“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”

My instinct is to write about all the things that I find easeful about Yellow Wheel: check-ins, warm-ups, asking questions, being unsure, classes, schools of fish… But perhaps what keeps me coming back is the hard stuff: early Sunday mornings, arguments, a place for all the hard feelings: that is to say, check-ins, warmups, asking questions, being unsure, classes, schools of fish…

Yellow Wheel makes me a better dancer (more on this later, perhaps), but it also makes me a better person. Or at least, it makes me want to be a better person. Every time I feel like I have taken too much of the space, I treasure the fact that people are still listening. Every time I insist on the wrong movement in a phrase, I’m glad that someone is there to prove me wrong. Every time I think I have reached something close to my potential, someone is there to amaze me.

Earlier this year, I was watching two of the company members dance their duo from the work. I sat in silence and had the thought ‘I get to spend the next two months in awe’.

But we’re also a dance company! If I think about the dancer I was 2 years ago… well, I start disparaging that person. But he was still cool and a great dancer, just missing some of the skills I have now. Like

- Falling through the feet
- Tripping on Swanston Street
- Active listening through the point of contact
- Making funny choreography
- Being good at being bad. That one took a lot of work. Still does.
- Anchoring from the ribs or thigh or collarbone
- Being upside down
- Mentoring, just a little
- A million other things. For each paragraph, I’m feeling like a million things are unsaid. I feel I’m not doing it justice. ‘It’ being, I dunno, the work we do.

Because it is work. Hard work, often. But work that feels worthwhile. ‘Worth’ little money, perhaps, but worthy. Worthy of the time we give it and worthy of exhausting our bodies (safely) and worthy despite everyone who says “oh, dance! Is there much work in that?” Worthy as - dare I say it at the risk of disparaging all those who do the work of real resistance? - as an act of resistance.

Yellow Wheel feels like the Room of Requirement. I don’t know if it can be all things to all people, but it has manifested as many things for me. A space to explore masculinities (plural), a place to learn new tricks, a place to learn from peers - indeed, a place to find peers when I felt I had very few. A place to disagree (of which there are many) without venom (of which there are terrifyingly few). Or if group mentality manifests in a task or conversation, to be immediately free to examine and dismantle it - the company then reforming like some primordial hive of bees into a new formation.

And I have heard from others that Yellow Wheel can morph into yet more roles outside my experience. It has been a safe space for queer youth, the first place someone smiled while dancing, a refuge during lockdown.

Forgive me for quoting at length in what is already a self-indulgent reflection:

“You know what’s interesting about stillness and duration and meditation? In ‘real life’ it’s impossible for me to have any of this. The older I get the more activity and the more obligations I have. The pace is so fast. I’m literally running after myself. So I need to create these islands of time. Then I go through this transformation in the work; work transforms me, and then I use this experience in ‘real life’. Normally it’s the other way round: you do something, then you use it for your performance. My work is basically a learning experience.”
— Marina Abramović

Yellow Wheel is an island of time - the primary, non-negotiable pillar of my week - but it’s more than that. Insofar as possible, it is an island away from prejudice, from capitalism, from hate (even using that word in this context feels alien - I cannot imagine a situation in which hatred could arise). While at the same time, not ignoring those phenomena if someone needs to process them. “Work [read: YW] transforms me, and then I use this experience in ‘real life’”.

There is much more I wanted to say. I have memories to share, reflections on how far we have come, our capacity to change the company and our choreography and our mindsets without losing whatever it is that makes us… us. But I am almost at the front door, where I have promised myself to stop writing.

The wonderful, amazing, lucky thing is that this is not a reflection and goodbye; for whatever mysterious reason that will (I trust) be revealed in good time, it is a reflection marking a moment in time. I get to come back on Sunday and see everyone. And dance!

No right or wrong. Nothing matters. Everything is subjective. Floating rock.

Yellow Wheel extends the range of my human experience - it is at WXYZ or wherever we are with the company that I feel the greatest joys and sadnesses and laughter and fear. I know that if I feel frustrated or inarticulate or clumsy today, that there will be a day - soon - that I come to YW and feel masterful or composed or beautiful.