{vanishing point}:::::.......r u p t u r e / r a p t u r e

no time for deep dives this month so here's some messy constellations on dancing as a vanishing point towards rupture/rapture <3

1. core memory

circa 1989, four years old, dressed to the T’s in a cute blue frock with knee high white socks, eyes half closed, caught a strobe light and found that time could stop and go and stop again in rapid movements, a throbbing. it happened once that night, some adrenaline running imagined hallucination. headless adults fill up the photograph (probably taken by my mother), i remember their glitched smiling faces, their boxy shapes, porous bodies, guiding hands, their fancy clothes, a wedding in a ballroom. my ibu, my mother’s closest friend, was a casual surrogate god mother whose family took care of me when my mom worked long gruelling hours at the factory. my ibu’s wedding in a ballroom. in the foreground, her elder sister (deceased for many years now), always in blue or purple eyeshadow, cheeky disposition, kind and warm, mami. i don’t remember anything else other than dancing. dancing with her, with mami, and then by myself. my shoes came off, remained at the borders of the dance floor whilst i danced until the lights came on. the soles of my white socks blackened and my feet sore, i floated into bed, already deep in sleep on the way home, already vanished. there was no music in this memory, only feelings. everything else was inconsequential props and there was no plot, no conclusion. only dance.

2. a scene from a film

i push myself forward, through other bodies, getting as close to the optimal spot where the sound feels glorious to me. it doesn’t matter if the space is narrow and movement is restricted or if no one else is there. my eyes shut, limbs loose, bracketed by hard bass, thumping, beats pushing and pulling, the air is buoyant, expansive. i grow smaller until i am nothing, a gentle nudge of a body moving pass, i feel their hair brush against my arm, sour apocrine runs tangent, and i come back in a wave, readying to throw myself back out, whirling head first into the vanishing point. a track comes on, i know this one:

goosebumps swirling in waves, cymatic skin marks. they call it chills or shivers, tegak bulu roma, an indication of fear but this is on the other end of that spectrum. Horripilation, the word horror is based on the idea of hair standing on end due to fear. It comes from the Latin verb horrēre, meaning “to tremble,” or “to bristle with fear”, to “stand on end”. to stand on end, micro antennas reaching out to the divine, the omnipotent, holding tight to the corporeal, the inept mortal body, the flesh bag, holding and standing on end at some precipice of rapture, trembling

dance is death delicious,

death delirious,

death temporary,

death irrelevant,

coming back again and again stripped bare, swelling, cleansed and overflowing,

i come in closer to myself

and away from myself

into nothing.

3. some fairy tale

Twelve princesses sleep in twelve beds in the same room. Every night, their doors are securely locked by their father. But in the morning, their dancing shoes are found to be worn through as if they had been dancing all night. The king, perplexed, asks his daughters to explain, but they refuse. The king then promises his kingdom and each daughter to any man who can discover the princesses' midnight secret within three days and three nights, but those who fail within the set time limit will be sentenced to death.

An old soldier returned from war comes to the king's call after several princes have failed in the attempt. Whilst traveling through a wood he comes upon an old woman, who gives him an enchanted cloak that he can use to observe the king's unaware daughters and tells him not to eat or drink anything given to him in the evening by any of the princesses and to pretend to be fast asleep until they leave.

The soldier is well received at the palace just as the others had been and indeed, in the evening, the princess royal (the eldest daughter) comes to his chamber and offers him a cup of wine. The soldier, remembering the old woman's advice, secretly throws it away and begins to snore loudly as if asleep.

The twelve princesses, assured that the soldier is asleep, dress themselves in fine dancing gowns and escape from their room by a trap door in the floor. The soldier, seeing this, puts on his magic cloak and follows them. He steps on the gown of the youngest princess, whose cry of alarm to her sisters is rebuffed by the eldest. The passageway leads them to three groves of trees; the first having leaves of silver, the second of gold, and the third of glittering diamonds. The soldier, wishing for a token, breaks off a twig of each as evidence. They walk on until they come upon a great clear lake. Twelve boats, with twelve princes, appear where the twelve princesses are waiting. Each princess gets into one, and the soldier steps into the same boat with the twelfth and youngest princess. The youngest princess complains that the prince is not rowing fast enough, not knowing the soldier is in the boat. On the other side of the lake stands a castle, into which all the princesses go and dance the night away.

The twelve princesses happily dance all night until their shoes are worn through and they are obliged to leave. The strange adventure continues on and on until the king is long dead and no one else has managed to uncover the midnight secret. They inherited the kingdom and every night for the rest of their lives, they danced and danced until their shoes worn out in a happily ever after. the second and third nights, and everything happens just as before, except that on the third night the soldier carries away a golden cup as a token of where he has been. When it comes time for him to declare the princesses' secret, he goes before the king with the three branches and the golden cup, and tells the king about all he has seen. The princesses know that there is no use in denying the truth, and confess. The soldier chooses the eldest princess as his bride for he is not a very young man, and is made the King's heir. The twelve princes are put under a curse for as many nights as they danced with the princesses.

4. all films should come with AT LEAST one dance sequence

to bring up the camp, or this dance montage and this one in the rain and this and this mashup or this.

My preference is that these dance sequences should never take itself so seriously y’know? So more of this and less of this because exuberance is emancipating, and something someone said about if there is no dancing, it’s not my revolution or something like that.

QUESTION: Emma Goldman quote

What did Emma Goldman mean when she said "Its not my revolution if i can't dance to it?"

ANSWER: Goldman's paraphrase

In her 1931 autobiography, "Living My Life", she put it like this:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
[Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]

5. Core memory

my sister and I, five years apart, spend our afternoons after school in a newly-normalised two income household where both our parents came home pretty late on the weekdays. because of our age gap, my sister the eldest daughter in an Asian household, the third parent was the caregiver, babysitter, lunch lady and master entertainer. Cable TV too was new, and it was either Channel 11 (MTV) or 17 (Cartoon Network). We’d tape (yes VHS was still a thing) all our favourite music videos just to learn the dance to a T and of course sing the songs (botching up the lyrics with anyhow words because no one can do a quick google search yet).

Sweaty in our oversized T-shirts and shorts, we’d stand in front of our small-assed television in the guest room and dance all afternoon, rewinding and replaying and putting together killer routines for nobody but ourselves. Once, whilst doing a choreo bit for Pet Shop Boys Go West (not knowing that it was a gay anthem but maybe we did but didn’t know it yet), I hit my sister really hard in the chest and she almost passed out and we lay on the floor laughing. And that time when we played Can I get A on repeat so many times to get it just right (we didn’t!) that the lines are embedded into my brain like some strange muscle memory.

this period was formative to my love for dancing for reals. a lil shoutout to my kakak

6. RUANG and the dancing parasite

at a certain point of life, i’ve stopped dancing. my BDD thrived and i hated my body for a really long time. it was hard to move, body, rock heavy, clumsy, large. the dance culture back then in the mid 2000s was still stuck in that toxic club culture of hook-ups, dressing up and looking like celebrities in the most uncomfortable shitwear that makes dancing so tedious. i stave off the club scene for years. house parties was even harder, smaller spaces, majority of boys, dance seen only as sexual and nothing else.

and a shift happened inconceivably, when i became pregnant. body horror aside, i found myself moving comfortably, almost dancing again, almost free. vanishing once more. at four months, i did two movement pieces with ease. RUANG, a four hour long durational performance and RAHIM. here’s a little write-up review for RUANG:

“Enclosed within a confined two meter square, dark space one at a time audience members entered while she performed in a traditional Balinese costume owned by Murni, slowly adding decorative pieces to her attire. A pulsating strobe light assaults the senses, while the atmosphere is dank and claustrophobic. Dripping in sweat Ila stoically performed her routine for four hours, bringing to “life” the emotional anguish of life within a harsh patriarchal society.”

and a lil image from RAHIM with a lil baby bump.

i believe my child, who is now turning seven, who dances and twirls around our living room everyday like some joyful ritual, sometimes knocking into furniture or shakes her head left and right when she catches a tune she loves at the supermarket, i believe that she was the dancing parasite infecting me with that same child-ness of that four year old on the ballroom dance floor many years ago, the one i’ve forgotten and cast aside for not being hot enough, or good enough, because i forgot that dance does not care, dance does not judge, dance dissolves and absolves, dance is divine.

7. 66 and the rupture

and then there was 66, this must be the place, HQ and all the other places yang sewaktu dengannya, where it became ok to dance with people again, people like me. there’s no groping, nobody pulling up close with no warning, everyone dancing by themselves but together, no care, no fucks given. i was at some shit point in my life and so i dance until the lights came on and i kept coming back once a week to three times a week. there is rupture here on the inside, and here on the outside and energies that spill out and leak in are warmth, resounding warmth. like a giant hug that everyone’s giving from a distance but more real than a real hug.

and E, always sage-ing up the place near the smoke machine, always smiling, the host with the mostest. on V-day before Covid hit she gave me a drink and we made a toast to nothing in particular but this moment we are sharing. and of course the music, always, the music brings me somewhere, elsewhere, back there, and here. haha. but 66 deserves it’s own post tbh so maybe more next time.

<3 with all my heart i hope to dance until the end of my life.

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also i’ve started a ko-fi account so feel free to spread some love at: https://ko-fi.com/myheartisanelephant.