Don’t break your agency.

The dance, seen from a perch atop a tricked-out shipping container plunked in a remarkably still-wild residential lot in East Austin, is a whole world. This world is lovely, complex, and free. It has rules, patterns, and rituals, sounds, fluids, and breath. The reason it breaks your heart is that you could choose this world, to live it, create it. All its ingredients are recognizable—humans in their bright and heavy bodies, vibration, light. It’s right there, here, we are right here, and it isn’t, we aren’t.

The world, in this example, is that of Anna Bauer and Jairus Carr’s Love you, moon, and it’s oriented by a kind of lunartropism. This world is the way the choreographers and their collaborators choose to light the floorboards, to gather and separate, to anchor themselves in space and time and in relation to our moon. Their choices, collective and singular, past and present, are the subtle centripetal force by which the world hangs together.

The dependency and foundation of world-making is the agency to choose, that agency being both a matter of circumstance and a practice. If I must recalculate how and what my children are going to eat because my family’s food assistance has been unexpectedly stripped away, the arena of my choice is limited to survival. If I am employed in a job that ensures my bank card is never (OK, rarely) declined at the checkout for bougie groceries but conflicts with my values, burns out my brain, and abrades my soul, I have failed to keep up the practice of agency. If the latter scenario is true because of the real threat of the former one, the work of untangling the system’s failures from my own is another constant labor that circumscribes the arena of my choice.

Functional systems enable choice, so humans can do, socially, what they do. In Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance, Deborah Hay writes of the phenomenon of dancers silently coming together to gather spilled candle wax, scraping it up with their fingernails to protect their collective resource, the dance studio floor. Zadie Smith, in an essay collected in Dead and Alive, describes this same phenomenon, a spontaneous, functional gathering to solve the minor emergencies—a wheel coming off a baby stroller, an elderly person’s fall—that occur on New York City sidewalks. Agency is foundational to the phenomenon. Hay’s dancers had freedom of movement—they did not have to ask permission to get out of line or pause a sequence of steps. The New York pedestrians are free to move along crowded sidewalks as they wish, governed by social pressures, which are born of collective need, more than rules.

Restriction of choice, whether what you can make for dinner or how to move your body, disables humanity. We must be vigilant. Elizabeth Bishop: The iceberg cuts its facets from within.

The provocation of the world of the sublunar dance—the world hung together by the quiet scuffs of sneakers, moonlight, murkiness and illumination, reverence and restlessness—is that it could be yours.

you’ve chosen the wrong life!

oh god, you could be gliding in Reeboks across the floor of an urban barn!

you could be tracing the lines of a partner’s wingspan with your own!

o iceberg! abandon ship!