march 2025 - spring cleaning my soul, baby
Here we are again, friends. Spring sort of arrived like magic and I can’t stop sneezing with excitement, I guess. Nearing the end of year 1 of grad school and trying to make sense of it all. Writing still feels like public enemy #1, thanks for helping me attempt to conquer her. I’m sitting in the fact that each moment is both once in a lifetime and not at all precious. Life feels a lot less fleeting than it once did. This moment will end and the next will come over and over and over again. As always, if you have thoughts, queries, scorn, etc. let me know!
PERFORMANCE
Let’s get to some PROMO(!) off the bat. I am performing in St. Louis, MISSOURI this weekend. Then I will not step foot in this state for many months. Get your tickets and come!!!!! Jacob is magic, Space Station is a life changer, and you should watch dance this weekend instead of scrolling on instagram reels for three hours. In some ways this process has felt like a farewell to St. Louis. Over the course of it, my relationship to this place has changed in big ways. It will always be my home, but I’ve lost the physical place that had become synonymous with that word. Yesterday I drove on these roads in my hometown that made me feel alive at 17 and thought about all that I once was and the stories I now hold and who I will be the next time I cross this distantly familiar street. I grew up a few miles away from this toxic waste site that they covered with hundreds and thousands of rocks. When I was in High School we would walk up to the top to watch the sunset. People died because of it, people died for it, people will continue to die once the toxins from the lake become cancer in their body, and I am just standing on top of it to get a better view of today inching closer to tomorrow.
I am hot off of performing in Tessa Olsen’s, I inhaled a whole handful of this shaved plastic and it was like drowning at ACDA in good ole Wisconsin. It’s a crazy, brilliant, cathartic whirlwind that I feel deeply lucky to have been a part of. The performance of it was sort of unlike anything I have ever experienced. It has me considering the role of the stage in my human experience. When I’m in character I don’t leave myself completely, but rather I let out parts of myself that I usually keep hidden. For 12 minutes I let people see the ugliest parts of myself, my deepest desires and biggest fears, the emotional fiber of a complex being live right in front of your eyes. LOOK AT ME!!!!!! LOVE ME!!!!! HATE ME!!!!! WHATEVER!!!!!! And now I am me, Marlee, again but I know the endless affinities of myself a bit better.
MOVES
I have this dysphoria between the way I move vs. the way I set movement. I respect and trust the way my body makes choices when given the agency to do so, but as soon as I start setting material I feel like I am trying so hard to be interesting and quirky and blah blah blah. I’ve been feeling this in big ways as I embark on another year working on this evening length solo about my mom and the fact that she is still dead and I am still alive. The way I improvise feels more closely related to the ways I grieve in private. The gross dirty parts of my grief that I don’t want to share with the world like this sweatshirt of my mom’s that I haven’t washed in three years, or all these expired spices that I’ve moved through 5 apartments now, or how I cried when I cut my hair because now there isn’t a single hair left on my head that she’s touched. When I try to set the movement, it feels more like the awkward smile I put on when someone tells me how she is looking down on me. Like I am once again just the sack of bones and flesh carrying her features for her friends and family who knew her and not me. Or I am back in that weird church where I self-produced and choreographed her funeral.
I am noticing the way I use transitions. How I sort of don’t. I just abandon an idea when I am sick of it and move onto the next thing that excites me. Sort of rejecting the notion that I have to skillfully transition from one move/theme into the next. Life transitions are seldom seamless and my brain rarely moves from one idea to the next in a cohesive way so why should I value this in dance making?
Tere O’Conner’s comp class has me thinking a lot about tangent and interlude. Interrupting something to return to it. This feels both exciting and satisfying to me because it is breaking linearity in a way that aligns with how I walk through the world. Like a friend is telling me a story but then they get a call so they talk to someone else for a second before coming back to finish the story. Or when I walk halfway down the block just to turn around because I forgot something. It makes the stage a place for real experiences as opposed to an idealized world where one thing leads to another and nothing ever overlaps or returns unless in a hyper-poetic way. He has also brought up this question, Did you choose that or is it just a consequence of being in dance? which is completely rocking my world.
TEACHING
“Being who you are, using your body to demonstrate that, and trying your best” is how one of my students defined the values of our class. YES! These are my values! They get it! I see them get it in the way they move. They are taking up space and using the weight of their big beautiful brains to fully commit to BIG MOVES. They are brilliant and can tondu like there is no tomorrow and in a few weeks they will be able to do a shoulder roll. I see something else brewing as well – they are embracing ridiculousness, being silly and crazy in pursuit of seriousness, learning to be more comfortable in who they are by taking risks and giving themselves grace and being brave. BAM!!!!!! This is the why!!!!!
ETC.
Currently reading: how to be both by Ali Smith
I’ve been trying to retrain my attention span by listening to albums in full as opposed to curated playlists. I took this a step further by intentionally listening to things that I probably won’t like in an attempt to force myself to intake media I don’t like and maybe even find something good in it. The big success story of this experiment is a new found love for Kenny Chesney’s early albums.
I cut my hair in a big way and the last time my hair was this short was when I was 15 and I hated it because I thought I looked like a lesbian. BUCKLE UP, BUTTERCUP!
Okay, thanks again for reading <3
