♪♪ [ Dance music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Eclectic string music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Director: Sounds good.

Uh, Scene Five, past.

Take two.

[ Clapperboard clacks] Scene Five, future.

Take one.

[ Clapperboard clacks] ♪♪ To separate the past, the present and the future in many ways is too difficult.

I feel like they are one and the same.

It's like one line that separates itself into three and comes back together again.

[ Laidback bass guitar music playing ] I've always been a person that is curious about time.

I remember, I don't know, waiting for my birthday or waiting for holidays to come, and you would mark off the calendar with a red marker, a red X or something like that, or -- or, like, a sticker or something else.

And the experience of time for me was just anticipation.

That's my first understanding of time.

Just waiting.

One day could feel like four days in a row, and then once the whole month has passed, it could feel like the start of the month was just yesterday.

This is something that I've always been acutely aware of, especially as an artist.

I anticipate time, I make time, I am time embodied.

Performance at its essential is kind of like the who, what, and how of what happens over a course of time.

What happens?

How long does it take for it to happen?

Everything else is in the creative adventure of answering those questions.

That's the why, who, where, and when.

As a performer, it's my job to think about how to unearth the past into the present.

It's my job to think about how to transcend the present into the future.

The language alone is quite difficult to even process or understand.

We all have these different ideas of what the past, present, and the future is, right?

The past for many is like, oh, childhood and yesterday and five minutes ago.

And the present is like right now, right now, right now, right now.

And the future in some ways, is what you can imagine 200 years from now, or what you want for tomorrow, or what you want for dinner later on, or what someone might say to you.

I mean, I presume this kind of thinking is universal.

Right, but when you're an artist, you're encouraged to question that.

As an artist, you're in all of those places at once.

As an artist, you're constantly bending and breaking your understanding of that.

♪♪ In my work, I study popular culture.

I'm obsessed with popular culture.

It's like a cavern for the past, present, and the future, like a time capsule of what was and what is to come.

Right now, I think in many ways, I like to think about what everyone else is thinking about and what they're being led to think about, and that is what pop culture is for many people -- a guide.

I understand culture as the essence of our belief system, our values, and what we think about, and popular culture as the more popular version of that.

This is probably why love songs are some of the most popular themes in music and movies and in books.

Love, I think, is in a constant place of evolution.

The experience of love is not easy to understand, but it blends yesterday and tomorrow and now.

Maybe popular culture is the human condition candy-coated.

Birth, learning, emotion, aspiration, morality, conflict, and death.

This is what I dance about.

This is what's in my body.

[ Rhythmic music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Right, and I -- I mentioned popular culture because there's -- there's a development right now about the idea of the multiverse.

It's huge in popular culture.

And I was talking to the scientists because I wanted to know if it was possible, if the multiverse was actually possible, and he said the wildest thing to me.

His name was Paul.

He worked at the Simons Foundation in New York City, and he said something like, the reason why the multiverse is so popular in television and in movies is because people are experiencing regret more than anything in their life right now.

And so the zeitgeist, or the popular mind game is a sense of "what if," like, what if I didn't do that thing?

What if I didn't love that person?

What if I didn't trip and fall?

What if, what if, what if?

And this is akin to creating.

You're faced with so many choices about what to do and how to do it, and how it might feel like the making of an image is so different than what it looks like when it's being made.

And sometimes the feelings that go into making something are not the same feelings that it evokes.

[ Downtempo music playing ] ♪♪ So when I start making a work, I improvise.

I think about what I want to feel, and I allow my body to bring those feelings up.

I record myself, or I just keep doing it until something sticks, until both the movement that I'm doing and the feeling that I want are aligned and I can recreate it.

However, then I might feel a different way when I watch it, and then I have to deal with that.

[ "Blood Brother" by Emily Wells playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ Some kind of violence you touch ♪ ♪ Some kind of violence you turn away from it ♪ ♪ Some kind of violence you trust ♪ ♪ Some kind of violence you need to be done for you to stay up ♪ ♪ Some kind of violence you feel in the body ♪ ♪ My body, my body ♪ There's a musical called "What If?"

And Idina Menzel was in it.

And this musical, as you can imagine, was a sort of fantastic journey into the different versions of how life could play out if someone were to make one decision versus another decision.

When I was learning to dance, I remember someone telling me that dancing was like an act of violence, because once you made one decision, you eradicate all the other options.

So imagine -- if you're still and not moving, you have the most potential that there is, but then you make a movement, and once you do, you've killed something.

You've gotten rid of any other decision that you could have made in that one moment, and then you move again and you've destroyed options, and you move again and you've destroyed options.

I actually like thinking about that.

But what if you could go back?

What if you could do it again?

I wonder what popular culture's relationship between sensation-seeking and the multiverse is -- contemplating regret.

Performance feels like a way to have a do-over.

[ Otherworldly music playing ] Sometimes they say as an artist, you are only ever making the same piece of art over and over again.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ For example, in 2018, I made this solo called "UGLY" because I wanted to know why I felt that way -- ugly about myself -- and why I felt that looking into the mirror was one of the most disgusting things that I could think of and imagine.

I hated it, and I thought, did I do this to myself, or did culture do this to me?

And in 2021, I made a solo called "UGLY".

It was part two, and that was because I hadn't finished, because I didn't know what I had learned in the first one.

But also because I had changed from making the first one, I thought, oh well, I have to sort of discover this again.

And then in 2023, I made another solo called "UGLY Part 3," because I felt like I had finally learned something from the first time and the second time, and I wanted to bring it all together.

And each of those solos, I had, like -- I-I had obscured my body and I-I didn't want to be seen.

And then I thought back to the very first work that I've ever made, and my face was covered and I had a wig on.

Then the next show I made, I had my face covered, and I had this white face paint all over myself, and I also had a wig on.

And then I painted my face gray in the piece after that, and then in the piece after that, it was purple with polka dots, and -- and I moved really quickly in that solo because I wanted to get away from myself.

I wanted to be more of myself and nothing of myself at the same time.

I wanted to dance myself beyond myself, and I wanted to unearth a kind of newness.

And at the same time, I wanted to get rid of everything that I knew.

When I am dancing, I am everything and nothing.

I wonder how do I get people to see that I'm a projection surface, I am malleable, I am whatever you want me to be, but I am also more than that.

When I'm dancing, the past means nothing, and yet I need the past.

I need to have remembered.

I need to have experience.

I need to have done something to which I imbue my moving forward with.

One of my favorite things to do is just lift my arms.

And I remember once when I was in school and learning how to dance, and you know, a port de bras is like a lift of the arms or a carriage of the arms, and it could be one of the most delicate things you've ever witnessed, something that I've always wanted to do well, and I've always wanted to have really delicate arms.

And I remember once, a teacher put their hand on my back and on my shoulders and said, "Just imagine everything that you have gone through.

"Imagine everything that you are, "and just lift your hands and allow yourself "to lift the weight of yourself up into the air."

And it was then that I felt some sort of connection with my body.

I had actually felt more present than I've ever felt in my life, but by just lifting my arms.

And I wanted that again and again, and I just imagined myself doing that every day for the rest of my life, because the feeling is just so remarkable.

It's something that I encourage everyone to do, to have, to enjoy.

I remember something that I don't think people understand, which is that how for the viewer, dance is a visual art form, but for the performer, it's a physical art form, and for both, it might be a psychological art form.

The things that you have to do to yourself to bring yourself into a dancing body is remarkable.

It's wild and it's almost impossible.

I-I don't know how we do it.

I don't know if the audience understands this, for all performance, actually.

I don't know if people know what they're doing.

No one knows.

Dancing is so beautiful and so delicate and so harsh on the body, and no one but the performer knows what's going on inside.

It's so amazing to remark, it's so incredible to project, and so rare that we ever feel what another person feels.

But we try over and over again.

Eye contact is something that is very important to me while I'm dancing, and perhaps this helps with empathy.

[ Ambient music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I often feel this very strange, delicate, and important connection between myself and the audience when I can look them in the eye.

I feel like it's this thing where I'm able to bring myself into being.

I'm able to call upon something that is inside of me and make it more real for them and for me.

I've always wanted to be a person who is a little light and more practical.

I mean, I don't cry a lot, but when I do cry, I often feel a sensation that I feel when I'm dancing, which is just alive.

I feel very alive when I'm dancing, I feel very alive when I'm crying, and there's no real way to translate that into somebody's body.

It's a kind of poetry that I don't totally understand.

I don't really believe that I-I truly know what poetry is, right?

But I think we all collectively believe that poetry is a kind of use of words and language in such a way that it creates a sensation and it creates an idea.

It infers experience.

And I think that dance is the same.

It's a kind of poetry in which something is inferred.

So everything that I see, everything that I touch, everything that I experience, things that people have said to me, things that people have done to me, live inside my body.

And when I'm dancing, that all comes out.

Lifting my arms, kicking my feet, shaking my head, twiddling my thumbs, turning, flipping myself backwards, it's all a kind of poetry, inferring something that has happened, that is happening, that will happen.

♪♪ And I think people can feel that.

I think people can feel when something is real in that way, but they don't know how to describe it, and I love that.

I cherish that, and I look forward to it.

It's something I really look forward to.

[ Chopped string music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Contemplative horn music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Wind chime jingles ] I remember someone told me that the water in your body vibrates to sound, so when sound is played, it vibrates in your body.

It vibrates the water in your body.

I do-- I don't know, are there -- are there that many sounds?

I mean, if you think about a piano and how much music is created by the different kinds of combination of piano keys, that's remarkable.

Our experience of time is just a combination of things that we have done, that we have seen, that we will do all coming into fruition.

And I think about that, especially when I'm dancing.

[ All ] When I'm dancing, I wish that I could dissipate into a million birds.

[ Voice echoing ] I think I would...

I would very much like that, and I think about that a lot.

[ Wind chime jingles ] ♪♪ I think about disappearing.

I think about dissipating.

I think about not existing only to acknowledge that I ever existed in the first place.

I think about time not being at all a rule that I have to contend with, and I think the same thing about gravity.

I don't know if I understand what the relationship between gravity and time is.

Perhaps that's next.

I want to be more than I am and also nothing.

I want to go so far that I am ahead of myself.

[ All ] I'm here now, and I'm so far... [ Voice echoing ] I'm so far ahead that I'm behind again.

[ Tense string music playing ] ♪♪ [ Wind chime jingles ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Wind chime jingles ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Wind chime jingles ] [ Inspiring piano music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪