Dancing (and Dance Writing) in Quarantine: Sarah JG Chenoweth
Sarah JG Chenoweth is a gorgeous dancer and marvelous dance writer based in Oakland where she lives with her robot-designing husband and her toddler. An Illinois native, she has an MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and has been dancing and writing in the Bay Area since 2013.
As two dance writers who do not identify as choreographers, our conversation reminded me of this interview with Fran Lebowitz. Speaking about choreography, Lebowitz says,
I saw the only job that was worse than writing. My idea of pure hell. The dancers sit there waiting for him to come up with something. It would be as if the letters were sitting there, or the words, smoking cigarettes, staring at you, as if to say, Well? OK, come on. […] I can’t believe anyone has ever made a ballet.
Sima: How are you doing these days?
Sarah: It comes in waves for me. I’ll listen to a podcast about how people who don’t have a home are experiencing this time, or parents who are working and teaching at the same time. It will hit me then. With the extension of the shelter-in-place, I was like, I’ve got to figure out how to be with what this is. Also, I have a toddler and he’s still being a toddler. We had a tailgate party this morning. We went and found a parking lot, hung out in the back of the car, and then kicked a ball around in the rain. It was good.
Sima: Being stuck at home, not knowing the duration of this thing, reinforces a staying with what is, which I think is great training. I can’t really remember what it was like before. The main thing I miss is being by myself. I get emails from people who are longing for the things they used to do. I long for people saying, “Bye! Bye! Bye!” and then nobody being in my house. “See you at five!” That’s what I remember about having babies, being like, is anybody going to take this baby from me for an hour? Please?
Sarah: Even 10 minutes!
Sima: So, you and I were originally going to have this conversation with Bhumi and some other dance writers. Now it’s just you and me, kid.
Sarah: Yeah, but I want to emphasize a point Bhumi made — anybody can write something in response to dance. It makes me think of Jill [Randall’s] One Good Quote. It bespeaks the effort she is making to foster dialogue wider than a single voice. Maybe it’s a way to reframe it as thinking of writing differently in our Twitterized world.
Sima: I think of you as a dancer and a writer, not so much as a choreographer. Am I right about that?
Sarah: I make dances on the teens at Shawl Anderson every semester. For a while, Mo Miner, Rebecca Chun, Kate Vigmostad, and I had Mid to West Dance Collective from 2015–2017. We had two full-on shows and also Peiling Kao made a dance on us. I made a piece for that. I make a ton of stuff for everybody’s dances that I’m in — Nina Haft, Jessi Barber, Rogelio Lopez, Andrew Merrell, Mo, Rebecca. I did a tiny 8x8x8 thing with Fog Beast but I mostly sang in that. I danced Trisha Brown’s Locus for Hope Mohr’s Bridge Project. But I don’t consider myself a choreographer.
Sima: How did you get into dance writing?
Sarah: My writing here started with a review of a Thrust show for Emmaly Wiederholt’s Stance on Dance. I was just doing it on my own and would just send stuff to people. I think I even sent something to Wayne [Hazzard] and he didn’t respond at all. [Laughs.] I wrote something about Nina [Haft’s] show that she had at Shawl [Anderson Dance Center] and I just sent it to her. I didn’t know anybody. I was just writing stuff. I was hardly even dancing. I was working in an after school program in Oakland. Then Jill [Randall] asked me to write reviews of the [St. Mary’s College] MFA shows. I did three of those in a row, which was hard because there are like 12 pieces in each show. I tried to write about all of them. One of them took me like a month to write because I tried to frame it in subject/object body theory.
Sima: Of course! That’s borderline academic writing, which takes forever.
Sarah: Only this year did I realize that what I’m doing now is dance journalism because all of my writing had been academic. Even in my undergrad when it was about literature, my writing was a little bit creative, but really it was analysis of literature I was reading in my classes. Hi!
Sima: That’s Sarah.
Milena: Hi Sarah.
Sima: That’s Mimi.
Sarah: Hi Mimi.
Sima: Milena has to Zoom bomb every meeting.
Milena: Mama?
Sima: Yes, dear.
Milena: There’s nothing to do.
Sima: That’s absolutely insane! There’s so much to do. Go draw, go write, go read, go dance in your room.
Sarah: How old are you, Mimi?
Milena: Guess.
Sarah: Hmm. 8? [silence] 6?
Milena: Close.
Sarah: 7! So when I was about your age, this is what my dad would tell me when I’d tell him I was bored. He would say, “You could sit quietly and wait for the next thing to happen.”
Sima: Yeah! You could sit quietly and wait for the next big idea. What happened with babbo? You were building a plane.
Milena: I didn’t want to.
Sima: Then you were playing Candyland. What happened?
Milena: We finished.
Sima: Yeah, because you can only do that for a little while. And now he’s on the computer again? Well, why don’t you ask him if you can use his phone to call your friend?
Milena: I don’t think he has the number.
Sima: I can give him the number. Just go ask him. Vai. Otherwise, go play in your room.
Milena: I want to play Subway Surfer on his phone.
Sima: Go ask him if you can play Subway Surfer on his phone then — . Sorry. I lost the thread. Academic writing, English papers, then realizing you were doing dance journalism.
Sarah: I wrote for Jill’s blog a few times. And then I didn’t do anything for quite a while because my performance ramped up and I was teaching English and Dance at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward. Then I had Wyatt [in 2018]. Then Jill connected me to different publications and I’ve written for Dance Teacher, DIY Dancer, In Dance. It’s minimal but it’s plenty for me and my life right now. I get to spend a lot of time on the articles, which feels comfortable for me.
Sima: When I was writing about dance in the Bay Area in the 1990s/early 2000s, mainly for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I was going to like six shows a week and was writing all the time, the turnaround was fast, and people were constantly complaining about the lack of dance coverage. Not enough, not good enough. And now that there’s like nothing, barely any print journalism, no staff dance writers, people are still complaining, and at the same time there might even be more dance writing now than ever before. It’s a weird time to be a dance writer. Then again, it’s probably always a weird time to be a dance writer. What motivates you? What kind of responses are you getting to your writing?
Sarah: I like to string words together. I like to see how they feel next to each other. And I like to whittle away at that until it arrives at some version of a message that feels like it has a purpose. Having a deadline and a place for it to go just keeps it moving. And maybe it has a bit more integrity that way. If you’re expecting anyone, someone, one person to look at it other than yourself, there are other stakes. Also, what I had found with writing about Kevin [Lopez] and Eric [Garcia], or Melecio [Estrella] and Andrew [Ward] or the [Shawl Anderson] youth ensemble — I’m writing about Aiano [Nakagawa] right now for Dance Teacher — is that I really like elevating other people who I think are doing amazing work. Their focus is not necessarily on writing about their work, it’s on doing their work so it makes me feel like this is something I can offer this community or this profession because I actually like to sit down a plunk the words out. I only hear feedback from my friends, so I don’t really know what people actually think about what I’ve written.
Sima: I also don’t identify as a choreographer. I choreographed because I had to as part of my MFA, but I purposely did the MFA in order to be on that side of what I had been writing about so much. And, of course, I realized that, Who would choreograph? That’s way too hard. And choreography isn’t my natural mode of expression. But my dancing informs my writing to a degree. Or at least just having such a conscious relationship to my body and what it feels like moving it.
Sarah: It almost feels like not even something to comment on because it seems so obvious. When I watch dance, even when I’m not writing about it, and especially if I don’t really like it, my way into it is just being really into the bodies moving. My way into a football game is to look at what they’re doing with their bodies. They are masters. They’re dive rolling — the way they catch the ball, the way they leave the ground. That comes from knowing what it feels like in my body to think and learn in my body, from my muscles and my bones, to be detailed. When I’m writing a review, I will move while I’m writing, not full on dance, but I’ll close my eyes and try to have a remembered experience of what they were doing to see how I can language that. I don’t know if it’s mirror neurons, but I think it’s true that they’re finding out that empathy can be learned, and I feel like dancers’ bodies are empathetic. We have an ability to sense what some other body is doing or feeling literally at the body level. So if I’m writing about it, I try to go there if I can.
Sima: I have issues with the mirror neuron/kinesthetic empathy thing. I understand mirror neurons as firing when you’re learning a movement phrase, for example. Or when you visualize choreography as a mode of practicing it. I don’t buy that mirror neurons are reflective of our capacity to feel what another person is feeling because the same movement can feel differently to different people. I think it’s important to cultivate empathy as the ability to feel another’s emotional pain but I don’t think you have to have had the same experience, in reality or neurologically, to have empathy.
Milena: I want to call my friend!
Sima: I promise when I get off this call you can call her, I promise. But if it takes longer —
Milena: But you’re not using your phone.
Sima: I am. I’m recording the conversation. Go, go. The longer you interrupt, the longer it takes, the longer and longer — Anyway, I’ve been a bit of a warrior against the ways the concept of kinesthetic empathy gets taken too far. Like when the circus audience collectively gasps when the trapeze artist releases the trapeze. I don’t think that’s a form of empathizing with the way the trapeze artist feels. On the contrary, the trapeze artist isn’t gasping in terror when she releases the trapeze. She’s a professional! We are having a response to what our body is sensing beyond the visual, but I don’t think it’s giving us access to the inner life of the person that was doing that movement.
Sarah: Totally. Whatever it is that’s happening to me when I try to go back and recall what I’ve seen in order to write about it, however that is described by people who describe those things, something happens to me, and I believe that it’s coming from being a person who lives in my body and has trained my body. So, whatever is happening isn’t only my cognitive memory. There is definitely something in how I’m feeling and sensing and that’s what I use.
Sima: It is kinesthetic memory that you’re accessing, which gives you more detail because of how it’s embodied in your body. It’s what someone who practices dance can access to write about it.
Sarah: If it isn’t felt, then what is the response?
Sima: It’s an interplay between the visual and the kinesthetic.
Sarah: I do feel some friction when I am seeing a dance show that I have to write about. There is this sort of switching between watching as a dancer or as something else. I don’t sink into it in the same way while I’m watching because I’m thinking ahead of what the reflection is. So, I have to go back later, as soon as possible, I have to close my eyes and just type out a bunch of shit as I try to tap into the kinesthetic lens.
Sima: Do you take notes while you watch?
Sarah: I go back and forth and I can’t decide which is better. I find it to be helpful but I also like to come away with a big feel —
Sima: — with what remains.
Sarah: Yeah, with what remains. And try to get that across.
***
At one point in our conversation, Sarah and I got to talking about my tinyletter. I was kvetching about the fact that because I write them quickly, they wind up not representing my best effort writing and this frustrates me. Sarah said, “But what happens is that as a series the posts talk to each other.” This was very helpful to hear, and it made me think about one of the goals of this blog — to put dance thinking in conversation with other dance thinking, to create a conversation that will hopefully enrich the dance landscape and serve as a document of our time. So, if you’re reading, please respond with your own dance thinking. There’s a nifty space for your comments below.
