1.

A dancer is working and a dancer is werking. This choreography stages an explicit physical task next to the work of performing the self—with both bodies carrying the exponential labor of keeping going. In más y more, choreographer and dancer José A. Luis is joined by D Hunter in a dance made to be performed twice each night, with the two performers changing roles in each iteration. In the first half of the piece, one dancer holds attention center stage, spotlit and sunglassed. This figure dances mercurial phrasework: cool, agile, adored. The second performer traverses loops around this dancer and their audience, harnessed and dragging the type of sled used for strength training. Each time they reemerge from the doorway, there is another 12.5 kg stage weight added to the sled. In each of these relentless passages, their physicality is altered as they must pull with more and more force. 

Both perspire. They don’t brush it away but they don’t exaggerate it either. At one point in the piece, there is a long wall sit—a move that requires stamina, but does not telegraph how much work it really takes. Many dancer skills entail submerging your effort, whether exertion or cognitive tricks like changing the facing or reversing on a dime. This choreography points towards unacknowledged labor, hidden labor, eroticized or fabled labor, racialized labor, gendered labor, racialized and gendered labor. Irrepressible striving is the fuel for the arts economy to which we both subscribe. In his writing, José locates this feeling within the experience of being a Mexican immigrant. He writes, “What more can I do? How much longer can I sustain this?”

This unaccounted labor is like an offgas—a cloud that fills the room. It’s the atmosphere we get used to breathing, and without it, the system would grind to a halt. When I was making work about exhaustion a decade ago, it felt like it had exuberance. Frantic energy had a gloss or sheen to it. It was something required of us as contingent workers, among whom overworking was a status symbol or something of value, a way to show that you are “in demand.” But now, after what we have weathered and are weathering, it’s lost its sheen. The hope it will all add up to something feels generally diminished. In rehearsal, José quips, “This is the hardest part—doing it all again.”

0,1

Here, my labor entails finding the right relationship to the work. Last spring, José asked me to join the production process as a dramaturg and to share writing about the piece; I brought back the term “embedded writer,” a role I had invited José himself into last year. I have dropped into rehearsals and showings, I have served as a sounding board and conversation partner, but here I am not a decision-maker. I see myself as orbiting the work, periodically reflecting back onto it. In writing, the balance comes from a place rooted in my own perspective and the integrity of my own practice, while also respecting the mystery and autonomy of José’s creative process. 

This balance is particularly crucial since I am approaching the work as a white person, and the writing is a series of points where it is possible for us to meet. Being in community means I have witnessed every piece José has presented in Minneapolis, but I also don’t presume to know everything about his practice, nor do I think it is possible to know. I stand beside audience members who will soon witness the work from their own angles. Riffing off of José’s own writing practice, which is titled Reflections, this writing is not a precise mirror, but more like a refraction that bends back towards the source.

José spoke of the unacknowledged labor of the dancer, how they are often asked to create material without being credited as such. In the role of choreographer, he aims to circumvent this through a process of translation. For this work, he creates movement material and records it, then from the video he notates a set of directions. A few I jotted down in rehearsal: “Forms come parallel to meet each other. Listen to the ground and curl up one leaf at a time. Walk towards your hands. Tornado to extend the leg back.” He gives these directions to D, who interprets them through their own body to create the phrase they will dance. It’s like a game of telephone, or a way to make something custom without the experience of having to face the blank page.

This choreographic process raises the question of what is actually happening in the dance. Commonly in a western point of view, a dance could be described as a series of actions, broken down into different parts of the body. José’s notations of the movement live somewhere between practical and poetic, a blend of metaphor and concrete steps. What is the essence of the dance? Is it more true to say that the dancer comes to put weight on two feet, or that a body is rooting in place? Is it more true to simply call it home? This is a problem of language, certainly, of the inevitable gap between what is happening and how it can be described. It’s also a question of perspective, of timing, of cultural narrative, and how we think we know what we can observe. What is the gap between doing and being, image and feeling, cause and effect? 

As part of a co-organized series called Dance Writing Practice Space held at Resource last summer, José began his workshop with an exercise where he drew a small handful of items from his bag and placed them in the center of the room. He asked the group to observe them, and directed us to write three lists: things you know by observing, things you don’t know, and what you can imagine. It was intended as relatively straightforward, but to me, this exercise exposed the complexity of witnessing. How do you know what you know? I was struck that some of the items on the imagination lists seemed to be more true than the observation lists. Choreographic processes like this work with a kind of epistemic slipperiness—one of the most fundamental things I love about dance.

1+1

más y more may be understood more accurately as a solo that is transmitted through the structure of a duet, rather than the other way around. In all the years I have known José, he has continuously framed his body of work as rooted in solo practice, even when creating group pieces. He notes that this practice is born out of necessity, and has grown into a relational ethic. In his own words, “If I don’t know myself, I don’t think I’m available to know anyone else.” This is not the first piece in which he asked performers to swap out roles in different performances. In By the Time We’re Through, each performer cycled through the “choreographer” role as an onstage observer, in a format designed to keep all the dancers on their toes. José often gestures towards the audience to cut through the visible isolation of the solo figure. In the first evening he presented, Solo w/You, José wrote a letter to each individual who attended. In más y more, the form of the work intentionally bridges self with other. While D holds their own presence and interpretation of the work, the choreographic structure implies different aspects of José’s interior world, or parts of the individual in conversation with each other.

What defines the self? Recall the discussion of dance as doing or being, image or feeling.

Who are you to the other image of yourself? Are you the reflection you see in the window? Can you be known by the contents of your backpack? Are you more strongly identified with your fantasies? This could sound like internal conflict, but in this work it’s more like the self as a prism, with facets that beam into multiple desires. Sometimes we want different things at the same time, cells dividing and multiplying. The self that is dancing in the club in flashing lights, the self that is straining to carry the load, the self that looks up to see a doorway—all are present and working in ensemble.

If we think of the self as a prism, we might also consider the other as a mirror. This dance is full of reflective surfaces: the rainbow shades, the twin rolls of mylar, sometimes the wall itself. Cross-cultural forms of the dyad often infer some kind of balance, held in dynamic tension. A duo can be a perfect replica, or a duo can be an opposite: complement or contrast. This form is haunted by binary systems, or ingrained forms of polarity. But in this dance, the swap is not even. They’re not twins, they might be half-siblings or cousins. There is no sustainable counterbalance, but one of several moons, on the verge of getting knocked out of orbit. Sometimes the direction reverses, and the surfaces of the black box seem to absorb, pulling and dampening the energy. 

A twist: José ventures that perhaps the weights are person C. The solo is a duet is a trio, with a strong gravitational pull. In this dance, you might look for the one in the two, the two in the one, the three in the room, the many, the whole. The weights themselves function as a group or set as well as discrete objects, a kind of chorus. As the weights are added to the sled, we might see it as a process of addition (+), or from another angle, expansion (x). Alongside the dancers, all the items have their own vitality and vectors of meaning. The room reverberates with a low electric hum of more-than-human life. The dancers ricochet, the pattern rebounds. Breakdown and transformation are co-constitutive. The effort that is required is exponential. 

1x1x1

One way to name the trio in this piece is: work, rest, and love. I ask José: “What is love, to you?” He smiles, chin to shoulder, exhales: “It’s unconditional.” The search for romantic love preoccupies, but the love between mother and child is fundamental. The relationship between the artist and the work is also one of love, of birthing. We discuss this and come down on different sides of the coin (or two ways of coping with a skewed system of valuation): José says you can’t expect the work to give you something back, while I have made a bargain that the work alone must sustain me.

That which you desire may not turn out exactly what you hope it will be. As in cruel optimism, as in bootstrapping, as in the romance myth, the goal may not arrive with the feelings you imagine, a sense of satisfaction or completion. The mirror may distort the object, or the fantasy turns out to be a two-dimensional set piece. In this work, the dancers press up against the wall, but never push through. We never see what is behind, or how the weights get added. Visibility does not mean success. Achievement does not mean love. When we get there, what next? What happens to all this energy expended? Is it possible to account for all that we put in? What is the measure of labor, love, loss? Why are we counting at all? 

In my rehearsal notes are two lines, one after the other but originally appearing as separate thoughts: “what is love? / the work of aligning.” That response rings true in this work, and in the labor of the dancers. In the studio, José and D attend to specificity, negotiate the limits of capacity, calibrate to the room, clarify initiation. Together they find when to unfurl, when to shift, when to drop, and what comes after this. This type of attunement is an intimate labor—working from where you are, with what you have, and towards a common meeting point. If they ask who they are together, the answer is that they move together. 

1/1 

This loop can’t go on forever. In the final sections of the piece, the two dancers come together, find stillness, grounding, and breath. Step off the treadmill and directly into a forest that has been planted in straight lines. Keep walking and the forest becomes more and more lush. Undergrowth thickens. You come to an overlook. Slick rocks, covered with moss. Time elapses. Cut cut cut stop motion, feels like speeding up, but is actually a kind of abundant waiting with no object. Tides like breathing. Lie back, head on a soft bed of soil. Finally, the scales are balanced. Zoom out, the earth spins. Inhale, cool air on skin. 

When you dip a sheet of metal in acid, it turns yellow-green, then orange. Metamorphosis comes with a slight burn. To build muscle, you must create tiny tears in the tissue and let the body regenerate. A small amount of toxicity can be an antidote. The surface of the desert cracks as it is parched. The color of dusk on Mars is actually blue. If you take the pieces apart, what does it become? 

Now into the unending rhizome. The dancers find ways to fit their bodies into each other, to make the curve of the waist a place to rest. The score is about decay, the process by which structures break down. Whole into part into whole. Chemically, the most complex thing is the last thing to decompose. But by definition, there can be no loss of energy. It goes back into the earth, or finds a new body. 

---

más y more will be presented September 19-20, 2025 at Red Eye in Minneapolis. More information and tickets here. Collaborators include D Hunter, Connor Berkompas, Mik Finnegan, Dylan Hester, Tracy V. Joe, and Emily Gastineau. 

Not really citations, but nods: cruel optimism via Lauren Berlant, exhaustion and exuberance via Jan Verwoert, all the 0s and 1s via Denise Ferreira da Silva.

---