In response to this chapter’s theme, Desiring Elsewhere, which explores the potential of queer imagination as a strategy of resistance, Moving Discourse is delighted to share a preview of Christopher Matthew’s new work, what is love, don’t hurt me.  The work builds on the concept of performance lecture, using a hybrid of dance, text, and audio-visual to explore how queer romantic partnerships have shaped dance history. Christopher will be considering partnerships such as Cunningham and Cage, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, and Ted Shawn and Barton Mumaw, exploring how movement can articulate ideas that words cannot.  Letter to E., accompanied by Christopher’s audiovisual work The Faun (Moving Discourse / Video section), explores how queer desire is inscribed in flesh and articulated through the body — through movement and gesture. What might seem ephemeral lingers in the present, becoming traces that connect past and future: a blurring, a queering of straight, linear time. Following traces of queerness means uncovering relations that stretch temporal concepts and ignore spatial distances. These relations are intimate because they connect bodies — through the passing on of movements, for example, or through storytelling. For theorist José Esteban Muñoz, such ephemera queer the archive, and this is precisely what Christopher is doing. Using gossip as academia and pop culture as theory, what is love, don’t hurt me blurs the line between the lowbrow and the intellectual. The work is as tender as it is a powerful gesture of queer resistance. 

Dear E, we have not met but we are family. I feel I know you more than what I can research, I feel I have learned about you through the stories of those I call family. To them you were a father and to me a grandfather. The intimacy of telling stories to honour someone is very different to telling the biography of a dancer. As I write this letter to you I have come to understand that.

I was watching a film version of a dance of yours, one I know so well as I had the pleasure to perform, taught to me by T.  In the commentary before the film you told a story of how you ask a composer if you could use his music for a dance.  He supposedly responded to you that you had already written him a fan letter so he agreed to let you use it.  This is not a fan letter but one that comes out of my soul and body. Something you also mentioned in the introduction that dance is the “the beauty, the oneness of a dancer’s soul and body.” This resonates with me, and it is strange as I have been thinking about performing over the past couple of years and I have been thinking that to perform is to have a transformation.  When I feel my body transform from somewhere within, possibly my soul.  As dancers, we are made of the souls that have passed through us.  I sometimes can’t find the origin story of my performativity but when I heard your voice talk about the beauty of the soul (intellectual) meeting the body (physical) I realized that this thought’s origin is from you. I perform today with your soul present in me.  At the beginning of this work, every dancer comes in and makes an entrance and then they take a seat humbly on a sculpture by N. I made my entrance, swinging my legs through my hip sockets floating across the stage. I carried my pelvis through space but as I entered I carried your soul in me. I bowed my head and then floated over to my sculpture to my seat amongst all the dancers.  When I perched on top of my sculpture I knew I was sitting with the presence of beauty (body/soul). I was in a ritual of passing on a family tradition.  A garden party! Like the backyard parties of my childhood where multiple generations moving about in sync but with different speeds.  Children running, adults running or walking past them and the elderly perched in chairs (like the sculptures we sit on now).  I never met you but your stories and souls were passed on to me through my chosen family (dance teachers and dancers of your company from different generations) who had the pleasure to grow and learn from you. Recently, I was speaking with L about you as I wanted to know more than just the dancer and choreographer.  I wanted to know you more personally.  You are like a grandparent I did not get to meet but my family wants me to know. The joy in her voice to speak about you resonated from her pelvis.  It floated up her spine and I felt your entrance. Like in the piece, your entrance was a circle, you didn’t stop in the centre of the stage you circled twice greeting each of us. This is now a metaphor for the soul being carried on and on through others.  One circle wasn’t enough. You had made two so we understood this is a cycle and your soul lives on through the bodies of dancers. I know you were something special because it wasn’t just her, when C, D and K (my chosen family) speak of you it’s the same floating from the pelvis transformation.  When they speak about you and your work, the stories are so alive. The stories become dances, and the dances become offerings and honourings towards you and each other. The joy that infected their souls originated from you and poured into me forever infecting my soul with joy and oneness of the soul/body. You even say it in the recording, as you finish your last circle. You say the word “joy” as you send your left leg into a 4th position lunge, arms in a high “V” and your head bowed. The next steps are shifts from side to side while your arms gesture low, medium and high which feel as welcoming to everyone. From there it is a constant momentum of dancers floating and twisting with sensuously dynamic movements that are all representations of an offering.

As I learn to float across the stage through my pelvis, I find myself reflecting on that location in the body. What about the physical body and the spiritual body? Were you spiritual? No one ever talked about you meditating or spirituality.  They didn’t have to because it was in your values and pedagogy. Thinking about the chakras and at the lower spine (2nd chakra) just as it aligns with the pelvis is the area to “honour one another.”  Like the classic openings to your works that start with each dancer floating in through the pelvis and presenting themselves and their souls to the audience and their fellow dancers. Often this chakra is the area of emotion, desire, and creativity.  Everything I see and feel in you, it makes total sense that your work is about honouring the pelvis, letting it float and be present.  But, it also involves the pelvis. The first chakra, the root, is about the “all in one”. The oneness you talk about and the transformation I have been curious to explore.  Your technique class starts with lifting up from the pelvis and bouncing over it as if it is not only the centre of the body but the centre of our total being.  The twist, shifting and the legs pouring out of the hip sockets like water floating from a pitcher. I have come to realise all the floor work was about unlocking the pelvis, the root of the soul so we greet each other, our audience and our legacies sensuously.  We root ourselves and float as we pass the legacy of your soul.  Each dancer making their entrance is about something bigger than the performance. It is a way for them to enter the family, the garden party and the world. Honouring ourselves and honouring each other. So this is not a fan letter but something bigger. A letter of admiration, a letter honouring you and you teaching me to honour myself as a dancer.  Our bodies and souls are one, floating across stages and across life and time.

Forever grateful,

Chris

P.S. I can’t help but think that the sculptures were also an honouring to M and her impact on your “soul and body”.  Not just abstract expressionism but expressions of gratitude and continuing her legacy.