Anyone familiar with the 70’s American television show, the Brady Bunch, might recall Jan’s exasperated outburst decrying the inordinate amount of attention afforded her older sister in the family dynamic.

“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”

Well, I say:

“Binary, binary, binary!”

It is painfully obvious to consider binaries as a central obstacle to any forward movement of human thought and activity, but it seems omnipresent as the default structure for so much contemporary human engagement. From the production of meaning to the principles of justice, this and that strategies are employed across multiple arenas. Good and evil in religion. Theirs and ours in war. Your way or my way in cultural divides. This dual positioning offers continuous, irreconcilable constructs and creates factions; gathering troops supporting this or that. One hopes we might look for another avenue to travel down but this never seems to materialize. Some of the more recalcitrant traits of unevolved maleness reign, most visibly in the leadership of our countries. We are held hostage in the tyrannical grip of the certainty game. There seems to be an absolute need to dominate by locating the winning idea and pushing it into others’ lives as if it were unchangeable and worse, indomitable. The idea itself is not the point, it is the battle for production and ownership of the correct idea that fuels many present day minds. There are facts, of course. They exist because they are proven, but most ideas do not reach the top of the fact mountain. They are culturally and historically produced and therefore, constantly subject to reconfiguration. Some don’t even require an arrival point, just consensus. I dream of a time when we might engage an inclusive, coalition-based thinking with complex, nuanced structures and even incomplete disputes, to bring us into new solution-scapes and better relationships between worlds. I am fully aware of the idealism in this desire but I feel that a mobile system of knowledge is preferable to the stagnancy of dogma.

I lived the doubleness of a closeted life until I was around nineteen years old, thinking I would secretly love men–notwithstanding the perils of that decision–and that I would be with women. This created a very perturbed internal motor that led me on a search for the irresolvable in life once I was released. I was interested in how art could trouble the ostensibly well-intentioned rationality of the western mind. I saw how choreographic manifestations with their amorphous contours, could evolve into agents for a new complexity. Choreography ended up being my teacher, leading my on a dive beneath the stinginess of image creation to the ocean of consciousness that is its undercurrent. There were so many structures converging in dances that I had to detach from the belief systems we maintain for functional cogency in social transactions and succumb to the capricious structures of the mind.

I have always been interested in the collision and superimposition of unrelated structures. Growing up on the shores of Lake Ontario, I would watch opposing weather systems race across the lake altering the color of the sky from white to purple-grey to a threatening bilious green that would then lose its ferocity as the wind helped reveal a staccato group of tiny munchkin clouds born of some meteorological alchemy. It was brilliant theater. As a rule, I create movement material from zero, and later I make more, starting from a random new place and repeat. After a time I have many disparate segments of movement. Instead of trying to process these through a representational operation to choose my next action, I began to layer them and dance between them. By superimposing unrelated structures, meaning grows. The result is always an extra element, born though a process of convergence, that births its own qualities, separate from source materials but redolent of their histories. If you place a transparency of a gothic rose window over a mandala over an African Fairy circle you will ponder each of these as source. But you are also creating a profusion of variants, which for me speaks to the conditions of life.

Our young colleagues, students, and children have recently foregrounded for us the concept of gender nonconforming and nonbinary identities. I won’t go into this in depth, but I want to thank them for the signal they have sent and point out that this courageous step has ignited an important discussion on the idea of spectrum. The farthest ends of spectra are so easy to define in opposition to each other. It is easy to recognize aberrant behavior. But when one resides somewhere between he and she, in an ocean of differentiated identities, the specter of ambiguity rises. This seems to frighten human beings; the indefinable is not as easy to fight as a vividly positioned enemy. In this middle area, where human variations on gender are emerging from the shadows, social precepts that have held us in conflict are being dismantled. The sheer number of endless gender variants diffuses the binary structure, dissolving its end points as these brave souls step forward. This could be transferred to the production of thought, where multiplying definitions of phenomena offer enhanced understandings and a deep, complex knowledge can be nurtured. These concepts are cousins of choreographic process. When I am shaping material for my dances it is a long process with much cutting as well as many additive, layering techniques. When material is moving too heavily toward the explanatory, in an area where I don’t want that, I subject it to the multiplicity lens, attempting to reveal the many connotations it contains to move away from the explicit. I am making an androgynous idea; an idea on the spectrum between mystery and definition. It is a flexible idea and can absorb many projections onto it. It might even urge the viewer towards the mobility of thought as opposed to the construction of singularities.

Borders. We hold them tight and although it is clear they define economic control according to present belief systems, what really happens at borders is a natural, ineluctable blending. The amount of ideas and products that cross borders probably far outnumber those held at bay. Natural phenomena like hurricanes and groundwater and wind and rhizomes and animals and language and culture and aesthetics and compassion, breech the borders unnoticed, and hold rich potential for exchange and collaboration. The concept of fusion in cooking and music is an obvious example of border disruption. Baja, California is a blended culture, its food, some of the most wonderful on earth, holds no ingredient sovereign. In the Dolomite region of Northern Italy, bordering Austria, the population speaks Italian with inflections that you would normally hear applied to spoken German, curling up at the end of each phrase and pointing to an agreeable life between cultures. Migrating birds hold no passport, yet they teach us about nervous systems and hemispheric weather patterns and lands far from our own. Outside of the real tensions of cultural appropriation, the invention of knowledge and cultural production that border bleeding has created, defines the history of the world. When our concentration is so laser focused on the point of tension however, we obviously miss the interrelatedness of multiple free floating concepts on the periphery.

I did not know what I was doing when I discovered dance at the age of 20, but I fell quickly in love. Its exacting physicality and sensual/sexual potential ripped me from the armor I’d constructed against the violence of a closeted existence. I had just come out and movement quickly became a vehicle for self-expression. I was elated by the non-conformity of dancing, with its natural position outside the realm of normative body usage. It was immeasurably important in my journey of unfettering myself from the grip of homophobia. I thought it was the dancing that enthralled me, but like a toddler learning an alphabet before they understand it becomes language, things shifted. Within three years, I started to choreograph through daily practice, and the force of dance became something else. As I shifted to a choreographic focus I sustained my love of dancing but a different project made itself available, one whose parameters, I would learn, were without end. Choreography became a system with which I began to process the world; to value thought and subject my myopic views to systems of undoing. Although the body delivered the imagery, it was thought that was being investigated.

The central property of choreographic thought that drew me in was its ability to propagate numerous ideas and destabilize the centrality of meaning production born of language. I began to view the world as a kaleidoscope of concepts each one holding adjacent ideas in an endless swirl of multiplying meaning. I started to feel that I was both a victim of consciousness and an apprentice of its quicksilver properties, attempting to build worlds where cogency was a foreigner. Layers of reference in my dances multiplied upon each daily viewing to create outrageous networks of increased complexity. The more I allowed into my scope the more I discovered that dance lived far from language with regard to representation. Yet it wasn’t necessarily a contentious position as language also offered crucial templates for construction. The capacity to look at definition as an expanding fractal experience placed dance outside the purview of denotation where singularity of meaning rules. New logics arose and began to take on qualities of critique, offering alternatives to the supposed wisdom of patriarchal intelligences. I started to see that any systems in close proximity will infect each other, often subtly.

Now, at the risk of sounding too Pete Buttigieg, I will say, I speak Italian and minimal French, in addition to English. I only share this because when I started to choreograph my first dances, I was in a concentrated period of studying Italian and floating in various states of consciousness. I was simultaneously a novice learning a new language; a native English speaker translating through French to Italian; an adult who understands grammar in general but still has to rethink it through the infantile steps of language acquisition; a choreographer coming to terms with anomalous movement structures emanating from his body and a person living in a completely different culture in Rome. This was an extremely destabilizing moment, but I was divining so much knowledge in this interim space. I think this moment defined my future choreographic construction more than anything, as I found an equation between grammar and the mechanisms employed to carve out temporality in dance. The relationship of a noun to the syntax and punctuation employed to deliver it in a sentence for example, was very similar to that of the cadence and counterpoint that moved images forward in a dance, shaping them from below. Although there is a similarity here, there is simultaneously an opposing goal regarding meaning. In language, grammatical construction enhances the effectiveness of definition, but in a dance the image and its temporal delivery system can be very much at odds. Like someone who is telling you a lie, what they say is not connected to their subtext. I found this tendency inside of the linguistic maelstrom that invaded my mind at that moment. There were multitudes of other ideas I gleaned from this in-between state that I applied to my work. This concept of one system moving into the territory of another to create a new system has been central in my choreographic experience. There is so much democracy available in it. It confounds the ego and can teach one how to live a life based on observation.