I am a dance-maker and usually perform my own work. In 2020, I decided to apply to a fellowship for dancers, using samples from work I had created. I had to differentiate my role as a maker from that of a dancer. I was led to wonder: What is a dancer? How does it look and feel to succumb to someone else’s vision? What does it mean to succumb? With these questions in mind, I asked three of my performer friends, Emily Gastineau, Theo Langason, and Amal Rogers to craft works that I would then perform.

The result was an exquisite corpse-style show, exploring the notions of memory, distance (in space, time, and other), sincerity, subjective and objective feelings, risk, rules, authenticity, control, and cumulative knowledge coupled with acute execution.

Opening the show was Rogers’ “Moos and Coos.” Curious about memory, Rogers began the process by making a mental list of moves, tracking when memory transitioned from a casual recollection to a formalized score. I visited Rogers in Miami, and it rained every day. Upon my departure, Rogers’ attention shifted to distance: the distance between us, between memory and truth, the lover and their beloved, two feelings, wanting and receiving, and the distance between what Rogers wanted to see me do and how she imagined I wanted to be seen.

From there, I moved into “Anat Untitled,” by Langason. Over many conversations, we kept coming back to the subject of sincerity: what it feels and looks like to have a sincere emotion, what sincerity looked like growing up, what it means to perform sincerely, and why sincerity can be so scary. The score involved moving initially without a specific intention, then stopping to share the first memory that came to mind.

The performance closed with Gastineau’s “13 Lures.” She provided me with thirteen cards taped to a wall with instructions that were unknown to me prior to the performance. During a handful of rehearsals, she established rules and parameters, which guided how I executed the instructions on the cards. Before taking a new card, I was to report to the audience how I felt at that moment, with an option to elaborate on those feelings. Drawing on her research on the perpetual, industry-wide discourse regarding the role of the dancer, Gastineau set up a series of experiments that questioned agency, affect, sincerity, willingness, and antagonism.