This year I went to Movement in Detroit with the desire to be more intentional about what events to go to. My gf was working 4 nights in a row (Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon), and I wanted to be available and alert to support her (i.e., not going to the maximum number of events).

I don’t find a ton of appeal in the marathon/endurance dancing that a lot of my peers subscribe to during this multi-day event, because when I’m simply on the dance floor for endurance’s sake, I don’t feel like I am intentionally dancing to the music.

For the first time in my 4 years of attendance, I went to a dance intensive at Andy Arts. Every day there was an hour of house, vogue, and waacking.

  1. house: “you can tell who a pro is because they exhibit restraint”. for the first time i maybe understood the connection between jacking and breathing. like, it’s not just a style to keep you “in time”, it might physiologically improve your breathing intake as well as make movements “easier” since you can harness existing momentum.
  2. vogue: who benefits from rules / structure / dissemination in a technical forum? those that aren’t out experimenting and taking risk (like “if you need to ask, then you’ll never know”) the instructor seemed to shirk from the expectation to formalize anything; i could feel the her resistance to codifying things. it made me think for the first time about how an environment where quiet obedience is expected and praised might be uncomfortable for some folks.
  3. waacking: this was my first class and i think i took to the medium really well (arm-dominant, pose-based, favoring the type of full extension do in aerial). didn’t realize that this was from black/brown folks in LA. i have this conception of disco dancing as “what john travolta does in SNF” and realize now that this must be a crude pantomime of waacking.

There was a person there who reminded me a lot of my younger self (eager, asian diaspora, ts) who asked questions at every opportunity, often being a bit unaware of how much space they were taking up. I remember thinking about my philosophy used to be how every interaction was a chance to harvest as much data as I could from the instructor or class, and how extractive that felt now (the questions instead felt like an attempt to mine information that should or could be gotten by spending time in the medium, or at worst was taking time away from other folks who had questions).

The day after the intensive: first time attending a house/breaking battle. I really felt buoyed by the joy and support and energy in that room. It made me want to go to the afterparties were dancers were going to go, but alas I had committed to all the gf parties.

T4TLUVNRG: packed and hot. I found the dance floor too loud, so since I was able to stand behind the stacks (F. was working soun), so I drilled all the combinations I had learned from house class and practiced breathing and combos. I had a great time but was tapping out near the end because of the duration (5 hours on nothing but caffeine).

Hart Plaza: I also went to the official festival at Hart Plaza just for Maya’s set: this was a difficult environment, but I felt I should proselytize and put on a polite face and exude energy for the cause. Found a few older men and we made a 4-person cypher that was going well (people gave us space) until a white couple (tall, straight, and admittedly hot) pushed to the front and obliviously stood in the middle of our cypher and killed it.

Transmission: best dance floor imo. energy was flirty, noncompetitive, people were really giving (I thought to myself, “why can’t dance floors in Berlin be like this?”).

Convergence: the dance floor outside the bar was muddy and gravelly. I made a valiant attempt and was there for 3/4 of the set but for some fraction went inside to Beige’s set and spun around grandiosely on a sparse dance floor.

Bunker DnB: saved myself for this, and used the principles of jacking/resting from house (and technique from Chicago Footwork for dancing to 150-160 bpm) to dance at a fairly hard clip throughout. Intense energy from the packed crowd, but not that much room for expression.

Feeling grateful for my body and what it gives me, and have endeavored to study more house and waacking over the next year.