The Gym No. 12: Here, there, and everywhere
On context and altars, where it landed
As a critic writing in the immediate wake of a performance or experience, I felt the context in which things had happened acutely. It was impossible to extract happenings from their immediate time and place. Artists seemed to have their fingers on the pulses of our world and communities; sometimes their work became a premonition. In 2016, a solo dance inspired by gay club culture was performed just before the Pulse nightclub shooting; the review became a eulogy. The next year, an ensemble work called Glacier coincided with the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement; the record basically wrote itself.
In the longer view, context is slipperier. Without the constraints of deadlines and the criteria of newsworthiness (timeliness being a big one), I have to either have to draw my own arbitrary boxes around things or figure out how to acknowledge the limitless and always-expanding here from which I write. Letter 12 has felt close to done each week for several weeks, but whenever I return to it, I find that the context has shifted, and as a result my purpose—the purpose I’ve gathered and sorted until it feels settled in my being—has dissipated and floated away.
The habit of gathering things to hold them is one I need to unlearn. Less ownership, more inquiry. What is context without journalistic constraints? What is the hereness in what I am doing?
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Speaking about the days before the war on Ukraine, here’s journalist Masha Gessen: “To sit there and imagine that bombs may fall on your beautiful city is too much, right?” Not only does hereness shift, but it’s all tied up in the limitations of our perception and imagination. We’re unreliable narrators in this regard.
As the Russian military bombed those beautiful cities, it became apparent that at home, our beautiful if inadequate and spotty promises of progress and autonomy and equity are threatened. And yet it is still too much to imagine that the U.S. Supreme Court is perhaps a sham, that our rights are being stricken out in secret rooms everywhere and that it will likely get worse.
And then here lay eleven beautiful humans, victims of gun culture and white supremacy and a strain of despicable ideas left to smolder in the echo chambers of the internet, unsnuffed perhaps even by a hand on the shoulder or a gaze into the eyes. And it is too much to comprehend that Congress protects our gun culture while children and parents and grandparents are shot dead. It is and cannot be too much to implicate ourselves in all the ways we may be complacent.
Here we are. Here is poet Jorie Graham: “The whole condition of empathy is much more complex and bodily and inchoate than the language we have for speaking of it.” But here, my body says, are the limits of empathy toward aggressors and those who seek control. Here is my cognition blinded with hurt and purple rage. The rage is love, I tell myself. I look for the altars, for a place to put the love.
Here is one, viewed through the frame of my phone screen: dancer Alexa Capareda, a stoic figure in a Beatle cut, moving her limbs steadily, purposefully, buoyantly beside a spiky tree. Since last year, Alexa’s Instagram feed has been peppered with photos and videos of her improvisations amid stark landscapes of the West: Rock canyons like giant mouthfuls of molars. Towering, spiky flora. Miles of sand, both pink and white. Cold wind, blistering heat, shadows, and shapes both solid and shifting.
During the most closed-in months of the pandemic, the posts were a salve for the cooped up and afraid. In several stills, Alexa’s body drapes over rock, yielding to ancient and persistent minerals. Of the videos, some are silent, while others include sound, like one of her tumbling down a pink sand dune to a scratchy-record sample. This one has the flavor of an artifact of human life on Earth, something we might send out into space or put in a time capsule to show someone—anyone—how we were.
Others are starkly objective, quieter, like footage taken from the camera of a planetary rover. To inspire exploration, Alexa embodies an alter ego. As the alien creature Plex, she says, “my body is smarter than me, and I can’t control it.” Plex is unyieldingly curious and buzzes with a heightened perception, as though conditioned to tune precisely to strange surroundings, be adept in different gravities, be directionally astute. Plex explored constructed human worlds, like Alexa’s bathroom mirror and a parking garage. But in the parks, Alexa would begin an improvisation with a Plexian prompt only to realize that the line between herself and the character had blurred: “I am an astronaut on a planet—wait, we’re on a planet!”
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In 2021, I saw this emerging body of work as a reflection of a hereness I yearned for, an antidote to disembodied virtual-centric life and isolation in physical place. In 2022, I’ve returned to it and found a tongue-in-cheek vibe: Alexa-Plex’s curious awkwardness reflected my experience of returning to physical proximity and figuring out relationships to other bodies and our surroundings anew.
Another reading, a persistent layer, suggests a way of being on a planet that seems increasingly inhospitable and bent on destruction. And then there is the heartful seeking. Alexa-Plex is one small being amid absurd and vast environments, tirelessly looking for data to send back to the home planet, or somewhere. There’s futility. But there’s aplomb, frame after frame.
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Here is a hereness, in each temporary crossroads of altar-making and altar-seeking.
Mentioned & related
Terry Gross interviews Masha Gessen
Sarah Howe interviews Jorie Graham
Altar ancestry: Sally Jacques and Deborah Hay
