it's a funny thing to be a dancer making very abstract work, and to be paired up with a writer who makes and primarily appreciates things that are very literal. he keeps asking, where's the narrative? was there any kind of story? and I say, didn't you see it? when my feet weren't flexed any longer and the tension left the arms? and every path that had been backward ceased and the trajectories became forward-facing? there was the story.
we're speaking two different languages, and sometimes I start to doubt that anyone but me speaks this exact funny dialect. (I easily start feeling like a weird dance-world nell, contentedly all "likka-tay inna-way!" as I flail my maddened arms around, wondering why no one gets it.)
this solo I'm performing right now is as abstract as anything, but it feels totally concrete. it feels almost painfully literal to me. chocked with a whole heaping mess of emotion, all gut and taut nerves and wanting to get out of my head. I am baffled that any sense of narrative in it could seem so obscure. c watches me dance and, invariably, almost exclusively, sees a woman tormented. we're going on five separate pieces here, and all he sees is abstract agony. I mean, crap. you know? there's a little more there than that. wish he could see it. there were times in the very recent past when this really bothered me (thinking there was something too clunky and literal in his ways of perceiving; thinking this meant mismatch and ruination; thinking that same lament, I will never be understood...), but I just don't really mind anymore. I'm still perplexed, but I'm not going to cry about it. now it just seems funny and bizarre that someone so smart can be so dumb about nuance and abstraction.
enh. could be worse. could be much, much worse.