Notes on Tere O’Connor
At the American Dance Festival, 6/30/26
It is ebbing away from me with every second. Every minute it gets less his and I make it more mine. Every moment is more full of misunderstanding. Each mile I travel I am less in his atmosphere, more in mine.
Let me say: it’s the kind of dance where you fall in love with everyone. You fall in love with them because they’re beautiful like celebrities, but better, because they’re right here, and they’re so alive. One man is almost ____, and he’s like a young ____, and yet he’s a little more handsome than ____, and ultimately I prefer him to ____. They’re beautiful and they’re irreplaceable, and they exist now and then not again. They’re beautiful like people you see in a train, people you see in a train passing yours, in that one place where the one train rides beside the other for a long moment, almost the same speed, and you have time to look and (why not) to fall in love, and then the other train speeds up and dives, or so it seems, and you carry on your own way.
I could tell you about the movement. You’d have to get up and stand in front of your mirror and act it out, or maybe you’re especially gifted and you can envision these things, and then you and I could pretend that this series of descriptions of the way they moved—not what they were animated by or how we felt, could feel—was the dance.
At the performance I attended Tere O’Connor spoke about the origin of his work, spoke of the motion of “the closeted mind” and how it animated him, continues to animate him long after he has left that life. I want to place that here (since he gave it to us) and not carry on with it. It is inappropriate to psychologize a person who has told you what they’re up to. It’s always been inappropriate, since he has always told you what he is up to. What he is up to is the dance.
At the performance I attended someone didn’t know that their phone was pinging audibly, just occasionally. Didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t care, but anyway the little pings became part of everyone’s experience, and one ping! was so well-timed, and it’s funny to think that the one person responsible for the little pings didn’t even know they were there.
Tere (we are on a first-name basis, I pretend) also talked to us about abstraction and dance and meaning and dance and other art forms and dance, and how dance is (well he kept using positive verbs, but I want to translate it into the conditional, can be and so on, because I’m not Tere) its own form, and its logic does not (may not) derive from anything else. Which presents me a problem, because here I am writing about your dance, Tere. I am so glad I no longer have to write about dance, and I also want nothing more than to be with this dance with my words, want nothing more than this misfit loving.
A solo goes on until it exhausts the performer. How do you get from one thing to the other? Any old way. If you have to go on, you will, and the way you get there becomes another tile in the mosaic, card in the spread.
A solo goes on until it exhausts the performer, and then something else happens, and then a flock of seagulls (I’m not joking but I am joking), then an election, a first flirtation, a trial by fire, and so on, life until life is done.
Have I said quite enough about falling in love?
I imagine the perfect state of mind for receiving Tere O’Connor would be Keats’s negative capability—being willing to assemble castles and abandon them, going back, playing the game as the rules change, with no irritable etc. That would be it. I am good at that, but even I fall into sense-making, sentence-making. I think about what I’m going to say, I start to fall into the romantic well of my own sensibility, I lose track. Sometimes I try to predict, I play the game of knowing when it will end, I give myself up for a stab at perfection, I spoil the nymph of myself with irritable reaching.
This is brief, this dance. It’s here and each moment is more intentional than any love-making could (or should) be. Its length and its intensity, its length and its detail are in inverse proportion to each other. It is a fantastic parade. If you cried at Tere O’Connor, this brevity would be the reason to cry. Or you could cry for reasons of your own. At the performance I attended, someone did. This is also perfectly fine.
I’m losing it, I’m losing it! I’m at this bar writing this after the show and it turns out to be the most bizarre place, and people are doubling down on their espresso martinis on this Tuesday evening, the last day of the fiscal year (ask me how I know), blowing fantastic scents from their nostrils, and none of this is what I meant to write.
The hands, at least we could talk about the hands—fantastic sculling, birds, clutching, petting a hedgehog (oh, is this your hedgehog?), shoveling sand, saluting a demigod, typing on a pangolin, shuffling two decks, making a complex kind of love that has never (never) produced a single citizen.
I wish I’d written down a few words. I don’t wish I’d been there with the uncapped pen, trying to cap the dance. I’ve written about O’Connor before, and well I think, but the critic’s state of mind is the least right for this dance. I have to let it fall through my fingers, I have to let it go.
(And if I let it go, I’m in this bar where people are analyzing the culture, melding Jelly Bellys with the latest Supreme Court decision, Czech cartoons on the telly, I mean there is life, and trust and believe that life is richer post-Tere.)
The wonderful thing about concert dance is the way it lets you simply be. Or not be. Which you choose depends on whether you think you live in your action or in your passivity. I think you live in your passivity, personally. I think that if you turn your hands up on your thighs, open your eyes, and have a moment without words, that may be the real you. Or, because I don’t believe there is a real you, that may be the wonderful you. A you you should experience. A you you need to meet.
There was something I wanted to say about specificity. (I know if I stop I will not start again. This is an impulse, this is an affair. This is a violation of police tape. I deleted my dance criticism files. This is a no-go zone.) I wanted to say something about richness. This is the kind of dance (and I am aware this is more a picture of My Mind on Tere than a representation of this dance). . . where was I. . . oh yes! the kind of dance that elicits that surprised little “ah!” that comes out of the nerves, bypassing the brain, the little “ah!” that alerts you to your capacity to feel—not feel in the schmaltzy sense, but really feel, respond, be with.
“We’ll get into it,” the bartender promises another regular. With every person who enters the vibe shifts, precariously. This is the life ongoing. You’re in it.
Let me note that, while there is acting in this dance, no one tries to put anything across. No one is asked to sell psychodrama. People are allowed to age. People are individual. People are not allowed to get sloppy. Don’t fuck it up.
I haven’t said enough about the dancers. I care about that. I don’t care that I haven’t said enough about “what happened” or “how it looked”—I don’t care. I care that I haven’t made you fall in love—no, not that, but I care that you don’t feel how involved you could be. How you could feel each turn of that elbow, how the exposure of the underside of that forearm could mean—what it meant—what it means—how if rain fell between you and that form, it made a difference—every drop made a difference—and not that form, that mind—that moving mind—