This is a book about dance works by dance artists that choreograph with a grounding in relationality and that enact relationality in their dance making, in various ways, for instances, with ongoing decolonizing impact, including on understandings of modern dance.

This is a book about witnessing, in this dancing, moments of permeating, deep-rooted, radical relationality and about feeling these moments in skin and fascia, muscles and bones, breath and heart and lungs. It is about knowing, in that sensing, what that truth feels like in action, even in flickers and flashes: that isolation is a lie, that the male supremacist and white-body supremacist1 and binary gender supremacist and human domination supremacist separations we swim in, imposed upon us all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and more than human, for centuries, if not millennia, are lies. Actually, no: you are not alone. Actually, yes: there is enough. You are part of an interdependent interweaving intricate as nerves, and as joyful and as painful.

This is about that momentary seeing and sensing, that flash of something hard to name, something permeating those separations and their fissures and fractures, spreading through and across them. It is about witnessing that interdependent connectivity, that permeating connective radiance, that love, as core and not as fringe.

It is about sensing those moments of love and radiance, of friendship and kinship, of joy and rage and struggle. It is about registering ways that relationality as a way of being starts and ends from a place of relationship that requires giving and taking in ongoing reciprocal, responsible, respectful relation with others. It is about registering how the practice of relationality is an always-shifting toward and away and includes the complexities and challenges that being and staying in radical relationality require. And how these shifts can also be transformations, which can be deeply painful, while also activations toward joy.

It is about the connectivity of all voices, as well as the importance of registering what each voice offers. It is about how each voice carries a part of what is necessary to the whole. It is grounded in my voice and ways of perceiving, and in the ways these perceptions have grown from listening to the voices and perceptions of those with whom I am and have been in connection, named and not named, seen and not seen.2

It is about how my ways of perceiving include the ways my ancestors saw and were shaped, and how the lands they lived on and came to and came from shaped them and cared for them. And it includes how the lands I’ve lived on, and have come to and came from, have shaped and cared for me: the Mohegan land and Abenaki land and Lenape land and Íviatem (Cahuilla), Máara’yam (Serrano), Tóngva, and Payómkawichum (Luiseño) lands, the Lisjan Ohlone land where I live now.3 It includes paying better attention to these lands, noticing the layers, recalling the glints in the farmers’ fields, registering the markings on the streets, the active presences all around that may or may not welcome me. It includes acknowledging that we are all, at different times, visitors on someone else’s land and being nourished, as well as shaped, by it. It includes knowing that I am entangled in this violent history that is also still the present and that the joys of my daily comings and goings across the land I live on, the strength and health I enjoy pumping my body along those paths, from all I’ve gained from generations of being on that land, are part of the violence of that history, as well as part of the present that sustains and shapes and teaches. It includes working to be a better visitor on all lands: thinking and dialoguing about and doing what I can, in ways that enact what it means to be in right relation, to live in reciprocity, to do the work of relational repair even when repair feels beyond me and overwhelming.4

This book is an attempt to feel academia’s, “contemporary dance’s,” and my own connections to brutal histories and genealogies of genocide and extraction and the absorptions and appropriations they have generated: the presumption of right to take up whatever one comes across, or to take away whatever one came to dig up and extract or dam up and direct, for one’s wealth and prestige, for one’s art, for one’s career, for one’s own, however one wants, without giving anything back, without awareness and acknowledgment of those who have long lived (and who will long live) as caretakers in relation to what is being taken and taken from. It is an attempt to stay present with the entitlements and entanglements I’m part of through my ancestral and academic lineages. It is an attempt also to offer what I can, as best I can, as a white settler dance scholar writer feeling these entitlements, to shift their presumptions.

This includes telling stories about how I’ve witnessed dances and dance making enacting otherwise: how, via the relationality in which they are seeded and grown, the dances I’ve witnessed sidestep the lies of separation and isolation that coloniality has attempted to impose here in Huichin, here in California, here on Turtle Island/Abya Yala, here on lands and waters in what is for now called the Pacific, here on this beautiful planet as a whole.5 It includes telling stories about how the dance making I’ve witnessed is rooted in the challenges and complexities of relationality, too, and negotiates its insistences and refusals, its opportunities for shift and change, recovery and reconsideration. It includes telling stories about how, via this grounding in relationality, these dances instead enact resurge-instances that reject the very terms that coloniality banks on, insisting that this (this world, this dancing, this genealogy of dance making) is actually not so stably grounded in one-way practices of European extractive absorption, because relationality is capable of recalibrating even those.

It is also an attempt to write in registers that reject the stability of these presumptions: to choreograph scholarship rooted in relationality (and its tensions and mistrust, as well as laughter and delight; the shared blessings and shared meals): in ways of knowing and of relating with what others know, and with place, and with ways of relating with others’ places, that are grounded in respect and relationship.

It is an attempt to tell stories about some of the Indigenous dances I’ve taken part in witnessing and about Indigenous dance making’s enactments of relationality as a way of being that enable certain things to come to the surface, at different times, for different readers, who are undoubtedly relating to it from different perspectives. It is also about how there are multiple strategies, multiple perspectives, multiple approaches, multiple moves to make, and to mirror, around choreographing relationality and around writing about it. It is to practice being a good student in relation with these multiplicities: to listen, to learn, to show up when interest is welcomed, and to step back, or to the side, when it is not—to say less, or say more, or say differently. It is about knowing that situations, discussions, and perspectives are grounded in a when and where and how you see and will shift, and change, and transform, and require different ways of seeing, and of writing, as you shift and look again. It is about letting go of getting it right, once and for all, because there is no once and for all, because transformation only happens through responsive calibrations.6

From what I’ve understood, listening requires (first, before anything else can follow) respect, and then doing the work of being in relationship, with an acceptance of responsibility to those with whom we are in relationship (and we are all in relationship), and then reciprocity: to give, as generously as possible, from where we are and what we have, which includes (at the right time, as we get ready to publish) the 20 percent of teachings we’ve filled in, so that our offering may become 80 percent of what someone else (say, perhaps you reading) sits with and fills 20 percent more of in themselves.7

And so there you have it. Thank you for reading. Merci beaucoup. Diolch yn fawr iawn. Go raibh maith agat.