“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.

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

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