Picture this!

I was much too busy looking around and catching the eyes of people I knew to step back and get a sense of how many of us showed up for yesterday's Dance Community Picture New York photoshoot at Bryant Park, a collaboration between Chez Bushwick and Sarma. Our corner (northeast) of the park was bubbling and buzzing, and it was a delight to see everyone, greet old friends and make new ones. It was sort of like the Bessie Awards without the awards and with a slightly scruffier crowd and with the handsome and gracious Jonah Bokaer personally handing you a bottle of Poland Spring. Can't do better than that.

As one observant colleague mentioned, this gathering could in no way represent the extensive and varied "New York dance community" since, for one thing, it was scheduled for Sunday matinee time. Ooops! Still, when I later took a look at the photos from similar projects held in Berlin and Cairo, I felt pretty good about our numbers and our overall congenial, collegial spirit. New York, you've really got it going on!

So let's call ourselves a community of communities and be out, loud and proud about it.

By the way, if you're curious about the conceptual nature of the Dance Community Picture New York, check out Sarma's What is A Community Picture?--although I have to tell you that this is the type of language that makes me nearly tear out what's left of my nearly nonexistent hair. Had I stopped to read this before I showed up on Sunday, I might have stayed home and listened to the Yankees instead. Here's a sample:

7. Community revisited: cultural critique and resuscitation

In recent socio-political literature notions such as the 'multitude' have gained currency to depict structures of self-organisation and possible political resistance. Authors in the line of Toni Negri, Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno are eager to divest these `groupings´ from a transcendental and common denominator since such a ‘unifier’ would take precedence over the fundamental and immanent differences of singular people, who resist categorization into `one´ entity. In such discourses ‘multitude’ is not on a par with ‘community’. While the former is seen as resisting hierarchy and transcendentalism, the latter is considered to do just that: to subordinate singularities to sameness, identity or the identical.

Notwithstanding these attacks, the notion of community keeps reoccuring and keeps a strong foothold. The question is not only why it relentlessly returns, often in celebratory ways, but also how we can, instead of burrying the notion of community altogether, have it haunts us as an open question. How can we recuperate the radical potential of community through a process of cultural analysis and critique? How can we avoid the trap of romanticization of community while staying alert to the forces that are helpful when looking for ways to intervene in the enactment of exploitations.

"Fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the enactment of domination and exploitation. I see the practice of critique, and in particular a critical relationship to community, as an ethical practice of community, as an important mode of participation" (ix).

(Miranda Joseph, Beyond the Romance of Multiculturalism: Radicalizing Difference and Community in Cultural Studies, 2002)

Please... Does this language represent me and most of the people I know (inside or outside of dance)? No. However, I do see the "radical potential" of this community. I feel it. Feels real good, too.

I felt our radical outsider-ness and the way that we inhabit New York and feed New York (and the world) with radical creativity. I felt the goodness of our energy as an enduring, positive, forward-moving force.

I do like the way Sarma's list of items ends:

10. More than a parade?

Could The Dance Community Picture in New York City on September 23rd be more than a ‘Hurray-we-are-a-community-parade’, and facilitate occasions for people to gather and talk, listen, speak up and reach out.

Yes, and what a great thing that could be. We need to gather and talk, listen, speak up and reach out, and I hope folks will cook up all sorts of excuses for that--group photos or whatever. Let's do it!