"We have life because water is bent."

As a writer, I’m interested in the intersection between poetry and storytelling. How and when does an act of human speech become like a poem? How do poetry and storytelling come together and diverge?

--Devi Lockwood, One Bike, One Year

Read more at:

Release (and Dreams of a Performance)
by Devi Lockwood, One Bike, One Year, January 16, 2015

Pop-up pas de deux

Metropolitan Diary: Free Ballet at Columbus Circle
by Jules Cohn, The New York Times, December 14, 2014

Al Aswany on the subversive dance of women

Dirty Dancing in Egypt

by Alaa Al Aswany, The New York Times, May 13, 2014

And it is because Oriental dance poses a challenge to a religiosity that sees any form of display as an act of impurity that it has always been misunderstood and associated with dishonor.

That is precisely what makes it a subversive art: The dancer who shakes off the shackles of the patriarchal order strikes fear into the hearts of religious conservatives, and may even pose a threat to tyranny. Hence its periodic repression.

Read more from Al Aswany here.

Becoming Holland Cotter: poetry in words and images

Finding Poetry on the Page and, Later, on the Canvas
An Art Critic Is First Inspired by Words
by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, August 14, 2013

The American literature of deracination

Subconsciously deracination probably has more to do with a desire not to have one’s visual field constantly invaded by inconveniently different faces—relationships that are fraught, unfixed, capable of producing equal measures of helplessness and guilt. But there is also, perhaps almost too easy to ignore, the question of scale—the scale our lives are measured against, the fundamental American desire to stand out on the horizon, alone with our thoughts, to be a figure against the visual field around us. -- Jess Row

White Flights: American Fictions Racial Landscape
by Jess Row, Boston Review, August 5, 2013

Open your eyes, find your way

For me, the search for meaning in the wake of tragedy led in an unpredictable direction, but the end result was an enriched view of the world. -- John Edward Huth, author, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

Losing Our Way in the World
by John Edward Huth, The New York Times, July 20, 2013

Silence will not protect you.

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking. 

― Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," Sister Outsider

Cynthia Oliver on choreography

Why I Choreograph
by Cynthia Oliver, Dance Magazine, December 2012

"...permission to stop striving and just be stupid."

I’m With Stupid
by Robin Marantz Henig, The New York Times, September 14, 2012

Listening in Africa

The Art of Listening
by Henning Mankell, The New York Times, December 10, 2011