we are the audience for what is coming: lights out @Meta©

Alex: Laura. Hi. Thank you for inviting me to join you in an audience at the Guggenheim to see Works & Process: Underground Uptown Dance Festival.

Laura: Oh, I’m so glad you took the invitation. It’s so wonderful to be in the audience with you!

Alex: When someone asks, I will come, you know that about me! Why did you think it was important for us to come together in this audience, in these last days leading to the inauguration, given my preoccupations over the last few weeks on this resuscitated blog?

Laura: I’ve been so intrigued and interested and impressed with your idea that thinking about being in an audience right now in this short period of time between the election and the inauguration of Trump is a very important thing for us to notice, and for us to practice, and for us to concentrate our feelings and our thoughts about, because we are the audience for what is coming. We feel very helpless about that. We feel very powerless about that. We have to remember what powers an audience has.

And then Emily is a friend and former student of mine and now a colleague at Yale. She’s the choreographer and dancer of The Scattering (working title), one of the projects we saw tonight (the other is Djapo by Marie Basse-Wiles and Omari Wiles). And I love her work. I love to see her dance. And I know that being in the audience for Emily’s work is provocative of much knowledge. I wanted to share that with you as another friend and former student and colleague in New York City.

Alex: It’s been such a hard few days for me because of what’s going on in Altadena and Pasadena and Los Angeles. I have been feeling so despairing and ineffectual. It was so powerful to be here with you and to see both of the beautiful dances in this incredible space. And it is really important to remember that gathering in this way is something that doesn’t change the world, and it doesn’t ease our sorrow exactly, and it doesn’t make things better for people suffering. But we must gather for the things, like dance, that people do that are so beautiful … and find each other together.

Laura: I appreciate that you came. With the horrible fires, of course, I’ve been thinking of you and the long life you made in LA. I remember one of the very few times I ever was there, I called you and you told me where I should go, and what I should do. And I didn’t want to email you or call or Facebook you, because I knew you were coming and I could be with you in person. I thought that was really the right thing. So, this horrible, tragic disaster that’s happening now and getting worse and worse, we are the audience of that as well.

Alex: I must admit watching from afar is so very painful, even as being there is exponentially worse … And being together here with you is a balm. It was so kind of you to acknowledge my minor audience project. Because of your generosity (an invitation, a ticket!), I am pained to remind you that I have changed my practice since the new year. I am not going to write about being in this audience with you.

I am relieved that I don’t have to think so hard, in public, on my blog, with a quick turnaround, and to a small but real-enough-to-me audience, about every encounter that I have in an audience in the interval between election and inauguration: that became a burden. Instead, I shifted the practice. I’m now cherishing what happens between two people in dialogue about these matters—two people who have known each other and collaborated, in our case for a very long time beginning when you were my undergraduate professor in the 80s, and what comes from those kinds of intimacy of expression and knowledge. And so again, I thank you for sharing this beautiful evening of dance and for letting me interview you as a way to better understand our audience experience.

Laura: Did you notice the theme of generations sharing in both dances? I had no idea that was going to be the subject, but so I responded to that theme, especially with you beside me.

Alex: Well, you are my teacher and now my friend, just as Emily was to Balanchine and his students and Omari is to his mother, Marie.

Laura: And I have been your student often.

Alex: That is also true. I’ll give you that. And of course, so much collaboration with FemTechNet! Isn’t it the best when that feminist teaching and learning goes back and forth and around, and how lucky we are that we got to be friends.

PS: It’s not like a haven’t been going to things since I stopped making myself think and write (hard) about each and every interaction with groups I chose to encounter.

Sharing photos of places we go, and the people we meet and love, has its minor beauty and dramatic pull. But I am trying my best to demonstrate that as the audience for what is coming, our platformed visibilities, our watching from afar—even of joy and solidarity, art and camaraderie—are not the methods that will secure us. We will need to “rewire infrastructures (of distribution, of accounting) because we will need more than capital or platforms will allow.”

For this reason, I will go dark from the 19-26. The last day of my practice will be found only here.