On his first day in workplace, President Trump issued a sequence of government orders limiting the rights of transgender and nonbinary People, from stating that the U.S. authorities would acknowledge solely female and male genders to eradicating gender choices from passports. His orders focused rights and protections attained via years of brave advocacy. And award-winning San Francisco choreographer Sean Dorsey has been on the forefront of these efforts for greater than twenty years, as an activist, an educator, and the inventive director of Sean Dorsey Dance. On the eve of the corporate’s Twentieth-anniversary residence season, Dorsey spoke about residing as a transgender individual within the U.S. immediately, and the way dance can meet this sociopolitical second.
How is the present political local weather affecting you personally?
This can be a second of complete dire emergency for trans communities. Our bodily autonomy, our freedom of motion throughout borders or states, our freedom of expression, and our most elementary civil liberties have been stripped. Myself and the transpeople I do know are experiencing off-the-charts each day nervousness, concern, despair, and rage.
As an inventive chief, how are you responding?
My work is about creating sanctuary. Within the inventive and rehearsal course of with my dancers, I work actually arduous to construct belief and security, and usher in a lot of humor and play. And audiences nonetheless hardly ever have the expertise of seeing work that facilities trans and queer our bodies and experiences. My life calling has been about creating that sort of sanctuary. There’s no method I’m backing away from that work. I’m digging in deeper.
This season, Sean Dorsey Dance can be performing works that spotlight trans historical past: Lou, The Lacking Technology, and The Secret Historical past of Love. What does that imply to the group proper now?
On the very second when so many forces are working systematically to erase our historical past and our existence—we’re seeing the phrase “transgender” being faraway from the Stonewall Monument’s web site, for instance—it feels extra vital than ever, and excruciatingly well timed, to be performing works that embody our historical past. All of the works assert the price, magnificence, knowledge, and worth of trans and queer our bodies and lives. To be doing these works feels extremely vital.
How can dance assist us proper now?
Artists have all the time been on the forefront of resisting tyranny and forwarding justice and creating magic and pleasure. And this time is not any completely different. The great thing about artwork is that it’s actually uncontainable—it’s unstoppable. Artists are storytellers, and we’re truthtellers. And reality can’t be extinguished, irrespective of how arduous tyrants strive. Fact will all the time be victorious. Love will all the time be victorious over hate.
However the victories is not going to occur routinely—they may solely occur if all of us step up and take motion. To those that are feeling discouraged, search for the heroes and she-roes and they-roes in historical past, when artists and activists created so many roadmaps for us, so many instruments. This can be a marathon, so we should handle one another and ourselves.
How does creating and performing dance make you are feeling hopeful?
Dance is a bodily artwork type; its instrument is embodiment. Whether or not we’re within the viewers or onstage, dance locates us and reconnects us to our physique and our breath. I actually consider within the huge therapeutic potential of dance. I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it, I do know it.
