---
narrator: Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant
subject: Contemporary dance
facilitator: Nathan Schneider
date: 2024-11-22
approved: 2025-08-08
summary: "A choreographer describes how dance helps people learn ways of being in shared space and in their bodies."
topics: [art, health, family, dance, music]
location: "Los Angeles USA"
headshot: "jasmine_albuquerque.jpg"
links:
  - text: "Personal website"
    url: "https://www.jasminealbuquerque.com/"
---

*How do you like to introduce yourself?*

My name is Jasmine Albuquerque. I'm a choreographer, dancer, storyteller and instructor.

*How do you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start in your life as a dancer and choreographer? Where are you now?*

I grew up on a mountain---which was problematic, because I never had a ride home. In that world of never having a ride home, I would go with my friend Caitlin to dance class and just watch her do ballet. It got to a point where I knew the difference between a *demi-plié* and a *grand plié* more than the girls in class. So I started taking ballet.

There was something really beautiful about the musicality of ballet and the foundations of ballet. I then progressed into jazz. We had a company called the Dance Asylum. It was really sexy, and all the parents protested it because it was so risque. My teacher played Soft Cell and other eighties music and that was what all the older girls did. I finally got into that company and loved it.

By the time I turned 16 I literally grew out of ballet. I was too tall *en pointe*. I was 6'4", so I was taller than my partners, and I was like, I might as well just pick YOU up because I'm bigger than you. My feet were huge. My feet grew out of my *pointe* shoes. It was such a mess! Then I moved to Budapest in my third year of college at UCLA.

That's when I started studying contemporary, which was a huge shift for me. I would take a train outside of the city and take class from a wonderful teacher. It was in Hungarian, but it really made me realize that dance is a universal language, and I could take my shoes off, and I could stick my ass out, and I could do things that were so anti-ballet. I was even counting in Hungarian. I started going to all these contemporary dance shows in Hungary.

That was before they joined the EU. It was 2003. You could go out for $5 and watch an opera or a dance show. Hungarian work then didn't leave Hungary. So I felt like I entered into this very special time. And they also learned contemporary in a very particular way, because of Communism. They weren't allowed to do it. Certain dancers would go to Italy or somewhere West and learn some contemporary then come back. There were two studios- when someone official would come in they would do the communistic dances, and then, when they left, they would do contemporary in the back. So it felt like this secret language that was really special, and it felt good on my body---finally, something that worked for this big body I had.

Then I came back to LA. I started taking class from Ryan Heffington. Ryan Heffington, mind you, is a pioneer of underground contemporary dance in Los Angeles. One of the first times I met him he had a shirt on that said "I love dick" and sequined pants. I said, "Yo, you look like shit," and he's like, "Yeah, I just got out of jail." I'm like, "What'd you go to jail for?" He's like, "I was defending a woman, and I was a little bit drunk." I'm like, "And you're about to teach class?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm about to teach class." I'm like, "...okay."

Then he goes and teaches the most amazing class you ever could possibly go through. There was an earthquake in one of the classes he taught, and I'm like, "Yo, there's an earthquake." He's like, "Whatever. Focus." Ha! Soon he taught me psycho dance. And that's when we started going into nightclubs to perform. This was happening from the eighties on but I was new to it.

By midnight a fully choreographed, fully costumed 30-minute dance show would happen that no one knew was going to happen. Wild stuff went down in these settings. One time a friend of mine, her leg---someone actually stabbed her leg because they forgot to switch out the real knife with a fake knife. My other friend, her hair caught on fire. One time there was a drunk guy walking in the middle of the dance floor and all the lights came crashing down.

At some point I was asked to choreograph a dance but the DJ was on speed and he played my track underneath another track, and I got so pissed because it was a very specific Aphex Twin song, and you couldn't hear the subtilites, so we just sort of melted and I got mad and I shined a light on him. I ran outside. I was wearing some little dress and a rat ran by, and then a dude offered me 20 bucks, and I was like, "Yo, I'm not a prostitute. What the hell?" I ran back inside to my family members who lied through their teeth: "That was great."

With psycho dance, we were very mixed in. I was trained on big stages where you just look out and you see darkness and you just dance. You see the darkness, and then you hear applause. So I kept saying to Ryan, "I don't know how to do this. I'm staring at my ex-boyfriend. I'm staring at my mother. They're in my face. How am I supposed to perform? Where do I go? I'm too big. There's no space." He crawled through my legs, and he said, "There's space." And he crawled through my arm and he said, "There's space. There's always negative space."

That was so beautiful. I love that. It trained me not only to literally face my fears, but to integrate that fourth wall, to walk into the audience and invite them in and to be able to go into a state in my mind.

A lot of these dancers were doing drugs and drinking. I was totally sober. I just didn't like that kind of stuff. So I had to create a veil underneath my eyes that could allow me to have a little bit of separation and go into a state.

The dancers in LA were so special. You have emotional dancers who are super, super amazing emotionally, and then you have physical dancers who are incredible physically. Then you have that rare group of dancers that can do the combo of both of those. And THEN you have that extra rare group of dancers who can channel past lives while they dance and that's what we were. We were called the Fingered Dancers. The show was called Fingered. You would come and get fingered psychologically. It was wild. It was totally crazy. This was around 2008.

After that, the scene died out. Heffington got sort of famous. He made a music video with Sia. He started a band called We Are the World---two dancers and two musicians.

When Heffington got too busy for us, I started a dance company with Nina McNeely and Kristen Leahy called WIFE. We all had looked in the mirror, and we were like, yo, we're getting old. Let's start talking about age, and we also were very into iconography and just these beautiful images that we had been looking at for so long. So we did a photo shoot where we were standing on boxes, on small boxes and projecting images on us to make us look like sculptures. And we actually looked like sculptures. And we were like, well, that's dope. Let's dance in that world.

So we kept standing on those boxes. The confinement, the limitations of being on a two-foot by two-foot box all of a sudden created the most crazy choreography because you couldn't run across the stage. You couldn't leap. That psycho dance stage, which was already smaller than the giant stages I had danced on, all the sudden got even smaller.

I realized that the best dance is when you have a large limitation around it. WIFE happened from 2010 to 2016 and it was a really special time. It was also a very nerve-wracking time. We were not using infrared, we were using regular projections, so our tech rehearsals were close to six hours long. The precision of where you had to be for the projections to map the body were so insane, and I kept blowing my back because I was so nervous about fucking it up. Nina was making all the projections. She's a self-taught animator and editor and incredible, but she was doing a lot of the work, and Leahy and I were producing everything. And we all had jobs, but we were just really trying to make this happen.

And we did. We went to England. We went to Istanbul. We toured with it. People loved it. They would come and emulate some of the movement and be like, "Are you a WIFE?" It was this kind of secret "if you knew you knew" kind of thing.

*It was an amazing show.*

It really did look like those sculptures came to life. It got very popular. People started teaching it in Germany. It unfolded in ways that we didn't even expect. But by the time we did our last show, which was called "Enter the Cave," I think I had blown my back like five times. I had to use Tess Hewlett to be my replacement and this poor woman---an amazing dancer--would learn a piece that took us a year to choreograph in like three hours and perform it because she's my same height. That was the other thing. It couldn't be just anyone. We once used my friend Zak Schlegel because I had blown my back and we had to tuck his penis under so he looked like a woman. It was totally bonkers.

After Enter the Cave, it got to a point where the energy between us was too intense. We were all fighting. The work wasn't distributed equally. We were stressed. Leahy ended up moving to Mexico and Nina continued on with her career in LA which has fully bloomed and blossomed in all sorts of ways and I did too. It crumbled at what was the pinnacle of what we were doing. It was very sad. It felt like I got divorced. Then I really did get divorced and those two literally got married. That's what was happening.

Since then I've been freelance. I've been a freelance dancer and choreographer for a long time, at least fifteen years. I also have to mention that I started teaching when I was 21. I'm 41 now.

Teaching was the experience that really shifted me into a choreographer. All of a sudden I'm in a room with women in their forties and I'm 21. "These are my students? What do I teach them? Shouldn't I be learning from them?"

I asked them to walk across the room and stop in the middle and look in the mirror and not fidget for 10 seconds, and none of them could do it.  I realized that I needed to teach confidence. I needed to teach bodies. I needed to teach that it's okay to look at ourselves, it's ok to be in our bodies. 

It got to a point where women were like---or people, you know I had a few men, but mostly women---saying to me, "I got a job after doing your class." "I slept for the first time after doing your class. "I broke up with my boyfriend." "I was able to be in my body." Doing that for twenty years turned me into a choreographer. I made a new combo every two weeks. I would have one combo one week, and then it'd be the same, and then we'd switch. So I was making a lot of choreography and I continue to. Teaching is a huge part of my career.

And now? I'm in LA, and the industry's kind of bottoming out. It's a very strange time for dance. Covid was super devastating for us. We lost 80 percent of our dance studios. We've all been kind of dissipated and broken apart. The Sweat Spot was Ryan Heffington's dance studio that went under. It was 11 years of a space to create shows, rehearse, gather, teach, perform and party. You name it, everything...where we went to think and talk was in that studio and it went down. And The Edge, which was around for thirty years also shut its doors.

So things shifted in a really weird way during Covid. We felt like we were Covid, because all we did was touch and grope each other and all of a sudden touching each other would kill each other. This was really, really hard for us. But it was interesting, too, because people started reaching out to dancers and saying, "We need you. We need you to teach us. We need you to help us get through this."

I started teaching on Zoom, which was bizarre. I did it for two years and eventually started teaching movement therapy. I'm not a certified therapist. I was just like, you know, let's figure out how to get through this together. I ran into a woman when I was at the Biennale in Italy, and she said, "You saved my life," and I was like, "Who are you?" She's like, "I took your Zoom class during Covid." We became these fountains of health, in a way.

Now I've had another baby. My brain has changed yet again.

I choreographed a piece two weeks ago, which was really wild in a postpartum state. I took an old piece from 2019, took out the men, put it on women, bought silicon bellies for them that were six months pregnant, and turned them into pregnant women---naked, pregnant women. I pumped my breasts onstage and then had them walk around me in trench coats and heels, take off the trench coats, throw the heels away, and start this very psychotic dance to AFX, which is even more gnarly than Aphex Twin-his alias. It took me 10 years to choreograph to this song. It's so---it makes your brain bleed. I wanted to take people into one little element of birth---what it feels like. I don't think you die when you give birth. You are hyper-alive.

Have I answered your question?

*Oh yes---beautifully. So beautifully, Jasmine.*

From a mountain to birth.

*Knowing very, very little about choreography, the image I have in my mind is a piece of paper with Russian ballet movements on them, with foot positions.*

Like actually writing choreography down?

*Right? What does choreography mean for you like? What does it feel like? What does it consist of?*

A lot of dancers don't choreograph because they want to be told what to do. They don't want to have to create it. When I first started choreographing I was writing things down, and it would be [moving hands and body] "Swoop! Wah! Hee haw! Pregnant swipe knife in out, left, right! Turn up up! La, la!"

*Were you using a standard, or were you creating your own?*

No standard at all. There's a name for that standardized choreography. I can't remember what it's called but it does not work at all. It's like this psycho map and also contemporary dance has changed everything. We're dancing to-you know-Philip Glass. How do you count that? Where is the five-six-seven-eight? Where's the one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a? It's not hip-hop. It's not jazz, it's not eights. Or even this song, this AFX song---like, try counting that song, there's elevens, there's tens, there's fives. I realized as I was teaching that I needed to teach from imagery. I didn't exactly realize this---I worked with a guy named Glenn Edgerton, who used to be the artistic director of Netherlands Dans Theater, which is one of my favorite companies in Europe and I took a choreography workshop from him. This was a long time ago...he taught from images. He always said, "Let's show things with images."

That was really helpful for me. I was sometimes writing things down and that was fun. It helped me remember. I had a hard enough time picking up other people's choreography.

When I was in the process of choreographing, I used to be very precious about it. I used to not allow anybody to watch me. That was what was nice about WIFE---we would have to choreograph in front of each other. But normally I would be like, "Don't watch me do this! This is so embarrassing."

But I started being more comfortable choreographing in front of other people. What I do is I go to the most empty space in my mind---the biggest void you could possibly imagine--the blackest nothingness. I have to let everything out...then the song---I open a song, I enter the song into my mind.  The song tells me what to do. Sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's an argument between us and sometimes it just completely flows. It's the weirdest thing---sometimes one minute of a song can take me anywhere from ten minutes to three hours to create depending on the state that I'm in.

But the song is the most important thing to me. The song has to talk to me. If the song does not talk to me, I cannot choreograph to it. So once I stopped writing things down and started working just with my body more, I realized that a dance is really just a repetition of three, you know---once you find a movement that you like, all of a sudden it's a dance. And I told that to my students: you can choreograph by just making a phrase on your body. Start improvising, and then, when you like one little thing, do it three times, and then all of a sudden, you have a dance.

I also used to teach this thing I named "Bomb/Baby" which is where I would have your body experience what it feels like when a bomb goes off and then try to imagine what it's like holding a baby. I would make them do both at the same time. You're experiencing this motion of shock and energy vs. caress and gentleness. Two extremities at one time. I liked what that dichotomy did to the body. 

All dance is a manipulation of energy.

Everybody can dance. But how are you manipulating your energy? What are you doing to manipulate your energy that's manipulating my energy when I watch you? Why are the hairs standing up on the back of my neck when I watch you, but not when I watch *you*? *You*'re not doing anything for me, but you're doing a lot for me. I can watch beautiful dance, but if the person has not opened up their state and allowed me to come in, it's not going to do anything for me.

Choreography is a very strange language. I try to run from it sometimes. I don't like it all the time---it's sort of brutal. It makes me nervous. I'm still nervous to choreograph after god knows how many years I've been doing this. I think now it gets to a point where I just can visualize a feeling.

For example, I'm creating a piece in my head right now, and I know I want to have forty to forty-five bodies on their knees and I want them to be the sea...the grass on the ocean floor...a solid seagrass of humans. But I don't ever want us to see their faces, and I know that there's a future, a chunk of the future walking through that they keep looking at. We don't see their faces, and then I know there's a duet between my friend Maija and Malachi that's happening on top of this sea of bodies---the most abstract, weird stuff.

And then all of a sudden, you have to physicalize that. I used to choreograph when I was on my bicycle, which was really nice because I had motion. I would get a lot of choreography from houseless people. I would watch them doing these moves that were so beautifully kind of psychotic. And I loved it because they were the ones who were watching humans for real, because they were out there seeing it every single day. Whatever they'd experienced in their paths, whether it was war or meth, or just not having money, or whatever it was that brought them to the streets, they communicate with their bodies in ways that's really beautiful.

I'd ride my bike everywhere. I was on a bike for six years in LA and I had this motion underneath me. I'd be listening to music and observing houseless people on the streets and that would bring out a state I could enter into that helped a lot with choreography.

*When you are communicating an idea to dancers, are you telling a story? Are you showing them images? What is the means by which you get your choreography out of your head and into their bodies?*

No, I'm not telling a story. I don't like stories with dance. I think it's too boring. I want half the audience to get up and leave. I want them to be like, "This is shit." I haven't done my work if people like it. You know what I mean? I want them to see it and say, "Oh God, what the hell? This is rude and mean and not fair."

So with my dancers---I told my last dancer, Maija, "Listen, I want you. But I also need a monster. I don't want a dancer, I want a monster."

I had one process of creating a piece where I was teaching them what it felt like to be in a psycho dance situation. I was throwing things at them in the rehearsal space. I was turning the music on and off. I was turning the lights on and off. I was getting aggressive with them. And then when we did the show---it was at Zebulon, which is a very special nightclub---I really loved my main dancer's body movements, but her face was frustrating me.

I was doing the piece to Pharmakon, which is super, super gnarly music. There's a section of it where she just coughs for the whole thing, and I came out dancing during the cough, and then the dancers come out, and I had them representing "liberty, blood, land, justice." It was about immigration, but in a very abstract way. That was the one when my dad played saxophone at the end. He played free jazz and I danced to it. But when we did the piece at Zebulon, the woman who was playing me as the Statue of Liberty kept doing this eyebrow thing---an overly dramatic face that I disdain in contemporary choreography. So during the show, I drank an entire bottle of water and spit it in her face, and she looked at me with an honest expression and I said, "That's the face I want!" She kept going. It was incredible. She tells me, years later, that that moment changed her life in a lot of ways.

I don't know what I do to my dancers. I try to give them enough space that they can translate what's in their heads. But we're meeting at some sort of middle point in the music. I'm giving them movement and sometimes I give them a little bit of a backstory. Like for this last one I did about birth, I showed them what it felt like to be in labor. I screamed. I got on all fours. I ran around. I also had them put the fake bellies on. What does it make you feel like to be pregnant? These were all women who had never had babies. It took 30 minutes of them walking around the studio with their bellies, experiencing that. I asked them, "What do you care for most?"

I don't like "this is the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end, this is the climax, this is what it's about." I don't treat dance as academic. New York has a very academic approach to dance, which I appreciate. Los Angeles is very "dance for fuck sake, dance to dance, dance because we can."

It may seem kind of elitist or weird, but when you find that grit, it's so beautiful, because we're emulating things---again, like a houseless person or someone sitting at a bus stop. We're emulating the things that you see in life. A brief moment or the moment just before something happens. But I don't want to force feed you. Most of my stuff is from a dream or from an experience I've had. It's piecing together abstract elements of my life. My brain is also not normal. I'm an art baby. I'm Lita Albuquerque's daughter---I have cobalt blue pigment and toxins in my mind. That's why I don't need drugs. I am drugs, to quote Salvador Dali.

*I'd love to hear a bit more about that relationship---the role that the dancers play in shaping a piece. How much is it a collective product of everyone who's involved as opposed to something that you are bringing to the dancers?*

Dancers are huge---they are the piece. It's just that I am so particular about picking my music---I'll listen to a track for, I'm not kidding you, 10 years. I work with my dancers in that same way. It's not always the same dancers, but I'm very specific about who I use. Those are the people who can experience past lives when they dance. They're the ones who can throw me off. They have to throw me off. They are bold in their choices. 

There's one woman named Maija Knapp who I just---I'm obsessed with her. She can do anything. She's got these thighs that are like trees and her deep *plié* is practically on the ground. Then all of a sudden, she's frolicking through a meadow, but she looks like she could cut your head off. She's just a beast. She's incredible. I've worked with her since she was 18. She's 26 now. I feel like she's what I always wanted to be in a dancer.

It really depends on the piece. But thinking about who can execute it is a big part of my process, because half the time I don't believe in my work. I don't think it's going to be good enough, and then I put it on the body of a dancer who brings out a different light.

When I was teaching a lot, I remember I would love the mistakes that people made. I would write down the mistakes. If all the bodies drop, and one person stands up because they forgot to drop, I would take that as the next piece of choreography. And Heffington always said, "Live in your mistakes." If you fall to the ground, live in it. Be that mistake, be it even further than you could possibly imagine. Don't run from it. Don't try to pick up the pieces. Thoroughly enjoy your mistake. I try to teach that with dance as well.

*What have been some of your most important decisions in the development of your career, in your practice? What kinds of choices stand out to you?*

I have no idea. What do you mean?

*Did you have moments when you had to choose to go one way or another? When you had to locate what kind of choreographer you would be?*

Yeah, absolutely. The industry in LA is very complicated. You have layers and layers. You have touring dancers, you have hip-hop dancers, you have contemporary dancers. Within the contemporary scene, you have the artsy ones, you have the more normal ones, you have modern dancers which don't really have too big of a place here, because they're more in the academic world---you're going to see them more at universities.

Also contemporary and modern, we kind of butt heads a little bit. Modern dancers are introverted, they're looking down. To me---I'm sorry, modern dancers, I love you, but it looks like a pillow party. There's no guts to it. Rude! 

Contemporary dancers look like they're on drugs but they make eye contact with you. And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh damn!" We always joke, we show each other videos of people walking who are on acid or on meth or whatever, and we're like, "Oh, a contemporary dancer." But then we make eye contact and that's what's powerful about contemporary---we use our eyes to communicate. We use our eyes for connection. We use our eyes for direction. 

I've been in Hollywood for too long. In Hollywood, as a movement director, I'm a punching bag between a photographer who wants weird and a celebrity that only knows sexy. Honestly, that's my job. I'm in the way of the lighting person. It's the weirdest job because you have this celebrity that really knows how to be sexy, but the photographer wants them to look bizarre and is trying to convince them to do this for the cover of *Vogue*. It is not the easiest thing to do.

When I was auditioning as a dancer, I would go to auditions with like three to four hundred people. I would be the one in the back, slow dancing with a ghost. "Can I please leave? Like I really don't want to do this. This is not my style." They were sending me out for like *Frozen* the musical, cruise ship gigs, things that were so out of my wheelhouse, and I kept saying to my agents, "I come from Heffington, I come from Kitty McNamee, Mecca Andrews...that world of contemporary," and they said they get it. But when they were sending me out for this stuff I'm like, "Help, I'm not this dancer."

So eventually I got named the "eclectic dancer," which really drove me bonkers. And then I was the "East Side dancer" which also drove me bonkers. They just keep trying to categorize you, and after being with my agency now for like at least fifteen years---I think I've been with Bloc for a super long time---they finally understand me. It also took me a very long time to be repped as a choreographer. They have a very small choreography department and a very large dance department.

It wasn't until I choreographed for Katy Perry that they accepted me as a choreographer. Then things shifted. All of a sudden, now I'm treated differently. But I'm still kind of low-hanging fruit in that world because there are so many incredible choreographers in LA.

This is another thing about dance which is really weird: It's one of the only art forms where your body disintegrates, but your emotional experiences accelerate. So you're at this weird crossroads where you feel "my body can't do this," but I've experienced sexual assault, or I've experienced being robbed, or I've experienced falling in love, I've experienced having a baby. As a 41-year-old dancer, I can bring that. But I can't kick my leg up high and I can't do triple pirouettes anymore. When you watch an older dancer, it's so beautiful because you're witnessing those things that they've seen. And when you watch a younger dancer, you're like, "You can do all that with your body, but you need to go through a little bit more life."

I feel like now they're trying to take the art out of me. Freelancing is constantly trying to take the art out of you. They always hire you, and they're like, "We want dance, but not *dance*. We want this, but not that." Why do I have all this skill but can't utilize it properly? Lack of funding in America for the arts. 

I never became a touring dancer because I was always too tall. You have to look like---you have to blend in. You can't threaten the lead singer. I've always stayed in the art world of dancing. I've made like twelve collaborations with my mother. That kind of puts me in a different category, too.

I don't know about the decisions. I think I've---I mean half the time I wonder why I still do this. It's totally crazy. It's such a weird thing.

*Maybe decision is not the right word for what moved you along.*

Yeah, I mean, I've surrounded myself with the people who move me, and then kept those people close to me as much as I could. I think now I've gotten to a point where I'm one of the people who moves other people, so that feels really nice, you know, for people to gravitate towards me. Some of my dancers were like, "I did this show even though we weren't getting paid because you're a legend." And I'm like, "A legend?!" Okay, that's nice.

But I think it's just---I don't know. I don't know how I got here. I tell people I've tried to run from dance my whole life and it's obviously my passion, because it just keeps eating me.

*It seems like actually the work has grown around you. Your turn to choreography grew out of the mismatch of your body to a certain set of expectations, right? And it grew out of relationships and out of need in the context of the pandemic and scenes you found yourself in, rather than something where you're directing it with an intention or plan.*

And teaching---teaching really turned me into a choreographer.

*Yes, that's right. That's not what one might expect.*

Teaching was huge, because all of a sudden it was just like the---what's the word I'm looking for---the accountability of having to show up with new moves and a new song. That's a lot of pressure over twenty years of having to have cutting edge music and cutting edge moves. Whether I have two people in class or 300 people in class, whether I have professional dancers in class or someone who doesn't know left from right, and they walk into mirrors all the time. I've had everything---I've had people burst into tears. I've had people throw up. We've seen it all. Teaching really helped me understand what choreography is.

*To go back to that question of transmission---and tear apart my framing here if it's not right: How do you communicate those moves that you come to a class with into the bodies of the people who come to experience them and to hold them? Is it through modeling them in your body? Is it through telling them who they're becoming, what they're becoming?*

No, it's modeling it in my body and working it through my body with them. There's a lot of statistics now that say dance is a cure for depression, because bodies are moving in unison together and doing the same thing. You're not just going to the gym and working out by yourself. You're in a collective room of bodies that are doing something together. You're increasing your beta endorphins. You're finding a physical and cognitive alignment in your body. You're turning your goddamn brain off. That's the trick---you have to turn your brain off.

It doesn't work if your brain is on. You need to learn my language, however. So you have to keep one part of your lizard brain on, with one eye open, but you have to turn the rest of your brain off, or else you cannot absorb this information. It's the most meditative state you could possibly be in. Again, going back to Heffington teaching when that earthquake was happening---I was the only one in the class who noticed the earthquake, and he got mad at me because he said, "You're not here, Jazz." And he used to say that to me all the time. He'd go "Jazz, why didn't you take class?" I'm like, "Dude, I was just in class." He's like, "No, you were not in class. You were in the mirror. You were fixing your hair. You were not in class." I'm like, "Damn! You can see that?" He's like, "I see everything."

When I teach, I'm trying to keep it open for people who don't know how to move. I also need to let them experiment. They're trying---first of all, they're in a studio. Let's just start---step one: you're in a dance studio staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. Good God! Maybe you hate your body. Maybe you love your body, but you're staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. It's totally intimidating, especially for dudes, too, because you're walking into this room full of beautiful women in leggings. There's a lot going on.

So I work them out for forty-five minutes. We do cardio. We do sit-ups, we do push-ups, we do burpees, we do stretching. We blow our lips out, we scream, we do so much stuff in that forty-five minutes of fully strengthening and release. There's a lot of release. And then we work on a combo for one minute to a minute and a half of a song and I start with maybe two or three counts of eight, or the beginning of the track, and we just do it over and over and over again. We start building and building and building until, "Does everybody feel good? Can we move on?"

Half the class says no. Half the class says yes. We do a little bit more, then a little bit more, then a little bit more, and then all of a sudden, you have this dance. By the time class is over that dance---you're holding onto it by the cliff's edge. You're like, "I don't have it at all. I can't wait to come next week when I can actually turn my brain off for real."

When I take other people's classes I'm usually struggle city---they do five moves, and I'm like, "Yo yo, do it again." I am so bad at picking up choreography. It is so hard for me, which is weird. Being a teacher, you get into this authoritative state where you're the one telling people what to do. And then when you take other people's classes, you're like, "Oh my God! I have no idea what I'm doing." If my students saw me, they'd be like, "Who is that? She doesn't know how to dance." That's one of the reasons I love dance so much. It's impossible to master. It is always changing. Just as your body is always changing too. It is a cognitive and physical duet. 

Everything is very dependent on what physical and mental state you get to after the warm-up. The warm-up is a really big part of my dance. Some people come for just the warm-up so they can get into that. Some people come for just the choreo. But if they haven't gotten through the warm-up, it's like they haven't been initiated properly and I don't really want them to just do the combo, because they can hurt themselves.

*That's how they begin to turn their brains off?*

The warm-up. And it's the same every time. It's super hard and you're sweating buckets, and we blow our lips out. We stretch our mouths out. We do so much in that warm-up that all of a sudden, once you're done with that, most people say my class is in two parts. They're like, "Your class almost feels like two classes, because your warm-up is almost like its own class." And then we move into the combo.

And I tell people with the combos---this is the other thing about dance that's really interesting, especially when you're learning with a mirror. The mirror can be very problematic. You have to either look through the mirror or practice the "school of fish". I call it a school of fish...if the fish start moving, make sure you know the direction---you don't want to go against the stream, you're going to physically get hurt.

This is another reason why having professionals and non-dancers in the same classroom is very problematic. There's etiquette and there are a lot of rules within a classroom. When you go across the floor from diagonal to diagonal, you would never reverse and go back. You're going to get hit in the face. You go to the other diagonal and you come around to the other side. Some people don't know that and I forget that people are not classically trained. I have had a lot of collisions. I forget that I have to keep telling people, and a lot of dancers get really frustrated when non-dancers are in the classroom because they don't have spatial awareness.

Spatial awareness is a huge part of being a dancer---huge. If you hit another dancer in the face---oof! You have not studied. You have not studied space. You have to understand space.

*What does studying space mean? Does that mean knowing those rules? Or does it mean something else?*

It means knowing that if I'm gonna do this, I'm going to do that. I'm committing to that. What does that mean for you if you're standing next to me? If you'd like to run into me, I will run into you. I will hit you so hard---not on purpose. But this is my space. That's your space.

You can do all you want in your space. If you want to do it in my space, I will hit you in the face. We're gonna clash. We're gonna hit. And that's cool, too---like, I'm down, I'm down for us to mix spaces. We can mix spaces, but be prepared in your body. Hold your center, push your belly button to your spine, and know that you're gonna get hit. I'm gonna get hit.

It's different than martial arts, because we're trained to not hurt each other. It's a team sport that does not hurt. We're trained to lift and help each other. We have to be on that same plane. We're constantly looking out of the sides of our eyes because we have each other's backs. We're in this together. If you screw up, if you fall off the train, you could potentially knock out the whole system.

It's kind of like being on a spaceship. Everybody is part of that spaceship, and we all have to contribute. If you don't know the rules of space, you're going to mess up the ride. If you trip me as a dancer, and I break my leg, you've ruined my career. You have to know the space, or you have to be prepared to take the consequences of not knowing the space.

Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm making any sense.

*It's so beautiful to hear you articulate this stuff.*

I'm really glad to talk about this, because I have a new brain now. Second child in, you get a new brain every time you get a child. I don't even know what left and right is right now.

*A lot of what you've talked about seems to be moments of turning away from traditions like ballet. What legacies, what currents do you find yourself drawing on in building your work?*

I didn't major in dance at UCLA, I majored in history. I was sitting there watching bodies get blown up. I'm watching someone with no legs scoot on their ass. I'm watching violence in the body, because a lot of my students would be like, "Your movements are like a little ballerina that has no head or no arms." My moves can be very violent. I have a lot of aggression too. I need to let it out in dance.

I think of the visuals that I saw as a historian. I also learned as a historian that there are no answers to things. Historians are very different than political scientists. They're not saying, "This happened because of this." They're saying, "I'm going to read everything, and I'm going to say, look at this and look at this---isn't that an interesting juxtaposition?" This concept was working its way into my choreographic brain---history and broken bodies---without me even knowing. 

One of the professors at UCLA would say that dance originated from agriculture, which was really beautiful because you were thinking about people stomping and planting seeds. We don't really know---like what comes first, the chicken or the egg, dance or music? Where is dance from? What is dance? I like this kind of idea that it came from agriculture.

But, again, I am a ballerina at heart, even though I've rejected ballet. My feet look like monsters---like, I've had people come up to me and ask if I'm okay, just by looking at my feet. And I'm like, "Yo dude, yes, I'm fine. I've lived with them my whole life. Appreciate it."

I've also seen a lot of amazing dance. I've seen Batsheva, I've seen Marie Chouinard, I've seen Louise Lecavalier, I've seen La La La Human Steps. I've seen these companies---Netherlands Dance Theater, Crystal Pite---that have blown my mind with choreographically. You know, Pina Bausch---I have to look at it like, "Try not to take everything that they're doing! I want it all!" I allow myself to take a little bit. And when I'm really stuck, I watch videos of these dancers and these choreographers---Paul Lightfoot, is another---people who have blown me away.

Let's say you're going to make pasta, right? You're putting it through this pasta machine, putting the wrong ingredient through the pasta maker. I'm going to put meat or put apples through the pasta maker, and then see how it comes out in my body. I'm looking at them on a flat screen, which is the worst way to learn choreography. Then I close my eyes. I put on a different track and I see what happens. Have I taken some of their movements? Of course. Has it come into my subconscious? Of course. Am I choreographing from my dreams? Yes. It's all mixed in there. Have I ripped from people I love? Absolutely. Oh, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker! Amazing choreographer. So it blends in. It's kinda hard to pinpoint my choreography to one thing.

I don't know how to answer these questions.

*You're doing it.*

I'm realizing dance is so abstract, it is just---it's so bizarre. I always did tell people I dance so I don't have to speak. There's so much I can't articulate with words. I can write them down, but verbally saying them is super hard.  
  
With my body I can scream and whisper, sometimes at the same time. 

*What do you think that other aspects of life can learn from dance? Are there lessons to draw from the way in which patterns carry through bodies?*

I don't know. Keep going.

*Are there lessons from dance for other kinds of worlds---people who are creating traffic patterns, people who are trying to figure out how to go to other planets, people who are trying to survive in the streets? What are the lessons from dance that carry to other parts of life?*

Well, first of all, you have this body just once, and you gotta have fun with it. We all hate our bodies to a particular degree. You're in this sack---what is this thing? What does it do? It gains weight, it loses weight. It looks pretty, it looks ugly, you know---it's all these things. You have to have fun with your sack because you get that sack only once. Please have fun with your sack---step one. It gets so heady, especially the body dysmorphia among dancers. The amount of stuff we do to ourselves is horrible.

In terms of what people could learn, I think it would be the spatial awareness. It has to also do with carrying yourself in a way that makes sense to you, carrying yourself in a way that you want to present. For example, if I'm gonna walk down the street, I'm holding my heart open. My back is down. I'm breathing out of my back. My rib cage is closed, my center is engaged, and I'm walking. Do you think I've ever been beat up in my life on the street? Have I ever been mugged? Hell no! People don't touch me because I'm holding my body in a way that says I understand this body. I own this body and I command this body. Would you want to hurt me? Try to---let's go.

It's a matter of building a body that you're having fun with and that carries the person that you want to be. We have to walk into the world like that, or else we're screwed. Especially as women these days---there's a lot of imagery out there. There's a lot going on with social media---we could go down that rabbit hole, which would be a whole other conversation.

But if you want to wear a mini skirt and you want to wear tassels on your tits, you better own your body. Same with men. If you want to wear a miniskirt and tassels on your tits, you need to own your body. Or non-binary folks or trans. Dance is about understanding your body and understanding where you have your limitations and also where you have your strengths. It is going to make us more powerful as humans walking down the street.

Maybe what I was talking about with spatial awareness: You know your space. I know my space, you know your power, I know my power. If you know your power, I can know my power even better. We can power it up. But if you don't know your power and I have power, this is a problem. Let's move smoothly through this world together, eh? 

I think it's about having a conversation. I talk about dance as having a conversation between your body and energy. Where does my body end? Does it end at my fingertips now? No, because the energy is shooting past and going out from there. If you see a dancer who stops their energy short, it's not good. It's not right.

Taking the outline of the body and extending it, and then having a conversation---that is when you have a beautiful dance. When you bring other bodies into the mix, when you have multiple bodies, that's when things get super beautiful because you have lots of conversations. But it's also---this is something I learned with WIFE---it's also about the silence. We would stand on those boxes very, very still for a long time, for an almost awkward amount of time. There was music, but we were so silent with our bodies that you didn't know what was going to happen.

All of a sudden, the first move was powerful because there had been so much space in silence. It allowed that movement to scream.
