“Artists don’t get paid to have long fuses.”

A middle-aged, very tall and quite serious Italian-American acting teacher with a zero-tolerance tardy policy said this to a room of sixteen students in the basement of a church in Cleveland. Victor D’Altorio hated the spate of bad acting taking over film, theater, and television, and saw it as a direct threat to a healthy society. For Victor, acting was life or death.

“Okay,” he said, “you’re going to come up in pairs and face each other.”

We were silent, confused and quietly terrified.

“One of you makes an observation about the other. If my partner looks like they have no idea what to say, I would say: you look like you have no idea what to say. The other person repeats it exactly, but makes it personal: I look like I have no idea what to say.”

Then he explained the real challenge.

“No matter what you’re thinking or feeling, you have to say the line. We repeat it until it’s no longer true. When something else becomes true, that’s what you say next.”

We didn’t know it yet, but this was an exercise in honesty under pressure. It was absolutely thrilling.

After the awfulness of music school, a domestic life that didn’t work, and a job in arts administration where my boss attempted to sexually assault me while we were working overseas, Victor’s class became an oasis of truth.

I learned that through the lies of the playwright, actors look each other in the eyes and show the truth of what it feels like to be human in extraordinary circumstances. The extraordinary circumstance was the theater. The human was the actor who learned how to strip away pretense and shorten their fuse.

Insincerity belonged to corrupt politicians, phony religious leaders, manipulative lovers and greedy executives. Art demanded imagination and sincerity. For thousands of years, it has helped us understand ourselves. The theater was a temple. Lying about your fantasies or your emotions was profane.

Victor loved asking a brutal question borrowed from avant-garde performance practice:

What are you doing?

For someone who graduated into a stolen election, then watched a man celebrate the collapse of the World Trade Center while I stood in a flower shop on September 11th, that question lived dangerously close to others:

What should we do?
What have we done?
What will they do next?

Victor gave us a daily practice: five minutes of automatic writing every morning, and journal responses throughout the day whenever something surfaced. The task was simple and patient. Lost voices were allowed to speak, even briefly, even privately. Truth got a chance.

That tiny dance—seeing something, naming it, saying it out loud—was rehearsal for doing so in front of others. A crowd. An audience. And reacting to whatever happens next.

In 2005, I drove from Ohio to Los Angeles. After months of auditions and background work, I landed a featured appearance on Charmed. I played a nerd in a speed-dating scene. I showed up in my own clothes and waited twelve hours to do nothing. At one point, a young woman asked, “Are those… your clothes?” I said yes, and she walked away like I was a freak.

Finally, the last shot of the day was called. Suddenly, the entire set focused on me. My direction was simple: walk down the stairs, look at Paige—played by Rose McGowan—and “do something funny.”

The cameras rolled. I walked, looked just past the camera at a stand-in, and gave the biggest grin of excitement I could muster. The crew burst out laughing. The director reset the shot, Rose rolled her eyes, and the illusion of film was complete.

Later that night, celebrating at a bar in West Hollywood, a powerful entertainment attorney approached me. He asked if I was an actor. I told him about my first TV appearance. He made it clear that if I slept with him, he could call friends at Warner Brothers and help my career.

Soon after, I was offered a contract to join a boy band. A record producer roommate explained what it really meant: loss of image control, loss of personal autonomy, loss of speech, debt disguised as opportunity.

Once I understood how the industry actually worked, my dream of being a movie star evaporated.

But I kept writing.

I learned how to hear every thought passing through my head and tell the truth—at least between myself, my pen and the page. And somewhere in that honesty, imagination appeared. Other worlds began to surface.

Years later, Victor developed excruciating bone cancer. He told us plainly that he would take his own life in a year to end the pain. And he did.

Before he died, he told me, “For every hundred good actors, there’s one good director. For every ten good directors, there’s one good writer. If you think you can write, write.”

I still struggle to live up to Victor’s standard of honesty, especially about what it’s like to grow up and live in the United States. After my disappointment in LA, I drove back to Cleveland and moved to New York City. On the way, at Petroglyph National Monument, where I saw sacred and personal symbols carved onto volcanic rocks 400-700 years ago by Native Americans and some Spanish conquistadors. In faces and animals etched out across the landscape, people the land did not let go stared right back at us. A few states later, I was in St Louis at the Gateway Arch, a monument to colonialism and genocide not far from Cahokia, a great mound city that was home to hundreds of thousands of people in pre-colonial times. Truths, imaginations and lies are side by side.

On December 27th, 2005, I settled into a tiny bedroom in an apartment on 42nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues that I shared with two other people and a fair number of roaches and mice. On New Year’s Eve I went with my soon-to-be ex-partner to stand in Times Square for the ball drop. We ended up locked in high security pens for nine hours with no bathrooms, no food, no shelter, no place to sit and a couple hours of the old TV star Regis Philbin yelling at all the celebrities rehearsing. Fortunately, it was raining, so we had plastic ponchos on and were able to hide trips to the sides of the pen against the gutter where we relieved ourselves like potty bandits. It was very ironic as four years earlier, 9/11 had caused a hit dystopian show about “paying for the privilege to pee” called Urinetown to close. In the following twenty years, African-American, Palestinian, Indigenous, Irish and fellow Romani friends helped look me in the eyes and tell the truth that we are still in that pen, and they keep stopping us from telling each other that we can get out.

I understand now that the role of the artist is not to invent lies that comfort power. It is to stand in the middle of collapse and say what is actually happening. It is seeing that we were always the prey for the machine. It’s seeing that imagination can reveal the heart’s deepest desires.

The actor’s job is audacious: to continue play-acting when the world demands war. To show us what we’re thinking and feeling before language becomes propaganda.

Hamlet doesn’t hesitate because the actor doesn’t know what to do. He hesitates because Hamlet doesn’t know what to do. And in that confusion, something essential is revealed about what it’s like to have power yet be powerless to watch the people you love be threatened and destroyed.

As systems of control multiply, honesty alone is not enough. We also need imagination—the sense that something exists outside the immersive theatrical production of colonialism that we’ve been given. Every attempt to reform this maze builds another corridor. But imagination remembers that there is an outside. There is a before, and there will be an after.

The playwright creates a situation of possibility. The actor enters it honestly. And the audience watches to see what becomes true next.

When the media no longer shows you the truth, take your ideas and a play through it with your friends in your living room. Read Julius Ceasar, go see A Raisin in the Sun or The Death of a Salesman, and you’ll learn all about humanity in crisis.

That is how truth survives occupation.

“If you are in touch with your body, your mind cannot be colonized,” Siobhan said as we stood outside the Teach Cheoil in Ennistymon. The early autumn evening tucked the little town by the sea in for the night.1 The former Anglican church turned house of traditional music on the hill was a good place to speak of words made flesh.

“I was reading how Buddhist monks resisted colonization when taken by the Chinese — through mindfulness, meditation, and spiritual practice,” she continued. Siobhan and her husband, David, have built their own home, farmed their land, raised their children, enjoy playing Irish traditional music and have fascinating careers spanning academia, art and psychology. I cherish their insights and generosity.

With the help of my harp, Róisín, I had just given a reading of choreography in crisis: a collection of testimonies, laments and prayers tracing how people move through empires and how these patterns still direct our lives every day. Kind folk of the town, who have tolerated me for years, witnessed this experiment where I asked, “who is allowed to fall?”2 After just finishing my PhD on impact-driven dance — dances born with trauma — I realized that falling was relevant to impact. How do people fall into situations of impact? Are people forced, do they slip through cracks or are they simply not caught at all? No matter what lands people in crisis, dance taught me that recovery can look like falling too, and together in ritual we can let each other crash as many times as we need to into the ground. In African American and Romani families we form rings so that people can move into the center and do just that.

I opened such a circle after the show. Jennifer had jumped into the center of the dance circle to beat the floor, suddenly and hard. The flood of videos we have been seeing on social media showing bombs falling on homes, doors kicked open and lives beaten down found echo in her strikes upon the wood. The well beneath the old church thundered back as we folded that knowledge into our swaying steps, steadying time through the shocks.

Others passed the basket, giving what they could for those caught in war and genocide — in Palestine, the Roma in Ukraine. Some resist by turning toward local farmers, tradespeople and artists for trade. Perhaps all of us, in our own ways, mark the decades of capitalism’s occupation of nearly every second of our lives with art: a choice to remake the world through how we move within it, together. In every story and step, we smelt choreographies cast in empire, searching for new movements that might bring us closer to the world we all long to live in.

Observe Your Rituals

From the time our universe began in explosion to when life stirred in the sea to the first orchestrations of civilizations, we moved into being. Motion became method of doing, knowing and becoming.

As the Abrahamic faiths say, maybe words were there. Maybe they weren’t. Regardless, when we see our spoken inheritance as emergent from movement and a mere notation of that dance and not the other way around, we can command our attention as one with the flight of the stars. Astrologers become sympathetic dance critics of the galaxy. Planets become quantum counterparts on our evolution within universal expansion. Dance returns to being our first language.

As I shared in Part II of this series, it is useful to explore looking away from if not shattering the mirrors of society that are holding us back. In the same way that words can become corrupted, misinterpreted and controlling, so too can images. We all know at this point what we have been told we’re supposed to look like, even within more liberated communities this problem persists. Some escape into sound, smell or taste, but even those are not free from aesthetic, well-conditioned preferences.

What then can we remember most honestly and sincerely? We can notice right now, in this moment, what our real dance is.

• What rituals are we really performing?

• What is your body carrying?

• What are we really worshipping?

• Where does our physical labor really take us?

• What do we actually sacrifice for love?

• Who have we truly become in our secret habits?

• How far back does our movement memory go?

If we are to reclaim or discover anew any sense of indigeneity, look first in your own body.

• Does your body tend to twist to the left (the past) or the right (the future)? Do you hold yourself steady when you speak to others?

• Does your foundation, your pelvis, live closed in pain or open and ready to move in freedom? Do you breathe comfortably?

• Where do you send energy within our body most frequently? Is it hot or cold? Fast or slow?

• What does it look like in your body when something goes wrong? Is the problem a thing you’re carrying, something you see or a pattern you’re stuck in? Do you practice moving through that?

We can reclaim power and build rituals around them when we take the time to study what we are actually doing. What is our life’s dance really building? We can learn a great deal about a person by what they say. We can learn other things from looking at them and judging their appearance. It is in observing how people move, however, that we are able to truly discern who they are and what they are contributing. I do not know if bodies around words — nations, clubs, resistances, businesses, schools — can birth liberation. I do know that there is no liberation without movement or at least the ability to perceive and imagine it. Why not put movement back in our center? As Dr Finola Cronin said to me while I was locked in the studio figuring out what I was doing: “Dance first. Then you’ll have something to write about.”

Myths as Mirrors

Joseph Campbell, the “comparative mythologist” made famous by the hero’s journey and his support of George Lucas’s Star Wars, once said that “myths are the dreams of a people.”3 If we understand myth as literature, the potency of dreams are flattened and critique stalls the instinctive gestures of souls seeking answers. If we understand myth as the notation of the soul’s journey through the cosmos, mythic time becomes local, and the local becomes mythic. A field of play becomes a field of insight.

For the last couple decades, US American film and television reveals at least three dominant dreams: the religious, the super-powered and the undead. I am generalizing here, but the gritty, real, tragic and comedic Hollywood of the 90s made way after 9/11 for a more mythic time signature of superheroes, witches, vampires, cultists and the otherworldly. What does that tell us?

We are still dreaming, but also slipping out of the confines that we have known. Figures with deep bodily knowledge — witches, comic-book heroes, exoticized cultures — discover that they know pathways out of oppression and danger. Right and wrong take on cosmic magnitude. We watch the apocalyptic undead infected from some zombie contagion ravage the innocent on screen while we fantasize whether we are the one helplessly running to non-existent safety — or if the zombies already got us. We’ve already stopped dancing. We’re already one of The Walking Dead.4

In the final scene of I Am Legend (Lawrence 2007) (spoiler alert), a leader of the infected (zombies) throws himself against the glass of the protagonist’s home science lab (played by Will Smith), trying to destroy the people inside who have discovered a cure. As he slams his body into the barrier, his own rage and hate injuring himself, we are reminded how even in our own bodies we can disrupt and destroy the very things trying to cure us and set us free. We are reminded of systems that would rather destroy than allow transformation.

There is a funhouse of mirrors trapping us in our own bodies, in patterns that we know to be wrong for us. De-colonial, anti-racist and indigenous perspectives have told us this before. Our imagination and dreams can gives us clues on how to get out and art can help us find the way. As I shared in the last piece, we can protect ourselves from getting lured back inside the funhouse when we look into the mirrors of life itself.

Mirrors for Life

If we are working towards a survival embodiment and a meaningful participation in a eco-accountable social world, we need reflections around us to let us know what our dance is really doing and its impact on others. These mirrors are often called relationships. In my decade of time spent in Ennistymon, County Clare and a lifetime learning from indigenous communities including those of my own Irish and Romani lineages, I absolutely confirm these are “mirrors” worth having:

1. Have a relationship with the land you are on including with all that share it with you.

2. Have a relationship with those who have come before, particularly if they cared for the land you are on.

3. Have a relationship with those who will come after.

4. Have a relationship with the world within yourself.

When we get to know our communities we can see ourselves in others, and they can see themselves in us as well. So much can be solved if we just looked at each other dancing while dancing ourselves. What happens when we see each other fall and rise? What happens when we feel the floor vibrate together? What opens in the mind when we sympathize with those that came before or will come after? How can we move with the understanding that our freedoms come with responsibility to everything else sharing space and time with us?

There are a growing number of books that articulate this knowledge, and they are absolutely worth reading if you are not familiar with them or do not have access to a community who shares these values and ambitions. They are rich in concepts of reciprocity, accountability, care, innovation and connection, and are frequently written by indigenous people, and so many researchers pointing the way to what we already knew all along.

Timedancing

Maybe you’re like me. I’m all kinds of “different” and am hardly what most would consider “indigenous”. Growing up in a country whose history depends on pride in colonialism, how can we know right from wrong? What does that mean for the mirrors we wish to hold up to ourselves? My own journey has taught me that there is something more immediate I can do to consistently pop me out of self-oppression and into the scary world of change-in-motion: tell the time.

In engineering, dance and physics we are concerned with time/space/energy. The tools of our trade are built upon measuring and coordinating place with an eye to how much effort is needed for change and how long it might take. Physics is the study of the universe’s dance. Engineering is our attempt to choreograph that. Colonization is the attempt to engineer more time for some and less for others:

• Will bloodlines expand, maintain or die out?

• Will land support future life for all, for some or become barren?

• Are our evenings full of time together in love or apart in hate?

• Is our our memory the playground for our future, or do we stop stretching the arms of the body’s clock into all times? Do we just settle into now, and only sometimes when we pay attention?

• Do we feel the cycles of nature, or do we only feel reaction in the moment?

• Are we hyper-attuned to respond to all beings not just in this time, but all times?

• Do we tell stories through the long night, or does our imagination collapse into apathy and emptiness?

Occupations are not bound by space or energy. They are bound by time. At some point, the energy sustaining it will run out and the hold on land will be released. One of the most rewarding lessons I’ve had from academia was the opportunity to critically ask what it means to be Romani and Irish-American; it was the opportunity to study what it’s like to survive an empire. Even those we lost, murdered by brutality, endure within our steps. Every time I step dance, I carry them with me.

Resistance can look like simply choosing not just to spend your time differently than what you might have been conditioned to, but changing your very awareness of time itself. Then we can see how we are not working to sustain an old, dirty contract with the land itself, we’re working to nourish and be nourished by the world. We go from waiting for the paycheck for waiting for the flower to bloom. We go from being afraid of what they’ll do to us tomorrow to learning what self-defense means right now. We go from survival of the “fittest” to wanting a survival embodiment for all. We go from counting loss to children born.

Dance is a choice to decolonize your body on the land that you are in this moment. It is a choice to create something different right here, right now. What would happen if we all started right now?

It’s time to break the spells over our time. Colonialism, or any ego-maniac for that matter, never owned land, energy or people. What they try to colonize is time itself — the hours, rhythms and lifespans we are forced to spend under its control. They are only as successful as the number of us who comply. Time magic is extremely powerful, and how we move through it determines the success of “the master’s clock”.5 Allowing your world to be closed in by smaller and smaller mirrors shrinks your timescale too….you don’t need as much time anymore to travel. Your presence gets smaller and more immediate until nothing is truly wanted anymore.

Break the cycle. Learn to Timedance. Keep life moving. Find the audacity not just to hope, but to move into the future not just because you’re going there, but because you feel it there. You express your destiny. You stand in your roots. You love for tomorrow. You find peace because you know where you’ve been and how you got here.

In conclusion, when we ask what happened to indigenous Europe, I am reminded of my friends, whose families outlived empire and still are dancing through its reincarnations. I am reminded of food shared not because it was wanted, but because that’s what care and reduced waste looks like. I see people entering the time-cycles of a fiddle, from the kitchen to the concert to the grocer to the pub and back. I see people leaving the left-to-right of English and going back and forth through the words of ancestors. I see people remembering what can never be taken away.

Whatever the legacies of colonialism and its shape on our lives, I invite you to develop your awareness of how you are moving through your life and how this shapes your own understanding of the time you have spent and have left upon the earth. This careful, quiet process of perception, calculation and action can be witnessed in ourselves. We can release our egos and cherish the precious survival embodiment that sustains us all. We can become natives to the dance of life.

To help you orient yourself after this series, I’ve created a short PDF with prompts to explore where harmful timescales rule your life, what you remember and what you notice about your life’s dance:

Timedancing Worksheet

66.8KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

If you would like to learn more about how dance can be a method of liberation and force of change in your life, please subscribe. I will be beginning workshops on impact-driven dance very soon. I am also working on a mobile application designed to support de-colonial time-keeping practices—whether you’re reconnecting with something in your inheritance or learning to sense time differently for the first time.

To begin, a lament for the grief of those we have lost.

Dear friends, colleagues and very kind followers,

I have many more posts on dance, survival, technological creativity and embodied history complete and waiting in the wings. Right now, however, I would like to share for those interested some explanation as well as specific actions you can take to help US Americans work to counteract and hopefully end our government’s harm.

Our lives here are in very real danger, and many both in fame and obscurity have already died in this long fight against tyranny since colonization began. The innocent and brave alike continue to perish for the interests of the few. Daily more people are very aware that our action and inaction here have very real consequences for those around the world.

The work I am encouraging remains profoundly embodied, and intends to find counter-motions to new totalitarian choreographies operating at scale. Our world—for better or worse depending who you ask—is rapidly being destabilized in particular by a handful of billionaire gangster bankers who are stealing all our tech, knowledge, natural resources, our children and so much more. Their goal seems to be the same as ever for any despot: to control all life on earth. Some methods are old. Some are new. All must be met by someone—hopefully enough to make real change.

I have so much love for our world, and I don’t want to see more people, animals, trees, mountains, waters hurt by greed and hatred. Many of you are more worldly and wise than me, so please do chime in, correct and advise as you know how. We should have never gotten here and yes, it is the mess of USians to clean up. That’s said.

First I will provide some context many may not have, and then things you can do to help if you would like to. Many of you are not from or are in the USA, and you know far better than I what you need to do in your own countries and communities to protect yourselves, so I’m not trying to dictate that. I come from a people who have never started any wars, so I cannot condone or authoritatively speak on violence other than physical self-defense. I also have multiple disabilities that would make me a significant burden to others in a crisis situation. My advice is for those looking to help US Americans who are resisting.

The assistance I am advocating for grows from striving to find leadership in what I call meaningful participation. This stems from a greater principle of survival embodiment, which is what it sounds like. However, these dances of the continuity of life need some updates for 2026. This is something I’ve dedicated my life to as a dance academic, embodied historian, technologist and human being.

I begin with the tedium of tech and publishing because it’s relevant and continues to shape the very nature of how we communicate, and it is now in the hands of the few who wish to, according to many sources, re-colonize the planet. (I remind everyone the last time this happened at this scale so many millions died the earth’s climate changed.) In the many attacks on life around the world, it is a struggle to find how to make helpful, productive, supportive and meaningful contributions to resistance. This is intentional. I have worked for America’s largest publishers for a decade, and I can guarantee every single one of you have used tech one of my teams have built. I have observed how this kind of communication has been undermined in the following ways:

1. Billionaire-owned press. The rich and private equity firms have spent over a decade buying up every single one of our presses. Everything really stems from this but there are details I will elaborate.

2. Profit. Close behind this was the desire for profit over integrity, which is pretty obvious to anyone who is reading on Substack. People are paying to be entertained, no longer paying to be informed.

3. Digital Publishing. In the presses I worked for, only print journalists were protected by the unions. Younger, digital members of the press face harsh quotas that end up creating click-bait journalism. They have to produce so much content there’s no time for depth. Paywalls and incentive systems obfuscate what is breaking news and what is OpEd. Ad placements end up controlling content and so much more.

4. Senior Staffers Betrayed the Public. When the elites bought up all the presses, the dangers of this were instantly clear to everyone in every single role. Senior staffers, who overwhelmingly have very privileged backgrounds—the kind you and I can only dream of—did not resist these changes in any substantive way that prevented the worst from happening. An article or two was published warning everyone, people griped at happy hours, a few days of strikes…and that was it.

5. Silent death of investigative journalism. The press’s most powerful tool is investigative journalism: the ability to find something out that no one else but the baddie knows that is of great interest and importance to everyone. This has been in steady decline for decades, but was accelerated during the 2007/8 crash when corrupt companies and criminals were exposed. This could not happen again to Johnny Joe at the country club again, “he’s actually a great guy” kind of stuff (people have literally said this to me about our most genocidal presidents because they had dinner with them). Investigations didn’t end overnight however. They turned into exposé’s about things that already happened that everyone knew about, not really putting anyone at risk anymore of prosecution and litigation. And then this too went away. Twitter was the last major source of investigative journalism with the potential to change headlines. There’s a reason why it was so important for the rich to acquire and degrade this publicly traded company that should have been a commodity operated by the people.

   Manipulation of Time. There is a careful cadence between breaking news, in-depth reporting, opinions, satire and other traditional forms of journalism. This has all been shattered, and the end result is that the timing of each of these is now scattered. Our sense of what is happening—already broken by the ever-alive decay of the internet—can now be freely directed wherever they want it to go for however long they want it to go.

6. Social Engineering Attacks. Many have written about the perils of social media, and some have written about how bad actors harvest attention online through bots and troll farms. What is not known is that all attempts to stop this election-shaping, harmful practice were—you guessed it—attacked by the trolls and bots. My favorite company for researching and combating this, https://graphika.com/, had to cease operations because they were accused of being part of the “deep state” propaganda. Every accusation from the baddies is indeed a confession.

7. The Private Equity-ness of the Press. The thing about private equity is that it cares about capital > profits, which profit itself already had destroyed any sense of (w)right and wrong. America is being carved up because the sale of each business in parts can be worth more than the profits from the business itself. This is late-stage capitalism—when it begins to eat itself.

8. Performative Leadership. As Moten and Harney said, revolution has to come from the outside and the fringes, it literally cannot come from the academic center. As an academic myself on the margins, I ask you to consider how many people just a couple years ago were outspoken activists for the marginalized and the resistance. Where is their leadership now? For most, their position and privilege in the end has meant more than your safety. All the same, I am grateful for what they taught me.

Okay I hope that was informative in some way, and if you work in the press you might keep asking more questions and demanding more change, or build anew. I know how to build and operate every single part of multi-billion-dollar publications at scale, and let me say I never thought I would have that ability. You can do it.

For everyone else, I hope that this helps you understand the urgency and need of finding meaningful participation—and sharing these routes, tables and moments of rescue with each other.

Here we go:

1. Re-Post Evidence. Then Post it Again. Most Americans do not have access to reliable news, so social media and direct messaging videos of incidents seems to be the most effective at getting people to understand the peril and to act. Seeing Eric Garner be strangled to death by Police in NYC a decade ago woke me up. For others, seeing Renee Nicole Good get shot in the face yesterday by an ICE agent has woken them up. Let everyone know what the system is doing.

2. Share History. The internet and commentary is flooded with hot takes that are right now clogging up the few communication channels that we have. This buries meaningful participation, and is intended to do so. The bots love this. So many of these quips and opinions are on a some race to the bottom of the awfulness of human history, which is understandable given how little sense of history most people have. If you need to go there, share specific facts about the history of empire. You will definitely educate at least a couple people, and we need that. For example, I’ve been educated by Canadians about American imperial history I did not know, and I grew up on the border.

3. Listen to Black, Indigenous and People of Color. This is a generalization, but I do find that historically oppressed people understand how systems create harm. And they know how to resist it. If they are kind of enough to share their knowledge, please show respect and say thank you. If this is you, thank you.

4. For the love of god stop attacking American activists. I understand so many domestically and around the world want revenge, but telling us how awful you think we are is wasting critical time and attention that could otherwise be spent on meaningful participation. We are all that stands between the world and war. Once this is over I’ll buy you a drink and you can tell me how mad you are.

5. Keep confronting fascists. One of the most helpful things I’ve seen online is foreigners confronting ICE agents, trumpers, harmful elites and white supremacists about the disparities of their narratives. People are coming around. Your outrage is working. We have been fighting them for a decade and many of us have run out of time to educate them. It helps a lot when you do.

6. Stop the undermining of your democracies. Banning X and regulating other platforms is a direct, immediate benefit.

7. Stop injustice at home. Every nation does bad stuff, know what yours is and do something about it. Every bit helps.

8. Boycotts. Y’all know what you’re doing on this one.

9. Do Not Post Organization. Soon ICE will be doubling their numbers and going door to door. Loose lips sink ships. Do not expose things that do not need exposing.

10. Read. Project2025 and the CIA handbook for psychological operations are open and available. Give them a read. There are so many great books, like Arendt and Snyder. Share yours below.

11. Pressure Your Politicians. You can pressure your elected officials to disinvest, boycott and speak out. You might be surprised how many secretly still support this because they or their families are physically threatened or because they are being blackmailed by a global sex, human trafficking or pedophile ring.

12. Amplify Meaningful Participation. If you find a voice you think is helping or can materially change thing, re-post and share them.

13. Keep Doing the Real Work. The world is awakening to what has been stolen from us—nature, intuition, connection, creativity, peace and love. Remember this is what we are all working to protect, so keep doing it <3

14. Get creative. Anymore ideas?

If you liked this post, please signup for my newsletter. Very soon I will be beginning “embodied survival” workshops every week or two, and I’d like to keep you informed and welcome you to the conversation.

Remember, your mind cannot process all this. But I promise you, the heart can bear it all.1

This is part two of three of a series asking what has been obstructed in our views of our own bodies. Read Part I.

The Man in the Mirror

Most dance classes I’ve attended have demanded attention to the mirrors, or more specifically, the reflection in them. The mirror becomes the authority: get the right line, the right illusion, the right version of yourself. It is the strange fate of a dancer to stare at your own body while you’re in the middle of torturing it for hours, months, years. This was the price of survival in the dance world, from childhood studios to Broadway rehearsal rooms.

But there was always one thing I could never understand in the mirror: my own face. I expected to see an American white man looking back at me. Instead, I saw what someone on a dating app called me a few months ago: “What kind of half-breed are you? Italian?” Years of this line of questioning cloud my view whenever I meet the man in the mirror. And that’s because there’s a 400-year-old ghost staring at all of us right back.

I’m seldom in dance studios nowadays, but this specter also haunts academic writing; it possesses people in conversations who are otherwise intelligent, sovereign. In my ongoing decolonial education, I have come to learn that their own eyes have been clouded by the ghost of The Sun King, one of the most powerful, artificially constructed figures in the propagation of colonization. His image affects us all, and endures when white historians say “the archive.” They rarely mean the truth. They mean the mirror that flatters the image we were told to appreciate.

Every field has its origin myth. Dance’s begins in a room of glass.

When Europe Learned to See Only Itself

Completed in 1684 under Louis XIV of France, The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles became the ceremonial spine of the palace and the stage where Europe would learn to see its own body. Amidst the many uses and interpretations of the palace’s enormous complex, the hall was designed for one purpose:

• to reflect the king infinitely

• to make his body appear opulent and omnipresent

• to collapse the distance between image and power

• to turn divine right into visual fact

Historians of Versailles — Margaret McGowan, Peter Burke, François Bluche — have noted how the palace was engineered to stage absolutism. But still too few dancers and dance historians follow this insight through the body. We miss how the choreography of power in that room became the prototype for the mirrors we inherit today.

Return to the Hall and the logic becomes clear: regal bodies arranged in a perfect cosmic orientation defined and reified for centuries by white male theologians, philosophers, scientists, painters, composers and choreographers. Somewhere in the flashes of mirrors, candles, crystals and windows, this divine order stopped being above, in front, right, centered or wherever the church told you to look. It became everywhere, it became fashion.1 Generations of the wealthy, powerful and aspirational — not only in France but across Europe and the Americas — absorbed these aesthetics so deeply that even when corsets, male high-heels, wigs, crinolines and gloves evolved, the values endured. The choreography of elevation simply migrated from costume to posture, from posture to technique and from technique to the racialized hierarchies of taste that persist today.

With its sumptuous interiors, fashions and customs designed to exalt a purity of whiteness, the Hall of Mirrors is narcissistic surveillance made stone and glass. You do not see “yourself.” You see yourself only in relation to the king. And with so few in mainstream dance or contemporary embodiment practices willing to interrogate these origins, the distorting reflections of Louis XIV’s court shimmer at us still.

This is the function of colonial whiteness and the subjugation of embodied indigenous knowledge in dance.

Ballet as Mirror: Appropriation Turned into Origin

Unlike the quadrilles (square or set dances) that would come a century later, Louis XIV’s court ballets weren’t charming aristocratic entertainments. They were political technology.

Choreographers like Pierre Beauchamp and composers like Lully built spectacles that staged the king as the axis of order. The most famous of these was the Ballet Royale de la Nuit, where Louis appears towards the end as “The Sun King” in a 12-hour ritual that incorporated “exotic” elements like feathers, so-called “Amerindian” motifs, caricatured depictions of African bodies. All represented theft from cultures France was simultaneously colonizing, enslaving or suppressing. All were used to lift up a new king.

What was stolen were not merely adornments but cosmologies: practices that honored land, ancestors and future generations — forms of embodied care that sustained whole communities. Under Louis XIV, these became props in a ritual of absolutism. The king consumed the beauty of other people to elevate himself. The tenderness and relational knowledge at the heart of these cultures was replaced with a choreography of domination.

And this matters because the gilding of the ballroom was not decorative, it was the aesthetic armature of empire. The same king who commissioned ballets to display his divine body also issued the edicts to conquer, enslave and erase. The choreography of spectacle and the choreography of colonial violence were two steps in the same dance. The king’s desire and those of his court were fed at this alter.

This is how the lie was built. Here is how dance history preserved it.

The Archive as Mirror

The surviving livrets and manuals including those housed in elite collections like the Rothschild holdings at Waddesdon, England are not neutral evidence. They are scripts for recreating illusion. They codify violations of bodies, cultures and human rights. They are artifacts of extraction, circulating in a world increasingly hungry for cheap print, portable authority and standardized visions of “proper” movement. These documents did not merely record steps; they established traditions of value that shaped later laws, cultures, universities and even the forms of resistance that emerged in their shadow.

Centuries of dancing masters — many concealing their own identities — polished the king’s fantasy. Fantasies of dancers so elevated by whiteness they could “dance on their toes” (en pointe) strive to erase the source communities entirely. Dark-skinned villains, “primitive” costumes and white-washed fashions codify stolen aesthetics. The manuals make us pretend the mirror is a window. They train us to mistake illusion for knowledge.

When I sit in a dance history conference and watch colleagues’ eyes glaze with an invisible flash as they skip over what every marginalized dancer in the room can see plainly, I witness how generations of scholars have mistaken reflection for fact. Whiteness’s compulsive search for what is already guaranteed — power — is the real ‘dark’ ritual of the Hall of Mirrors. It is why white dance scholars keep returning to the same hollowed-out bones of the manuals, still looking for the King. It’s why those of us recognizing suppressed embodied lineages are still cast aside while they still have “important research” to do with manuals, the prints of court dances and the costumes that will never, ever create the meaning they are looking for because it was never there.

It is an empty, insatiable hunger whose destructive force has been confirmed for centuries by Black and Indigenous scholars, by dancers at the margins, by communities systematically repressed. It is the desire to be a king.

The Manuals That Maintain the Myth

Beauchamp–Feuillet notation, Rameau’s Le Maître à Danser are manuals claiming to describe “how people danced.” Not only are they absolutely atrocious to read and are about as nonsensical looking as you can imagine, scholars like Susan Leigh Foster and Rebecca Harris-Warrick remind us, these are not innocent texts. They are:

• political artifacts

• technologies of discipline

• imperial aesthetics

• tools for exclusion

They preserve and uplift what the powerful wanted remembered and not what was actually unfolding in the world. Who and what was repositioned?

• African diaspora dance

• Romani social dances

• Indigenous dance

• rural improvisation

• working-class bodies

• embodied knowledge outside the court

These are the ghosts the mirrors refuse to reflect.

The Three E’s: Enclosure, Extraction, Exclusion

When the gold and velvet are stripped away and the mirror is shattered, the machinery illuminated across disciplines by political economists, de-colonial theorists and archival scholars comes sharply into view. It’s the simple, dumb colonial technology of enclosure, extraction and exclusion.

This is how colonial systems operate on land, on bodies and on knowledge. Louis XIV’s dance world was not separate from this logic; it perfected it.

Enclosure.

Movement was centralized in the court, yes — but even more importantly, knowledge was enclosed within a small circle of men who produced and transmitted the choreography. The Beauchamp–Feuillet system didn’t arise from open artistic exchange; it arose from an elite, guild-like network of dancing masters, court officials and royal academicians whose access to manuscripts, rehearsals, treatises and royal commissions was tightly restricted.

In this sense, the world of early dance notation resembles other imperial knowledge enclosures:

• the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, where mapmaking was secret and punishable by death;
• royal academies whose membership conferred political rather than purely artistic authority;
• court musicians and dancing masters whose livelihoods depended on guarding knowledge, not democratizing it.

Dance notation did not reveal anything about the world; it regulated who had the right to move inside it. Versailles becomes the only legitimate source of “European dance.” Colonial cities, churches and palaces are placed upon Indigenous burial sites and places of profound spiritual meaning. The logic is the same: enclosure produces legitimacy, and legitimacy erases what came before.

Extraction.

Rhythms, aesthetics, rituals and meanings were lifted from Romani, African, Indigenous, Mediterranean and working-class European communities — and once absorbed into this closed circle of court choreographers, these knowledges were declared no longer belonging to the people who created them. They became royal intellectual property. They became court knowledge.

This mirrors imperial cartographic extraction: the empire learns from you, maps you and then claims your world as its own.

Exclusion.

The same select circle that enclosed and extracted knowledge also decided who counted as a “dancer,” whose movement had value, and whose bodies should be erased entirely. The manuals survive because the people who made them controlled the archive. In the colonial gaze, communities who created the aesthetics survive only in distortion or silence. Rhythms, aesthetics, rituals and meanings are stolen from colonized and marginalized peoples, and the discarded bits are called “noise” or “low”. Dances are weaponized against their own communities.

And here is the part that is hardest for me to say, but necessary: this machinery did not disappear with the 17th century. It is still upheld — often fiercely — by fellow scholars who inherited its authority rather than its truth. Their confidence is not rooted in deeper research or greater insight but in their proximity to the old gatekeeping networks that once controlled access to manuscripts, guild knowledge and royal favor. The same false certainty that guarded the Beauchamp–Feuillet circle still appears in conference rooms, review boards and academic publications, where outdated frameworks are defended as though they were natural law. It is not scholarship that keeps this worldview alive. It is habit, hierarchy and fear. False certainty is the modern Hall of Mirrors: a reflection mistaken for depth, authority mistaken for understanding.

This is racial capitalism in motion draped in the fake elegance of court choreography. Its grotesqueness grows as generations of scholars imbue this machinery with meaning that was never there. The decadence of this world was not noble; it was brittle, wasteful and terrified of its own emptiness.

And here is the truth audiences and dancers alike feel instinctively: that first reaction people have to ballet’s rigidity (that sudden “what is this?”) is not ignorance. It is the body recognizing a structure that was never built for its freedom.

When My Body Recognized the Pattern

Recently, in a contemporary academic setting, I watched enclosure–extraction–exclusion unfold in real time inside an institution that believed it was opening its doors. My identity and presence were welcomed for the promotional materials, and then accidentally removed from the event itself.

I hated myself for letting it happen. Then I hated myself for recognizing the pattern so clearly — a pattern my de-colonial and anti-racist colleagues had taught me to see — and still trying to deny it. Disruption was seeing that my body understood the choreography of harm long before my mind was willing to admit it.

The moment I named the three E’s, something in me regulated. Not because the harm disappeared, but because the mirror stopped working on me. I knew exactly what kind of dance I was in and what was really happening behind the glass. Bright, shiny things no longer hid harmful motives. I abandoned reflection for truth, letting my body finally metabolize the structural violence I had been dancing inside for years. I forgave. Once I stopped performing for the mirror, I could finally see the others still caught inside mirrored corridors of oppression. I better understood those whom the mirror privileges.

Thomas DeFrantz calls this “the Black body’s refusal.” Ann Cooper Albright argues that the body knows what the archive represses, and I’ve loved dancing in her barefoot contact interventions in those long, stuffy conferences. For me, it wasn’t just about not looking in the mirror anymore. It was about stopping my attempt to be the mirror for the world in my own dance, in my own body.

Since that moment, my body has refused. I eliminated dancing for many years in a necessary reset. Today, I am working on a new video series dancing with roads, something very familiar to me and my family for generations. It’s a journey I can offer to you. This is how I know to rebuild and share right now. And this is exactly what the system fears:

Once you see the code in the choreography, you can choreograph the code.

The Mirror That Never Reflected Me

In many contemporary dance spaces, the toxicity of mirror culture is well understood — and rightfully so. But the task is not the same for every dancer. “Turn away from the mirror” reveals something important: it only feels liberating to dancers who never needed the mirror to belong in the first place. White dancers, including many in somatic lineages, can treat the mirror as optional because the state mirrors them everywhere else. The studio reflects them. The choreographic imagination reflects them. Their bodies are already legible.

For non-white dancers, the mirror is not a tool to be easily discarded but a demand. The colonial gaze polices the body whether the glass is present or not.

This is the same logic that makes barefoot dancing “authentic” and “classy” when done by wealthy white dancers, yet “improper” or “trashy” when done by under-resourced or racialized dancers. This dynamic is perhaps done without full self-awareness, but it nonetheless strips many dances of ancient, living knowledge and replaces them with techniques and exercises rebranded as “discoveries” within a capitalist wellness economy.

Somatic rooms talk about healing and presence, but most avoid history, colonization, racialized embodiment, and the political labor of surviving erasure. Somatics without history is another mirror — softer, kinder, but still a mirror. Turning away from mirrors liberates only those already reflected without distortion.

The real question is not whether mirrors should be used, but who were the mirrors built for.

As white presenting gay Romani man, I had a body that never quite fit the rooms I was allowed to enter, so the mirror became survival. I learned early which parts of myself were “acceptable” in public and which were not — a calculation many people never have to make. For years I clung to that damn mirror waiting for what was never going to be offered.

Covering mirrors in a studio does not dismantle the structure. It simply hides it. This is the Hall of Mirrors at work: a structure of belonging masquerading as a tool of awareness. Sadly, so many in our world (more every year it seems as we lose the arts, nature, even science now) were never taught to feel what they feel, let alone remember that they, too, came from somewhere else.

This is an archive — a repertoire of lies — that the mirror was built to reflect.

Community as Mirror: Moving into the Counter-Archive

For me, the truest reflection was never glass. It was my community — shared, uncertain, alive. When the studio mirror tries to define me, diaspora knowledge interrupts it. For example, when my foot hit the floor in Ireland, my body was not expressing an “Irish shape.” It was having a conversation between Romani lineage and colonial imprint. It is dancing in the kitchen with my Irish friends.

The mirror is kumpanija. Mahala. In Vogue/Ballroom it is the House. It is a family’s rhythm pulsing through the ups and downs of life. Belonging creates the mirror, not the other way around. I have found Irish set dancing — and the eco-somatic practices I learned in community in North Clare — work this way too, and they have been among the most joyous parts of my Irish-American life.

If community — its connections to land, to those who came before and those who come after — restores a more accurate mirror, then what kind of knowledge does it generate? In Part III, I will outline what I believe that knowledge is, and how learning to dance with time itself can become resistance, protest, recovery and liberation.

This is why community dances feel alive: they are held by people, not institutions. The counter-archive does not begin in the Hall of Mirrors. It begins with those who were never allowed to see themselves reflected there — and danced anyway.

The ghost of the Sun King still lives on in the piece of glass in your hand. It no longer needs court ballet or academic ceremony to obscure your view. Windows became mirrors. Mirrors became screens. Truth became whatever power wants us to see.

Continue onto Part III

Wayfind

When I was a kid, my favorite stops on our drives down south from Cleveland were at my dad’s friend Larry’s house. It was a small, very old farmhouse tucked into the hills that drop toward the Ohio River—quiet, a little ramshackle and full of life. My father and Larry had worked together as school custodians, and we visited often. Larry’s wife was endlessly kind; she barely blinked when my mother arrived after the four-hour drive and announced, “Alice, the kids have lice.”

Larry’s adult children were gentle souls, and one of his younger sons used to tuck my sister Colleen and me into bed with improvised stories about the Care Bears.

The house itself was a magical concoction of centuries-old bones, salvaged materials (I’m pretty sure an old camper was reborn as a bedroom), and 1980s country décor. For my sister and me it became an expansive playground: the feisty rooster, the rowdy dogs, jeep rides into the woods, and the thrill of exploring abandoned houses in the Ohio River Valley.

But my favorite memory from Larry’s comes from one winter morning, when I woke up on December 6th to find a few small presents tucked into my shoes.

Impact

My mother and father explained that it was St. Nicholas Day—the feast of the old patron saint of children. Over centuries of Christianization, canonization, and eventually American commercial mythmaking, he would be transformed into the figure we now call Santa Claus. But before all that, tradition held that he moved through the night in disguise, leaving small gifts for children—especially those who were poor or vulnerable. He also became a patron saint of travelers and sailors, though that connection meant little to me as a Romani child. To me, the gifts that appeared beside the shoes I’d worn dancing in the mud earlier that day, as ice crystals formed on the ground, felt like pure magic.

As an adult, I’ve come to see that, amidst the commemoration, canonization, and colonization of St. Nicholas, the simple act of leaving out shoes on the night of December 5th has always felt like a moment of resistance. It is the memory of a real man—not seasonal merchandise—who chose to use his power to be generous and help others. Like the three wise men of the nativity, it is a practice that reminds the world that sometimes help and knowledge come from outside, from travelers. It is a memory of generations, and a hope that I might one day leave gifts for my own children by their mucky shoes.

My whole life has become research into movement: how bodies step through history, how impact shapes us, how the floor remembers what we try to forget.

Shoes are not just shoes.
Shoes are the point where body meets world, where force becomes story.

So when I think about that Saint Nicholas ritual now—leaving my shoes out, offering the place where my body touches the earth—I understand it differently. It was a ritual of trust. Of vulnerability. Of movement blessed, because the road ahead contains many dangers.

Fall

But today, as I think of that ritual, my heart breaks.

Children everywhere are suffering things no child should ever have to endure. The shoe outside the door becomes something else: a symbol of a child who had to run. A child who lost their home. A child who will never return.

Please join me in donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, Chirikli, or any mother–child charity you choose, because the world keeps failing its children, and these organizations try to do for children what Saint Nicholas once did: offer protection, care, and possibility.

When I was nine years old, we watched All Dogs Go to Heaven in school—a film about loyalty, courage, kindness. But the reality is that while we watched that story, many children in the world were living through horrors. Some of the children who gave us our sense of bravery, compassion, and empathy—children whose stories we didn’t know—were suffering unimaginable things. The world often asks children to carry the impact of violence that adults create. And children always feel it first.

But when I think of Saint Nicholas now—the traveling protector of children—I cannot ignore the truth that today the traveler is something else entirely. Amidst the horror we are seeing against children in Palestine, Ukraine, Congo, Sudan—and Romani and Sinti families facing oppression all over the world—is a painful truth: this nightmare is exported.

The traveler moving across borders is war.

The traveler settling into homelands is colonialism.

The traveler entering children’s bedrooms, classrooms, and futures is genocide—carried out by powerful men who call their orders “security,” “policy,” “operation,” while they harm the very children they claim to defend.

These forces travel farther and faster than any saint ever did. They arrive in the night just the same—but instead of gifts, they leave ruin.

I think of the little girl who voiced All Dogs Go to Heaven, killed at ten after years of abuse. Heather O’Rourke, “Carol Anne,” gone at twelve. Children whose magic shaped my understanding of courage and empathy, even as adults failed them completely.

Build

If Saint Nicholas once walked from door to door offering protection and care, then the work is ours now. There are just not enough travelers of peace.
We must become him not in legend but in our choices.

It is time for new action that might one day become a new myth of hope for the season.

If something was, your body already knows.

What we call colonization did not just take the world. It colonized its own body. Dance is the evidence….and a method to freedom.

In the chilly dusk of autumn, I stood near a 5,000-year-old limestone portal tomb and watched the moonrise. Nearby a farmer gently watched his enormous, terrifying cattle balance across the rocky landscape. I had invited a fellow American to come with me. We read the display signs indicating this was a pre-historic grave site.

“This isn’t a grave. This is a magical portal,” she said.

In that moment, something felt off to me. It was as though she suggested there was some other power at work here, and that it was hidden. In time, I would come to understand that I had a different experience of this historic site. I wasn’t seeing some reflection of secrets and ancient magic, I was seeing the awesome majesty of humans anchoring love, grief and community in time and place for millennia. What could be more magical than that?

Dance, spirituality and history cannot be separated from the body or the land beneath it, and if we want to better understand our relationship to them, we should restore our understanding of our life’s dance through the lens of time.

In this series I’m asking us to confront how deeply our histories, bodies and fields were shaped by that theft and what liberation can mean. I’m also demanding better academic research into our history, which is and has always been embodied. I don’t want to hear about how “we can’t know how people in the past were feeling” when we have woodcuts and pictures of people in chains and being butchered. You may not know how they felt, but epigenetics suggests that their descendants do. The explosion of modern spiritual practices and the wellness marketplace indicates we’re looking for answers to the past’s traumas. Or maybe the trauma never ended. Empathizing with those who came before us is honest, and I also think it’s academically rigorous. It could also be life-saving today.

For thousands of years Western Eurasia — a large, highly diverse region of cultures and ethnicities — has been intimately part of a Asian, Mediterranean and African world. A lot of people jump to “New World” Atlantic World discourses, but these can end up centering Europe and a fictional geographic center of whiteness, cutting off people historically from the rest of the world. This dangerously isolates people who belong to the rest of the world as much as the world has been coerced to belong to them. So much of de-colonial work I believe is recognizing the false boundaries between us that prevent us from living from universal truths of the human experience. It is recognizing the enormous cost of creating a world where some people are a little or a lot better than others.

The risks of allowing false divides to endure are becoming clearer as we witness threats to life in the form of mass planetary extinctions currently unfolding. We know from modern psychology the dangers of isolation and how loneliness can fuel hate and colonization, and this is my primary motivation in posting this series, and for this newsletter. Dance belongs to everyone, and, especially if you’re white, there is a very good chance you had yours stolen from you. Personal reclamation is part of this journey.

I love Europe and my life has been saved and transformed by friends and communities there. I am also grateful to my Indigenous, Palestinian and allied friends for opening my eyes America’s ongoing colonization, and to the colonization of my own people, the Roma and the Sinti.1 It is from this life-saving gratitude that I offer this invitation to question what has been taken away and in turn, what the body remembers and can never be taken away.

What I want to call out, as directly as I can, is that we cannot understand our global history without asking what was done to European bodies and what European bodies were no longer allowed to do. As I will cover in the next part, something truly astonishing happened to embodied self-perception and autonomy in the creation of ballet in particular, and understanding that process and how it endures is essential to building autonomy.

No other field tells the story of Europe’s internal colonization more clearly than dance.

Every other discipline can escape into abstraction: text, numbers, theory, categories—ultimately control. Dance cannot. Dance forces us to stay with the human being in motion.

Please let me clarify that I have no problem with anyone studying ballet or the dances of white people. Ballets Russes remains one of my greatest inspirations when I do dance theater, and the hard work of ballet dancers is extraordinary. I do however, have a problem with calling that the dance: insisting that all real dance comes from ballet.

I remember when someone confronted me and said I must have studied ballet because of how I danced. I took a single quarter-semester at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. That was it. But in their mind — and in the mind of my partner at the time — it was impossible to dance with integrity without ballet. Everything else was a joke. This is not an aesthetic position. It is a colonial one.

You can try asking yourself this question. Is dance just ballet or something people do for fun or fitness? Or is dance the study of who we are, how we move, how we express, how we live in our bodies? Within dance studies, this difference is everything. The first story reproduces the empire. The second begins to unravel it.

Here is another clue: Where do you turn for healing, belonging, and spiritual grounding? What dances and culture support you in this and which do not?

For centuries in an American context, white folks have turned to African-American, Indigenous American, Asian, Latin American and Romani dances and embodied knowledge for belonging, healing, spiritual support, courting, mating, and more. They do this because something was taken. Their own ancestral embodied knowledge — the stuff that lives in rhythm, gravity, breath, repetition, communal timing — had been taken away or lost, and in time American white Christian patriarchal consumerism gave them so much more.

If something is missing, the body goes looking for it.

I love archival, time-period-specific research, where the legacy of this problem can be easily observed. I have been in many meetings where privileged, egotistical historians insist that everyone else is “doing the archives wrong.” One American scholar who works primarily out of France rolled her eyes at the mere mention of other dance cultures beyond ballet.

They hold some imagined center: “We are the true keepers of high-quality historical research.” Meanwhile, the primary sources they rely on do not make any sense.
They look at dance manuals and a handful of well-trodden sources, just in more depth — and believe they have captured “dance history.”

Meanwhile the bodies, the folk forms, the communal improvisations, the rhythms of working people, the ecstatic dances, the migrations, the survivals and the refusals are nowhere to be found in their origin stories. Even worse, they do nothing to support the traditions and people in Europe who are actually preserving and re-discovering these practices.

This erasure is not an accident. It reflects a deeper erasure of Indigenous Europe and of Europe’s relationships with Africa, the Mediterranean and Asia. It ignores the many people from somewhere else who are part of its history and the racial diversity that has always been part of Western Eurasia’s dance. It ignores that we all came from Africa.

In an education context, as long as we keep saying that dance studies is just tutus and turnouts, we will lose whatever small foothold we have in the wider world. We will lose funding. We will lose power. And within our disembodied colonial system, we will lose the last traces of knowledge native to every single person on this planet: how to live in a body.

Within the dance world, anti-ballet sentiment is not new. Modern and contemporary choreographers have been addressing these issues for a century. Their bodies know something is wrong. They make new futures because they had no choice. But narratives matter, and we must begin telling truer ones.

In somatic dance spaces, tremendous strides are being made to dance from the body. But even there, intellectualism sometimes overrides humanity. We tend to dance “the inhuman”: technique, energy, line, clinical anatomy. We hesitate to dance what is undeniably human: heartbreak, lust, displacement, longing, anger, connection, transformation. Pina Bausch never hesitated. She and her decentralized dance company remain a reminder that the body is always telling the truth.

I am not saying I have all the answers. I am not saying I’m going to get it all right. I am saying we must ask better questions, and we can do so when we do so in and with motion. I discovered something was deeply wrong in western dance history during my master’s degree, long before I fully understood how this would shape my own self-perception. It was the researcher in me who noticed the gaps and the dancer in me whose body refused the lie. Just because someone said ballet is the origin does not make it true. Just because the archive is silent does not mean the body is.

In the next part of this series, I turn to the machinery itself: the manuals, the archives, the academic habits, the nationalist projects, and the colonial frameworks that built this lie in the first place.

Continue to Part II

At some point, we all have been someone from somewhere else. This might have happened because we were on vacation or studying abroad and, of course, we were guests. Then there are those who wander, some with purpose—others who move along ancient trade routes in order to stitch together wonders the world has never before seen. Or perhaps something horrible happened to me, my home, my family, my income, and it was necessary in a half-sober, squishy-eyed dash to flee somewhere unknown. Maybe, more cruelly, you are in your home but because you don’t look like everyone else in the town, you were “someone from somewhere else.”

Then there is the silent swirl of time that makes us all strangers in our own home: our bodies.

For as long as we can remember, we have been timedancers. In dreams, in the eyes of a stranger, across murdered ground and resting universe—through clock, compass and wheel—we spin. At other times we seem to twist time right back. In some moments, we whirl together.

In our journeys across the earth, we have come to account for crossings. Some care more for beginnings, some for departure and others for their finding. As the number of witnesses of this wayfaring has grown, so too have our ways of keeping track of where we have been, where we are, and where we might want to go.

Some map hope, and others wanting—a hunger with no shore.

The ruins of borders, however, teach few throughout the ages. Our celestial orb, our continents, our homelands, our houses and our bodies are moving. Their edges, so fiercely protected, can never, ever be immortalized.

We are not just held by the space we take up on the earth, but our time upon it. The will we bring to the dirt, shamrock, sea and eagle—to the arms of our love—is our dance.

For some timedancers, we glimpse only bits and snatches of ghosts. Sometimes it is a whisper from the lift of our fallen, or simply an apparition of the stuck. Somehow, it seems, our will becomes our energy and that becomes our destiny, and that can be felt throughout time and space.

In every dance of life I have ever delivered from those who have transitioned out of their bodies—every parent who wanted to apologize to their children, every child who wanted to comfort their parent, every spouse who wanted to say “I’m still here”—I was only ever able to do so when I dropped into my heart.1

The mind opens, the heart falls… and time opens. This connection, as a former mentor of mine would say, “is your birthright.”2

A fool tries to hold power; a dancer flows through time to the tick-tock of a beating heart. The clock can stop, but the compass always points.

It seems, however, in our choreography most have forgotten leaving; they prefer to stay. The warp and weft of fate brings collision, drifting and devouring stillness. We all push and pull the floor that shakes and breaks with the wilderness, but in all its horror, if we struggle to hold the ground we silence our hearts, losing their breath, stilling the mountains.

In that lonely place, we risk becoming those who care not for dances.

We can become a timetaker mining for miracles.

It has taken so very much time to learn to take the next step we are about to take without falling—so many gentle rhythmic taps from mothers, carryings from fathers, so many diving flights from our wise ones.

For a timetaker, our next careful leap is not a holding of hands across the world, a march through survival, or even a simple kiss—it is a meal. It is a lonely dance with others dancing alone at the same time into their own sinking pools.

It is an end to the brilliant miracle of billions of human souls and countless beings growing, moving, dying and returning.

The fundamental wrong of the timetaker is not the taking of something from itself, for it already was itself and always will be, but that its timedance was stolen from all of us. We’re wired to connect, and your favorite ballerina, your favorite writer, your lover—your children—may never come to be.

The harrowing message of manifestation teaching is not that we don’t get the things we think we want, but that we have settled for those fleeting things instead of the whole world itself. We belong to the universe, and it to us. This cannot be stolen, but your time in your fleeting frame with other fleeting frames absolutely can be disappeared. How many have never come to be because we stopped loving?

I created timedancers because somehow, not entirely clear to me, I remember. As scientists observe, my brain lights up with memories, but the memories themselves live in the weaving of time, not just the firing of synapses. In my days as a gypsy boy from Ohio, the Appalachian mountains and Georgia, in the city of mirrors, someone experimented on me with needles. In the ensuing vision, I remembered space.

I recalled primordial shapes, worlds being built, arrows in flight, and hearts looking out to sea.

In the cornucopia of my timethreads (identities), the last I would unravel, after decades of artistic and academic study, was my Romani “gypsy” identity.

I come from a people who remember leaving, arriving, and who we met. I am Romungró. For centuries we have been known as “gypsies,” a name given to us by the English who believed we had come from Egypt. Over the last fifty years, many of us—Romungró, Vlach, Kaale, Xoraxane, Gitano and others—have agreed on sharing a more accurate name that comes from our own language: Roma.

“We have many names, and we are all of them,” says the film Proud Roma, inspired in part by the Romanichal lineage of Charlie Chaplin—“we have never started any wars.”3

In a world of nations, a decentralized society of people who are settled, displaced, trapped, risen and nomadic can be hard to understand, and often impossible to study for a system determined to trap the world in the nets of timetakers.

Being a people set a-course a thousand years ago unravels the cadastral—the strict mapping of land still used today to measure, divide, and extract.

I look down the road and see others of my blood traveling, as our crafted anthem Gelem Gelem sings:

I went, I went on long roads.
I met happy Roma.

But then the dark ones came. They were not dark at all, but pale and fair.
We have been the dark ones—of Kali—descending into ancient timekeeping.

Whether it is choreography or the soul pulling at the incandescent ribbons weaving through time, you are dancing. I’d like to help you learn your dance. To confirm that yes, it’s there. The bits and snatches of timelessness you feel are real, and a call further inside and beyond.

I invite you to enter the repertoire of the Timedancers.

If something in this piece reminded you of your own crossings or your own sense of time — I’d love to hear.

At a summer camp on water ecology in high school I had a friend who was taught all the wrong names for colors by her older brother, and purple-for-orange haunted her into adulthood. I know it sounds poetic but it really was not for her. I, however, learned the standard English names for color and how to see them, but my interest in visual arts education stopped there. Puce, teal and ochre remained fabulous, unpainted words to me. Over a dinner of Daire’s tacos, Jackie—holding up a glass of champagne to the light coming from Daire’s nourishing fairy garden—showed us a tawny pink that could not be captured in paint. It just seemed to happen. I began to feel color.

This was not however the first color that she showed me. In early August of 2025 as Israeli-induced famine began to set in on the people of Gaza, she drew a red line. When I saw it, I remembered when my Palestinian colleague Eva once said to me:

The war started in 1948 and never stopped. My family is grieving.

Perhaps the red line suggested, in my slowly decolonizing brain, that war lived somewhere on one side of it. But genocidal famine became the watercolor stroke itself—bleeding through the page. Through the fading, pressing and splattering of a brush we drip into a massacre without beginning or end.

As I feel the falling of self and society, the “enlightenment” tropes of knowledge-as-light, goodness-as-white, bad-as-black appear to comfort me. Suddenly insides are dyed with shame and bright fantasy blinds the truth of the human experience. This is ancient patterning.

In the medieval liturgical imagination, Satan was painted black and stripped of song. In The Play of Adam—a twelfth-century church drama that helped stage the Christian cosmos—he enters “niger et deformis,” black and misshapen, unable to make music. The absence of melody marked his distance from divine order; blackness became a sonic and visual shorthand for separation from grace.

Through these performances, the Church taught that to be outside the light was to be outside harmony itself. Empire later translated this theology into philosophy: the Enlightenment’s worship of illumination and purity recast whiteness as both the form, while darkness became its necessary proof of ignorance. Our senses, our colors, our bodies—what did not reflect that light—were cast into shadow.

And yet artists have always known otherwise.

Creatives can move outside this dualism, so often showing us that when life does not seem to work out, it is the secrets in the “shadows” that set us free. Scholars like Fred Moten remind us, blackness is not the opposite of light but the condition of its possibility. What if the dark is not the opposite of knowing, but the place where knowledge begins to breathe again? What happens when we stop searching for light beams while we break upon the brown earth around us, blind to the blackness holding us in space to the beginning of our time?

Emmylou held me a bit this week as the war against journalism escalated to the murder of the Al Jazeera reporting team in Gaza. When I worked at Fortune Media (of the Fortune500) at the end of the 2010s, my colleagues were already sounding the alarm that journalism was in peril—clickbait quotas, billionaire buyers of the press, the murder of truth-tellers like Jamal Khashoggi. A working man was killed for speaking the truth about a very rich man. We never received justice.

Emmylou’s planting of poverty in the red dirt of Mississippi stains my fall:

“One thing they don’t tell you

’Bout the blues when you got ‘em

You keep on falling

’Cause there ain’t no bottom

There ain’t no end.”

— Emmylou Harris, “Red Dirt Girl”

Sounding through African-American life for centuries, blue resists swallowing in the abyss of the annals of agony. If we take the mariner’s gaze upon the horizon of our torment, worlds of deep indigo, ethereal gray and churning yellows bring us through changes of weather, time and tides. Clairvoyance (clear-seeing) invites us to open our eyes and articulate landscapes.

In my work with the North Clare Dance Creamery, Maria has explored the colors of the seasons of her life and given us the privilege to feel them dwelling with us. In my own body, I change with the seasons and with my movement across the earth. In the North, the pallor of my ancestors returns, adapting me to the winter. Toward the equator, my Romani ancestors prepare me for the sun’s weight. My deep brown eyes invite strangers to Kalipen—blackness in Romungró, my critically endangered Romani dialect. With ties to the ancient Indian goddess Kali and, more recently, our patron saint Sara Kali, darkness is sacred: pointing to time, to origins, to infinity.

What have we painted across the lives of others from what we have done and said? Named colors are for rainbows, bedroom accent walls and fascist ball caps. Unnamed colors can set us free. It is all the blank space around the words, that is why poetry needs so much empty page. As I look out at the sea in Lahinch at 6:30am, my tears water the green dancing above the cliffs in the bay. I fall into myself, and in the drop, I see color—all the way through.

Sinead knew there-ness from being a human rights attorney. At the moment we were passing through Stormont, home of the Government of Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. Bodies are still missing from the Troubles. We had just left collapsing buildings on Gay Street in New York City, where my landlord and government tortured me for seven years while telling me what is happening is not happening while fellow academics stalk me in order to discredit my work because I am Roma. Now all over the city people who have fled horrors for refuge disappear off the street. Sinead’s father’s doctor was taken too. Pol Pot and his fear of people with glasses came next. We trade notes on humanity’s collective suffering, tracing time threads for the secret that would stop the weaving of cruelty.

I met Annette a couple weeks ago just steps from the White House at the Dance Studies Association Conference at George Washington University. Her insights on Windrush and British imperial history joined me at the picnic table while Sinead cozied up in her hooded jumper, leaned back in a chair against her cottage and looked up at the stars. The only thing that becomes clear in the mass of black collapsing in around us is this: we must keep telling each other of the screams heard in the night, and the blood spilled in broad daylight. We listen for these lights so that they may pierce the dark of all that we have not yet accounted for.

With a colonial military lineage pulling me back three or four centuries on Turtle Island, my complete right-ear deafness and my sexuality prevented me from “defending democracy” with arms. As twenty people today are crushed in Gaza as they seek food and the US military supports genocide, I see the fantasy. I have continually been an activist, but this approach falters. Was capitalism really welcoming us in, or just giving us a late start in a race already won? Still, I was carried across the dance floor in the rise and shuffle of my father’s waltzing steps. My mother taught me to rise and grind across the kitchen floor. This pulled me up from gypsyism, pandemic obesity and now, the fall of my country: U.S. America. I can rise—and maybe if I stomp loud enough I can be heard.

This macabre speech continues through the night and follows me through herb-walk chats, across my whiskey rocks in an Irish trad session in Ennistymon and now across computer screen of precious metals most likely harvested in part by slaves. We trade notes on dangers never far away. What would happen if we all stopped just to listen? Maria screams with the sea. Artist have represented transatlantic slave trade. Dancers hear it. Maybe in our batters, shuffles and rallies we keep the sounds going. Maybe the rattles never stopped.

At a dance conference this year senior scholar laughed as he dismissed my work, “What does all this really mean? Can’t we just have fun?” I recall the woodcut of the Englishman dancing a hornpipe in fetters1 and I see the question’s honest premise: can we have fun with the suffering of others? The long history of colonial enforcement and its perpetual systems of racism, patriarchy and bodily coercion for profit point to the presence of punishment in dance: the taming of the many-headed hydra of commoners, sailors and slaves in revolt. This experience of oppression, felt so acutely and chronically by the oppressed, is invisible to those privileged by colonialism.

For example, when Charles Dickens visited New York City in his travelogue American Notes, he observed of the founder of American Tap Dance, William Henry Lane (“Master Juba”):

Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!

American Notes for General Circulation

For most of my tenure in academia I have seen scholars and practitioners alike delight in this whimsical, racist representation of a genius who broke through brutal systems designed to suppress him. He went on to bring his performance to Britain and Ireland, where his last presence was recorded in 1851. Since I first read this text in 2014, it has struck me as a grotesque: at best the writings of someone trying to cash in on what he did not understand. To Dickens, Lane’s dance was whirling, dazzling nonsense. To those who carry lineages of impact—of violence—we know what we are listening to, and what we are moving beyond.

To dance with impact is not just an invitation to autonomy of time, space and energy—of what it is to be you, here, now. It is a deep state of listening to the annals of agony and performing the repertoire of the risen. We will undoubtedly keep trying to speak and write for the fallen, as well as stand in silence. Something else happens, however, in between the beats of slaps, claps, taps and stomps: moments of listening to the hearts of the taken, and the drumming of the risen on the ground.

Sinead and I continue our conversations as we trade notes humanity’s weaving, the baskets that have carried innovations of kindness through fire, pillaging and plague. We will not know if it is suffering or kindness that we have woven until we look into the eyes of those left carrying the burden down the road. We will know what we have written in the annals until we catch them—or let them fall.

The falling of summer turns the heart. Last night the newest of moons helped us see our souls twinkle in the darkened sky. The laughter and love of long days now shine somewhere out there when the nights grow long and winds turn icy. We hope that our walks in the wild, idle chats with friends and kisses under the sun were bountiful. In the winter we want many stars to wish upon. They guide our way until the day when the yonge son climbs high again and we can breathe with all that is green again.

In preparation last week whipping winds came to the west of Ireland, biting and yelping us indoors. There was talk around town about the strangeness of these airs and a distant battle of hot and cold over the Atlantic. Meanwhile earlier this month in Panama it was reported that the annual, predictable swell of cool, nourishing waters did not come. While we worry on what-have-we-done, we put our hopes on the local. As the world shakes, our best chance is each other sowing together with the ground beneath us.

The tilt of autumn's light brings a turn within me. My family have travelled by caravan, by verda, for as long as we can remember. I have traveled the same roads as my great grandmother did from unceded ancestral lands of the Erie and other Native peoples in what we now call North Ohio to the unceded ancestral lands of the Cherokee in Georgia. Along the way through Southern Ohio there were predators. Irving Brown, a gypsy lore-ist observed of Romani women like her:

"One has only to glance at a Romani girl to see how pure and strong the vital instinct flows in her blood: something in the sensuous, unfettered walk, something in the glitter of the eye, something in her whole feline being.”

Gypsy Fires in America

Comments like these have never been refuted by the Gypsy Lore Society, and despite having few Romani members, it remains the most funded body for Romani Studies. They still study our blood. Our roads are haunted in US America by so-called "gypsy laws", police harassment (I was five when I first experienced this because of our traditions) and lack of legal recognition and protection in the USA. Still, when the winds change I know it is time to go out on the road. More often wheels down have turned to wheels up in airplanes for me, but still the chakra, our sacred symbol of technology, carries me. That is enough.

We, the Roma, came to Europe in its fall. After the Romans for centuries had crushed much of indigenous Europe with a forceful enticing into a one-world modernity of trade, massive engineering and entertainment, suddenly they were gone. Where they left, local war-lords (kings) and cult leaders (priests)—who they themselves, in many cases, lost their identity—dominated. It is throughout a millennium of this falling and wandering-in-place that we came to western Eurasia through middle Eurasia and North Africa, bearing the advanced knowledge of what we now call the Arab, Persian and Indian worlds. We brought a unique nomadic intuition with the land full of arts and technology most of Europe had never seen—or had not seen in a long time. In the centuries that followed, these were stolen. In exchange, we were given the lies and thievery of slavery, genocide and dire poverty. So much can stand on a road between us and the safe place we hope to rest our heads next to those whom we love.

As the light lays low on the horizon in the months to come, there is much to learn from the turning of tides and the wide winds of winter. They invariably come. We practice our memories of these ghosts and the spirit world shares their lessons of their haunts in the Irish tradition of Samhain—Halloween. In the muddled dawns, daylights and dusks of the dark half of the year, we listen to the stories of the night.