Am I a Bad Dancer, a Big Fucking Baby, or Just Trans??
3,400+ words on learning culture, technical striving, and the dysphoria of it all
Access the audio recording of this piece read aloud.
Here’s a list:
Bare feet.
Long limbs.
Loose cotton pants that flood around the lower calf.
Smooth, loping movement.
The swooping pelvis that falls and rises.
Here’s another list:
Feet that point.
Limbs that make the shape.
Racerback fitted tank tops.
Leggings that crop around the lower calf.
Ponytail, or bob.
Okay let’s try another one:
The hair has a fresh undershave.
There’s a tattoo or a few.
The legs turn out as they lunge forward from shorts, and the calves are shiny muscular.
Pelvises are all tilted forward or like ballet-grinding.
The soundtrack is kind of club vibes.
And last let’s consider something completely different: a tall man with arms like an eagle and a gaping loose tank that flashes out the muscles across the ribcage. Calf-high socks. Limbs that carve through space and knees that flex the pelvis deeply toward the ground.
And here’s what is happening:
Everybody is doing the phrase.
Everybody is dancing fast.
Everybody learned half these moves a long time ago.
Nobody asks to slow down.
Nobody seems to be in pain.
Nobody looks unhappy in their clothes.
—
I’m trying to identify the visible qualities that have led me, at various points in my journey of learning to dance, to feel sick. I have been sick with many things! For instance, sick with desire: I have yearned deeply to possess some of these qualities, to wear them on my own body, to practice hard enough so that I can do them right. I’ve been sick with failure - with the feeling that because I did not show up that day looking and moving like others and may not tomorrow and have tried hard and even made some progress before but apparently not managed to keep it up, that everything is very sad now, because I am not part of this and I am not wanted. And I have been sick with disinterest bordering on revulsion: I have felt so completely averse to taking on some of these qualities, to going on the shopping trip or the life path that would allow me to embody at least a reasonable facsimile of them, that I can barely hold a sense of other people’s abiding humanity because I am so far out the door.
What I’ve come to perceive over time is that this swirl of horror and yearning is approximately gender dysphoria. There’s a dose of chronic pain in there too, along with a touch of an I-started-dancing-late-so-this-is-extra-hard-for-meeeee complex, all baked into a nervous system that learned at a young age the scary consequences of failing to measure up. These feelings have collided and amplified each other most often in whiter dance spaces - in terms of the cultural lineage of the dance form being practiced, the bodies in the room, and especially the intersection thereof, and in spite of my own contributions to that whiteness. And they’re spurred not only by the average normy studio ballet or modern class, but also by seemingly avant-garde postmodern spaces, where no matter how experimental the premise might be, technical supremacy often merges with social capital and identity to create a seemingly inescapable matrix of linked norms.
Forgive me for referencing a formative trans film from 1999, but the problem with so many dance spaces is precisely Th[is] Matrix™, wherein each of us is asked to accomplish these norms or else be othered if we do not. Systemic norms are generally oppressive, and not only do they compound upon each other, but the emotional cycles mirror each other. All my life I had been attempting to accomplish yet ultimately failing at cis straight femaleness. In my adulthood attempt to accomplish-yet-ultimately-fall-short at certain kinds of highly technical dancing - whether because I started too late or because my body was too short or bound or boxy or in pain - the feeling was the same.
In both trajectories, I’ve made up ways to comfort myself along the way (I just have to find boys who like girls like me; I just have to take class more often); in both cases, success was a moving target (okay cool he’s hooking up with me but now I’m disassociating; okay I’m glad I made it to class but I’m gonna need the full 3 C’s of cigarette, coffee, and cupcake to repair my ego afterward). These days it seems like the way out is through constant reassessment: separating the wheat from the chaff, the beauty from the bullshit, the agency inside the autopilot; by which I mean identifying what parts of gender and of dancing are interesting and a good fit for me and then pursuing those. But first I want to look a little more at how I got here.
—
Many of the entries my personal Encyclopedia of Things That Spark Dysphoria - and maybe in yours too - seem so small, common, infrequent, or that’s-just-life that it can be hard to take them seriously or register them as dysphoria in the first place. A daily life example that sometimes makes me chuckle is the norm, if you have breasts, of wrapping a towel under your armpits instead of at your waist. The best way I can explain it is that wrapping the towel under my armpits feels embarrassing. On the other hand it’s like, am I gonna get a ballpark $10,000 surgery just so I can wear my towel like a bro? Deal with the fucking drains that hang out of your chest for weeks afterward or whatever? (I have a mild blood and physical injury phobia; the drains thing gets me all teeth-straight-across emoji. [To be clear and since we’re already tangenting parenthetically, gender affirming surgery is the bee's knees and more power to all of us who choose that.])
Anyway, dance for me is rife with these kinds of dysphoric deets. For instance, something as simple as being barefoot can feel inherently feminine to me, so I can become upset if I find myself dancing barefoot in public unless I’m wearing certain clothes that somehow make it okay - these days probably loose clothes that create a line straight down to the ankle. I was blessed to be introduced to movement through Capoeira Angola training where we were required to wear sneakers anyway, so I got comfortable bouncing around in old Sambas long ago. Now I often prefer dancing in sneaks no matter what, but that comfort, and the kinds of permission Capoeira spaces granted me over many years, is once again tied to technique, gender, and race at once (more on all of that below).
Same goes for so many kinds of clothing, obviously. There’s really overt stuff like having to wear a dress in a performance (because the fancy costume designer made them or the choreographer prefers the silhouette and the rest of the dancers like them!). But the infinity loop of navigating this over time has been wild:
buying form-fitting clothes, being asked to wear them, hating wearing them,
buying different but still “feminine” pants, looking in the mirror and being like great I’m doing it!!,
eventually giving them away to a friend after not wearing them for 4 years,
wondering why a choreographer would think I wanted to wear THAT when I literally MAKE SOLOS WHERE I TAPE MY BOOBS DOWN WHILE TELLING THE FAIRYTALE OF BLUEBEARD (sorry that’s a deep cut from 2017),
finding pants and a tank that literally make my brain go “see, I’m not like other girls” when I look in the mirror during class,
…and so much more.
The journey of what I chose for myself and what others chose for me, how I placated myself or others, feels so stark to look back on (even though clothing probs are like basically the first thing people talk about when you join a gender-focused therapy group lol).
And to top it off, You can Do You all you want, but you still have to deal with other people. Even if I’m showing up exactly as I want to be, in the shirts or pants or vibes that feel right, if the rest of the room looks like one of those lists I started off with then I still have to spend backburner energy trying to…not be bothered about it. I look at myself in the mirror against these other bodies, and I comfort myself by saying things in my head like “it’s fine I’m just the sloppy baggy-clothed queer who needs a haircut and forgot a water bottle and rushed in five minutes late and doesn’t do this movement well anyway” - which, lol, doesn’t seem like a particularly good headspace for trying to learn and practice. It’s generous neither to myself nor to anyone else.
When I was younger I believed so much in the importance of achieving technical prowess that I was more willing to push through my discomfort - even though that discomfort itself made it hard to learn. Today, I’m either too impatient, or else too hopeful - hopeful that there has to be another way for movement learning spaces to exist, a way that doesn’t alienate all the people who aren’t showing up in droves for the benefit of those who are.
—
So far I’ve been writing about “dance,” but the first movement arts culture I found a home in, starting from when I was about 18, was Capoeira Angola, primarily through the FICA lineage within the United States. I sometimes delineate between my movement training history in Capoeira and that in the field of dance more broadly because the two worlds do just feel profoundly different in many ways, and it gets too complicated to try to compare or explain without oversimplifying or else getting long-winded. But I wonder if part of the reason I was drawn to Capoeira was because it was a space where my identities were not the priority. My teachers for the first 7 years or so were predominantly Black men who not only actively emphasized the African roots and history of the form but explicitly centered Black students, and to varying extent other non-Black students of color, in their teaching and mentorship, even when there were a lot of white students around.
I suspect these spaces worked for me in part because it felt good to learn movement from male teachers who didn’t force on me a form that felt feminine. Moreover, with the focus rightfully and honestly fucking finally turned away from white folks, I think there was some release as well on that lifelong pressure to perform the specific whiteness that is white womanhood. I could simply be quiet and learn to turn on my head.
Of course, a white person in a space centering Blackness is still a white person in a space centering Blackness, and there is a long and harmful legacy of white folks’ predominance - even that of thoughtful, respectful white queers who hope that by overthinking everything they can avoid harm - slowly seeping like some FernGully bullshit into spaces in which we’ve been welcomed but should never have become the center or the majority. I stopped training a few years ago in part because I did not feel I could reconcile this risk.
And as is the case in many long-lasting creative and cultural traditions, my generally positive experience exists alongside other histories of gender discrimination, sexual exploitation, and problematic power dynamics (though to do justice to those realities would require another essay and likely a different writer). The very freedom I sometimes experience from being blissfully not-paid-attention-to often happens at the same time that bodies more likely to be sexualized than mine - femme bodies, bodies of color - may not be safe.
But in honoring how the movement and learning culture of Capoeira Angola shaped me, I take at least one lesson, and a pretty obvious one at that, which is that a space that decenters whiteness can shake up at least some of the fucked up gender requirements that often go unquestioned otherwise. I can’t tie this up neatly because one vector of anti-oppression neither guarantees nor makes up for the lack of others. But it’s as if tugging on one thread of supremacy opens up a little more space for the other seams to come undone as well. At the very least, I would like to see that happen more often.
—
Another movement arts culture that made a dramatic impact on me was that of Velocity Dance Center and the social world of dancemaking that surrounded it when I lived in Seattle from roughly 2011-2013. I moved to Seattle specifically to study and pursue a career in dance. Through work-study and the actually pretty low cost of living in Seattle at that time, I took class nearly every day, sometimes twice a day, and many of these were my first-ever studio classes in ballet, modern, and hip hop.
There are so many things I could say about this time: that people were by and large incredibly welcoming to me, gave me extra tickets or ushering shifts to see shows for free, kept me on the work-study roster as long as I wanted to stay, welcomed me to their intermediate/advanced classes even though I was neither intermediate nor advanced but just very willing to learn.
That I literally did not know how oppressive ballet classes could be in other places because my teachers were all capable, kind, and queer, with extensive improvisation and somatic practices, and everyone in class wore socks and sweats.
That even so, the Cornish BFA kids were everywhere, and the length of their limbs and range of motion in their hips and absolute confidence in the techniques they had on hand was simply overwhelming for me as a “beginning” dancer who could not lift a straight leg very high let alone achieve those mythological deep juicy pliés.
That although I do not know the full gender experiences of the individual choreographers who led the scene at that time, the visible predominance of what I understood as cis womanhood, combined with the absolute mastery many leading choreographers had of ballet, Gaga, or whatever other techniques allow you to do whatever you want with your body, was so enticing yet so impossible to reach, and thus profoundly alienating.
My time in Seattle opened me up to so much and changed me powerfully and positively. It also was my introduction to what I think of as the technique trap. The technique trap works like this: A dance space or person claims to be valuing something other than or in addition to technical skill alone - like the subject of the work, or the commitment of the dancer’s curiosity or presence, or the way people are treated, or whatever. But either 1) everybody who’s actually getting any opportunities or visibility has lots of technique anyway, or 2) when push comes to shove, if you can’t do the moves, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying or hurting or still have something else to offer; the choreographer gets pissy or moves you out of the way. Some might say, Bitch It’s Dance, So You Have To Be Good At Dancing!! I know, I know, and I don’t entirely disagree. In fact, what’s confusing in all of this is that I like learning how to dance better! I love developing new skills, refining movement, executing it with more strength and thoughtfulness than I was able to before. I just hate the crushing sensation that we lose our value if or when we can’t. It’s ableist as fuck. And it reminds me of failing at gender.
—
When I moved back home to Chicago about a decade ago, I immediately applied for work-study at a couple studios and tried to get on the same rhythm I’d been in in Seattle, but the transition was rough. Many places had a weird differentiation between “adult” and “professional” classes that just served to emphasize how much your ability to accomplish technique was apparently tied to your identity. Most of the ballet and modern classes were stiff and full of shapes that were painful and difficult for my body, with no relief of fun or kindness let alone being taught how to actually do the thing, but it felt like I didn’t have an option but to keep attending if I wanted to keep hope alive on this whole Pursuing Dance thing. The women in ballet classes literally wore tights and leotards and sometimes even delicate SKIRTS! The choreo in the hip hop classes was taught super fast and groups were often split up by gender at the end. And honestly, it felt like everyone was kind of being an asshole, either to the students or themselves. Although I eventually found teachers who worked for me, it felt like most options out there were far more risk than reward.
I suppose this is all a good thing though because resistance to norms is the font of invention or whatever. In Chicago I started actively dancing with collaborators and eventually making my own work, and like a true born-and-raised Chicagoan who comes to be obsessed with their hometown, I have come to love, believe in, and identify deeply with the multiverse of dance communities here (with gratitude as well to the dance spaces in New York City and the Bay Area where I’ve also had the chance to, for real though, live, laugh, love - and learn). I’m hell of picky about classes, but for better or worse that’s not the primary area of learning. Friendships are; the bar outside of wherever we just saw the show is; the shows themselves are.
These spaces are enriched by the profound array of difference - in race, gender, technical training, aesthetics, influences, abilities and disabilities, and more - amongst the group of working artists who I consider peers, elders, role models, admired strangers, and general community. My understanding of what performance can be has been shaped by folks who dance in wheelchairs and in public school gyms, who are old bearded white men and queer Black millennial femmes, who take HRT and SSRIs, who grew up studying bharatanatyam and yeah, sure, sometimes ballet.
But lest you think I’m settling on diversity alone as the antidote to oppression, it’s clear that what matters is not simply the identities in the room but the approach. We need to be asking ourselves what we're valuing and why, what that means for others, and what might still be missing. When these considerations are investigated as rigorously as the technique, the work moves me. More than that, I can actually focus on it in the first place, because I am not distracted by feeling othered or wondering if others are. And yeah, sometimes I still enter a vibe that feels like the ones I started off listing, and I can fathom it but I cannot handle it. So then I leave.
—
So, what now? At the end of the day and 3,000 words later, what do I want?
I guess part of what I want is to not be surrounded by so many white women in dance class, even though I realize that doesn’t all the way make sense as someone with enormous proximity to, complicity with, and history amidst white womanhood.
I want to get better at reigning in this anxious brain of mine so that it doesn’t go down unhelpful rabbit holes right before it’s my turn to go across the floor.
I want dance teachers to know that if I am distracted or spaced out it might be because of dysphoria.
I want queers and people of color and disabled folks to know that I’m grateful when you’re there because it’s generally better when there’s more difference in the room, although I’m sorry that my presence may not offer the same support to you.
I want studios to consider how their clothing encouragements or requirements might be hard for gender expansive folks, and then to stop asking for those clothes.
I want to keep learning and practicing dance movement in group spaces without wondering if a new class is going to make me feel overwhelmed and broken.
I want all of us to feel free to choose and like the movement we choose and like, but also to take the time to notice how our preferences might be lining up with some bullshit.
And I want many many other things too, like a massive amount of funding for way more artists distributed in a reparative way by the government, and all of us with capacity to do so advocating for that until it happens.
And if I’m being honest, I still want to be a better dancer: a dancer with more strength, more range of motion, more fluidity, more tricks, more whatever the shit is that makes people impressed, cause it feels like then I’d be more safe and more loved. But one unattainability I suppose I’ve stopped wanting is to be successfully female. And when you pull down one goalpost, the whole field starts to lose shape.
—
Thank you to those who read this in advance and shared their thoughts and feedback - I needed it, and you.
Next up IRL
If all that really wet your whistle, you can
catch me live for hangs and chit chats all weekend at Elevate Chicago Dance, a cross-town festival with about 13,000 performers/performances/events all weekend,
where I'll be PERFORMING DANCE LIVE IN PUBLIC IN PERSON FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE MARCH 2020
on Saturday, October 15,
at 8:15pm
at Mana Contemporary on the 4th Floor,
FOR FREE,
on a lineup that runs overall from about 6pm - 10pm that night.
I would also so deeply love if you joined me for something else at Elevate -
The Real Dance: A Micro Reality TV Show - Episode 2, which Grace McCants and I co-created/directed, is showing on the big screen!!
on Sunday morning, October 16,
at 10am
at the Claudia Cassidy Theater downtown at the Chicago Cultural Center!!
also for free!
in the first hour of 3hr worth of dance films showing that day
all of which are simultaneously streaming on Twitch!
Wherever, whenever, hope to see you soon and talk together. Thanks for taking this in.