Tithes, Offerings & Communion

Ambivalent understandings of the bodied and the rituals of contribution.

It’s become ritual after producing to be exposed to a part of myself that I need to be more honest about or a truth I need to say out-loud. I don’t know when it happened, I’m lying I do know when—when I stopped practicing embodiment as a dance practice.

When I’m thinking about the practice of embodied dancing, it’s a way of being while dancing. As a practice, it’s a ritual, or maybe I should say a fingering. Yeah—let’s go with '“a fingering”. The practice of embodiment, in my own words, is a felt process of unlearning the ingredients not needed to reach a desired condition of sincerity within the body, in the context of trans(re)lating the reality through dance. I decided, sadly, to stop practicing embodiment right after Haute Velour in September because my priorities shifted. I could no longer allocate a tithe to being ushered into embodiment as a practice for the time.

For context (and in argument to folks that would position embodied dancing as something that is afforded to every human with a body) embodied dancing is not an innate or mastered condition I claim to maintain without the help of being lead in that practice. I think if more dancers were sincere, they’d put down the respectability pretense of creating personalities out of labels. The entitlement to an embodied state isn’t assumed considering all the empirical powers that be. And for damn sho’ accessing an embodied state isn’t generously granted to every body, let alone humanity being generously granted to every body. I observe dancers become too fucking familiar with their innate talents, abilities or passions; and/or lulled by making a living, that they’ll engage terminologies that elicit respect. They’ll let terms like embodiment cover-up an ability to gut-trutfully estimate what they offer to people who are looking for the truth of embodiment in a world order where that is not an equal opportunity. Fuck making making money off a passion, if you aint anointed to do it. That’s a sermon, I need to draft up.