Aidos

Shame at looking with pleasure at shape, color, moves, without demanding to know sense; shame that I would invite significance to obtund the sensational intensity of immediate perception.

Shame at being an older dancer; shame at being ashamed of being an older dancer.

Shame that I have become focused on what’s interesting more than on what’s true, the latter evasive, changeable, the former less abstract, always present; shame at hubris of presuming to see beneath the actual.

Shame at my reluctance to believe in art as artifice only (imagine my success!); shame that I ever left California fields for New York City stages.

Shame that I don’t accept what is; shame that I accept what is.

Shame that I am not accepting gracefully no longer dancing youthfully; shame that I did not appreciate the adjustment to old age that adults around me when I was young had the dignity to disguise.

Shame that my dancing is impotent to right wrongs; shame that I would consider that it could or should.

Shame to believe I dance by my own strength and will; shame not to credit my role in the play.

Shame at caring what others feel about my dancing; shame that I would prefer not to care.

Shame at underestimating the value of inner conflicts, sidestepping them by living them out vicariously in societal forms of competition; shame at the result: handling worldly conflicts inappropriately, including turning the other cheek in cowardly escape.

Shame to upbraid choreographers for ugliness or sloth or aggression; they’re just striving from intuition as am I, and don’t really know, nor should be obligated to know, in some fixed rational way, what it is they are formulating; simply offering, as they do, what comes up for what it’s worth; shame that I would ignore my upset at dancing that diminishes or discards its a priori condition as a visual medium, presenting instead limp limbs, text, confessional tears, topical content; departing, in large part or small, often by considering the experience of the dancer or the choreographer over that of the viewer, from the immaculate ecstasy that comes with daring exploration of the human body’s limited range of rhythms and shapes; simplicity allowing room for honoring and giving range to the dancer’s imminent radiance.

Shame when the next move involves consideration of approval; shame pretending not to be disappointed when dancing unseen.

Shame that sometimes when improvising I tip the balance away from shape toward kinetic momentum; space around me begins to disappear; as if I’ve consumed it; it’s inside me; the context in which I was a figure swallowed up; now I’m the whole world; gone the separation that allows for “I and thou”; shame that my Libran nature keeps me from attempting and experiencing radical divagations from classical proportionality.

Shame to dance forcing body beyond natural behavioral patterns; shame to consider natural behavior patterns anything but kinesthetic habit developed through repetition.

Shame that I presume to ask another to move in a prescribed way; shame that I would forgo the opportunity to see what a consenting adult has to offer as glint within my Terpsichorean celestial prism.

Shame if I want you to see my dancing in a certain way, as that could mean I’m wanting you to be someone you might not be; shame if I allow fear of your judgment to enervate my urge to excite your brain’s kinetically empathic neuronal web.

Shame to escape to an imagined infinite; shame to bank on present finitude as security.

Shame, perhaps, at my trusting to studying dancing first and foremost from the point of view of physical technique, leaving myriad other aspects to intuition and blind faith; it’s that my love of the form was jump-started as a way to avoid other kinds of human exchange; thus it never occurred to me to address rationally what kind of interaction moving in front of others might be taken to be; it’s a sign, for sure, that I cringe on behalf of Terpsichore when I see concerts generated from conscious...