Last November, after dancing together in Alexa West’s Occasion, occasion, occasion at the 2023 Performa Biennial, Amelia Hientzelman asked me if I’d like to do some dramaturgy for her. We sat at a bar in Ridgewood and had a conversation, most of which I have forgotten, but I do remember her saying when creating dance, she likes to take her time. I was immediately taken by the patience she offered herself as a choreographer and extended to me as a collaborator. All she knew, that evening, was that she was making and wanted to make a dance about being a dancer, which she articulates as dancing the self. From there, Cavity’s takes on a circular trajectory rather than a linear one. While dramaturging for Amelia, I act as witness, soundboard, mirror, and shadow, looping in and out of the work as it blurs and solidifies.
We have worked together over this past year, and I’ve only been to about eight rehearsals, sometimes with weeks or months between them. Our process has been spliced or interrupted by pauses—beats of time when I’m not in the room. I don’t really know what happens while I’m gone. When I return, Amelia shows me what she’s been working on, either alone or with her collaborator, Dorothy Carlos. Dorothy, an experimental cellist, is based in Chicago. Because Amelia is planted in New York, their work together has also been coated in rests: pauses. In their time apart, they continue to sculpt the world they will eventually occupy together.
Before they begin a run of the dance, I ask Amelia if there’s anything she’d like me to look at. Often, it’s the timing between her own score and Dorthoy’s, where they align, disrupt, and call to each other. I pay attention to the space in between them and measure the temperature of the atmosphere they build and cohabitate. I attempt here to hold onto their time knowing that I can never keep it.
As a dancer who does dramaturgy, I exist in a tension when watching a performance. My somatic empathy rubs up against my analytic gaze and I find myself sifting through the realities and potentialities of what is happening, what could happen, what I want to happen. But felt this and looked at performance this way before I ever knew what dramaturgy was– what it is. It wasn’t until going to school for dramaturgy that I was taught to expect certain responsibilities as a dramaturg: giving comprehensive notes, asking generative questions, and offering slight alterations and shifts to a writer’s or director’s material.
I do not think about any of that when I’m with Amelia. Which is likely because of our conversation– that I can’t even remember. When we’re in the room together, I feel necessary without feeling obligated, listened to without feeling glorified, and committed without feeling bound.
During one run of Cavity, I take notes that I only understand the second I write them down. I try not to look down and suddenly note-taking becomes haphazard figure drawing. Most of the time, my pages are full of floating scrawls of words: proximity, spread, crawl, errancy, and possession. In the room with Amelia, I feel myself carving out my own practice realizing my primary task is to listen to her with my own body and then report how I feel; how her work has made me feel.
When I’m tracking the work’s composition, I’m looking for the friction between moments—not so much questioning their order but encouraging the complication of their spatial, physical, and emotional dynamics. I try to capture and communicate what I remember. When was I distracted? Startled? When did I feel on the periphery of the work, or entirely dropped in? My notes are not muddled with critique of judgment, but rather an echo of what I have witnessed. I’m not only invested in the physical mechanics of her choreography or improvisation. I am considering her movement as a material with weight, texture, and body. How does the materiality of my own body and the act of observing cloud or clarify her score?
Next comes the sometimes covert, and other times explicit, task of comprehending what Amelia wants from her audience. What does she want them to leave with? For me, one of the most thrilling dramaturgical pursuits is wrangling, dating, and predicting the afterlife of a performance during its making. The longer I work on a project, the harder I find it to position myself with an audience member entering the space and theatrical landscape for the first time.
My absence–our pauses afford me a distance that breeds freshness. My own distance from the work juxtaposes Amelia’s immediate and inescapable proximity to it.
There is a saturation, a muddiness, an overwhelm, a boredom, and a patience that fuels her movement and sits behind her piercing gaze. By amplifying and fragmenting the shape of her body, she invites the audience to feel the weight of their own.
When watching Cavity, there’s always a moment, if not many, when I uncross my legs, fold and then refold my hands, as if adjusting the grip on my own body will keep the memory of her’s from slipping away from me. I might reassign my fingers from the task of pulling on each other to resting on the back of my thighs. I feel the creases of my jeans and attempt to iron them out with the heat of my hands. When I look at Dorothy’s hands as they stroke, slide, pinch her cello’s strings I wonder if she is the conductor or conduit of this turbulent landscape. A landscape Amelia thaws as her hot breath escapes her, sometimes an expulsion, sometimes a hiss, or spit—I might bite my own lips or hear myself swallow. Dorothy’s sound creates a dark and humid cave, a bottomless well, made of slick walls, surrounding my own body as much as it does hers.
What happened in the pause? I asked Amelia to write to me for one minute.
She writes, “The pause is the fantasy of it all sinking back in – absorption of each moment up until this point – arms reaching out fingers spread – you came – the pause is when you see everyone gathered around your bed.”
To her I write, “She sat with her legs wide and thought and thought and thought. I’m concerned with sound. I think I’m considering wide open spaces and can never remember what song I want to sing at karaoke and why does dancing make?”
We both agreed that writing is very hard and a minute can feel very long or like nothing at all.
We promised each other we would not make sense of what we had written.
Leading up to Amelia’s show at Pageant, I began reading the work of Renee Gladman quickly becoming consumed with the idea of the anti-narrative. There is something anti-narrative and anti-disciplinary about Cavity. Amelia is exiting dance through dance and mapping the unknown.
Yet her reverence for form and spectacle is felt in the deeply moving strokes of her physicality. Instead of making meaning, she finds it in the corners that the edges of her movement create.
Read and learn more about Amelia at her website, here.
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