posturing is its own demonstration of anxiety - that doesn’t eventually surface this feeling or one adjacent to it: insecurity, scarcity, rejection pain that lingers even amidst occasional wins. Impostor syndrome also sits quite closely against what I think of as underdog mindset: the feeling that we don’t fit the mold or the traditional pathway of our form or field, and that that has shaped our access to opportunity in ways that make any success essentially a righteous win against the man, regardless of whether that underdog context is quite some time in the past or has been followed by more mainstream markers of support.

It seems apparent to me that the ongoing practices of adulthood and emotional maturity as an artist include managing one’s relationship to these messy feelings and finding the right-sized volume and method of response. (In other words: how do you avoid inadvertently being an asshole or condescending to people because your head is up your ass, thus limiting your access to perspective? On the other hand, how do you avoid the self-sabotaging impacts of over-identifying with loss/rejection? Incidentally, are those sorta the same, just with different directionality as to whom the negativity might be aimed in any given moment?) This isn’t that different than other practices of adulthood that involve learning how to act accordingly from one’s personal set of intersecting privileges and marginalizations, but we may not be so used to tracking it, I suppose.

Anyway, I had a bit of all of this come up recently when I found out I had received one of Chicago Dancemakers Forum’s 2026 Dance Project Grants. This support will go to a project called Swine Ball, which is a dance-theater exploration of some stuff I’ve been untangling my own curiosities around for many years regarding sociopolitical histories and identities within my extended family. (Haha does that make any sense - if not - don’t worry - I’ll make it clearer in time for when people need to understand.) I got a phone call letting me know I had received this grant and I think what I said out loud in response was “Really? Are you sure??” As I’ve written about in other moments, the news brought up a funny mix of feelings including 1) feeling good and 2) feeling bad about feeling good. What shall we blame that blend upon - the whiteness, the transsexuality, or the cultural Catholicism?? If you relate but from different identities, lmk in the comments what trifecta shapes yours. (Just kidding, this isn’t a viral substack and there aren’t comments, but what I mean is it’s interesting the number of contexts that can lead to the same feeling.)

Incidentally and forgive the hard pivot, but what I’ve actually been wanting to write about recently, and what I started to wonder about in terms of how much it’s related to my own package of all the stuff above, was what my “dance” practice has been like over the past year and change. I found myself telling a friend recently that probably the most consistent dance learning/class spaces I’ve been in over the past couple years are house dance, line dance, and whatever you want to summarize as the mix of step/aerobics/Zumba classes I’ve stumbled across at my neighborhood gyms and community centers.

Man, I have to tell you. Find me at Zumba! Find me at step aerobics, find me at line dancing, find me on the house floor. And on the off days, find me lifting weights. Why, you ask? Basically because communal cardio and solo strength training don’t feel triggering lol.

We’re starting to wander here into some of the baggage that may not be super legible to those without some version of Capital-D-Dance training context, but to summarize and wildly over-simplify: within the Contemporary Dance And Movement-Based Performance Field there are a bunch of bodies that have some volume of training in technical forms, and basically everybody is in an ongoing angsty psychodrama about their own relationship to that volume and mix of training and whether or not they feel good/bad, proud/embarrassed, etc about it.

Example: last week when I went to a modern class for the first time in ages, I was holding back tears throughout. That was largely about the fact that I have a semi-permanent/semi-chronic/??? hip injury aka a torn labrum and I sort of live in ongoing uncertainty as to when that’s going to flare up and be bad/make it hard to walk. (I did get a cortisone shot several months ago and that has prevented the badness for quite some time. Consider cortisone if u relate and haven’t tried it yet!!) But it’s also about the years I spent in my 20s entering the dance field as an adult and desperately trying to soak up all the training I could across many different forms as fast as possible, feeling somehow both too old and too young at the same time. Put me back in a floorwork phrase and those hackles raise right up. (The hackles are injury management and fear of my body being judged for its lack of virtuosity.)

Dance baggage notwithstanding, I’m in love with these communal cardio spaces on their own terms. God grant me a 55-year-old woman in the rec room at the YMCA leading me, her mom, and a handful of Chicago Teachers Union members in squats and salsa. Let me be so lucky as to learn a coaster-step-hitch-step to that closing song from the last episode of Heated Rivalry amongst a group of earnest queers under the covered patio out back of the new wine bar. May I always lose myself in the trance of the jack, the farmer, the heel-toe-heel-toe led by an old-soul Gen Z or a legendary elder (there is no in-between). I want to be enveloped within your intergenerational, shockingly affordable, heart-rate-raising footwork every goddamn day. You make me feel myself as part of a fabric, and you fuck my calves up (complimentary) along the way.

There’s some final thought here about the fear that people will feel I haven’t earned or worked appropriately on the baseline skills of a form in which I’ve received support, that when Swine Ball premieres next spring I’ll be told once again by a peer or critic that the dance part wasn’t up to snuff, and, perhaps worst of all, that at some objective level they’ll be right, and it’ll be my fault for being some kind of chaotic Pac-Man art monster chewing voraciously through forms and fantasy pursuits with no regard for self-control or staying in my lane. But I suppose my business in the meantime is to prepare, rehearse, budget for good pay, and keep my hip healthy. And should my fears come to pass, I’ll make it my business at that point to keep dancing as best I can.