Collective Choreographies

In the Drawing as it is on the Dance Floor

LS sends a Miles Davis 1988 interview this week, “Not sure if this resonates but reminded me of you. What happens in ur drawing process when u put the wrong line. Do u keep going?”

To the interviewer, Davis responds without missing a beat.

“A wrong line? The more… you said line… When I make a wrong line… The line isn’t wrong until after you put the next one down. Music is the same way. The sound— You don’t make bad notes. The other— the note next to the one that you think is bad corrects the one in front. Only way you can do that is by experience. Only way you can take a line that you didn’t mean to draw is to draw every day. Then you can be able to say, “well, I put this in, it isn’t too far away from the thing.” Or maybe change colors. Just the same way of composition. It’s the same way.”

Juxtaposing my drawing process with Davis’s articulation of the relationship between lines and accumulation, LS identifies a guiding rule that has held since I first started notating choreographies in july of ’24. The mistaken steps, the discernible difference and inevitable idiosyncrasy of individuals performing the same movements side by side, the inadvertent turns or spins in the wrong direction, the flair and flourishes intentionally layered onto synchronized footwork, these are all part of the composition, in the drawing as it is on the dance floor.

I let the lines lead my pen in the same way that I feel my eye led by dancers in proximity on the floor. Adjacency creates pockets of similarity and difference as we sync up, copying each others’ high kicks or extra spins, aligning our movements, and sharply or subtly differentiate from each other, adding hair flips or kick steps or swiveling our hips. MB reminds me one night onstage when I think I’ve forgotten the choreo, “it’s in your body not in your head.” The muscle memory and propulsion of group movement is what directs our physical bodies more than any coherent thought. It’s this interdependent looseness, the social quality of coordinated movement, the push pull quality of multiple bodies in shared space, that the drawing seeks to depict.

“That’s storytelling! There’s more in there than documentation!” EL laughs as we assemble the perfect matte-finish plywood frames they’ve designed and fabricated in their shop. Running our fingers over the drawings, I describe the various forms of difference and sameness in the lines, what types of movement they indicate, where the kick becomes a heel click instead, where a spin or turning vine is substituted for a vine, proffering the names of friends whose footwork I was evoking through specific choreography notations, since the cadence of movement within our little cohort of regulars has become so familiar these past three and a half years. “It’s amazing that you even see that,” EL says, “When I dance, I don’t clock other people’s movements.”

I work on the drawings at the cafe, at the bookstore, while waiting in line, at home in the garden, out at the bar having a beer alone on a weeknight, when I’m out at the noise show or the improvisational jazz set or the reading cum performance art trans lesbian wedding. Hand drawing feels the closest to capturing this balance between muscle memory—rhythmic repetition that becomes unconscious or automatic, and carefully calibrated rulesets for shared movement—the choreography as specified by stepsheets. When I draw out a dance, it reminds me of rock climbing, a mental puzzle paired with physical movement.

The drawing takes shape somewhere between thinking and feeling, just like dancing in the line. While drawing, I learn that I’ve got made up terminology in my own head: cross behind switch and heel actually has a name, a heel jack. While drawing, I realize that I never even learned some of these dances that I know, and have to ask friends or look online to specify the actual steps. I recall M and I first learning to line dance in april of ’23. We lock in. We stare at everyone’s feet obsessively. We shuffle shyly but insistently off to the side of the floor. We learn without verbal instruction, our visual instruction a constant scanning of the room, averaging what we can see, emulating it by approximation.

“And do u listen to the music while u draw?” LS asks. Sometimes yes, I listen to the track and think through the steps as I track them with my pen, syncing up the drawing to the dance. Other times, though, it’s something else. Here, I’m listening to Caroline Polachek while drawing James and Jackie Rice’s early 2000s choreo to hyphy classic “Blow the Whistle.” Or, I’m playing demos from our eco- psych- punk band, the Velvet Ants, and singing along because we’ve got our first show coming up at the local bike co-op in less than a month and I’ve still got to memorize my own lyrics.

A different week, I’ve been replaying People Under The Stairs album O.S.T. on a loop, but when I’m drawing a Christopher Gonzalez choreo from 2019, typically danced to the Luke Combs song “Beer Never Broke My Heart,” I realize that “Montego Slay” is a perfect swap for the dance. It changes the feel and step of the choreo completely, even though the movements themselves are technically identical. A hip hop beat brings in a whole other type of levity to the movements. It’s not something that I can explain in writing! But it is something we can practice at the gallery next week dancing together!

“If you know, you know,” but what I really mean to say is, “if you feel it with your body, you feel it.” Come dance with us at the gallery Sunday May 17th with Abi of Bootleg Linedance and Corey, Friday May 22nd with Kira and Sean of Stud Country, and Sunday May 24th with Summer and Paris of Do Si Don’tcha! We’ll learn two dances from the drawings up on the wall each night, and afterward I’ll share what lines correspond to which movements. The notational system only becomes legible as a language that you learn with your body.

The ruleset emerges from the practice of drawing. The index —or code, rosetta stone, language, pattern, as people have referred to it in turns these past two years— is a notation system that defines each type of line dance step. Each movement as specified by a stepsheet is codified as a linetype, for instance, a shuffle step, a vine, a coaster step, a high kick, or a heel jack.

Some drawings become very dense (first diptych below.) In this case, one wall of the dance is 64 counts rather than the more typical 32 counts. Twice as much music, twice as much time, twice as much movement, on the same physical space of the page, means more tightly packed and overlapping lines. Several dances “travel” more than others (second diptych) where movement traces lines back and forth across the floor, the entire grid moving synchronously along one axis at a time. Some dances move more prominently along a diagonal than parallel or perpendicular to the “front” of the room (third diptych.)

The datum for every drawing is the location of each “dancer” in the grid. The drawings themselves are not centered on the page, rather, the grid that indicates each dancer’s starting position is centered on the page. Some dances tend to move “backward,” beginning with a backward shuffle step, or heel splits or knee swivels going backward. Others move mainly “forward.” When movement skews heavily in one direction on the page, it’s possible to envision how the entire grid shifts over the course of the dance, moving across the floor, turning, course correcting, turning, and doing the same again (fourth diptych.)

Only two weeks ago, nearly two years into this drawing practice, I realize why the grid is rotated on the page when a friend asks me on the dance floor. It’s a convention of architectural drawing: orthographic projection. In the last drawing (below) 121 “dancers” are represented by the grid, the same abstraction represented in each drawing. In the center image, dancers are drawn planimetric—a bird’s eye view from above, and to the right, dancers are drawn in axonometric—in parallel projection. When you come through to the gallery next week, we’ll have a participatory drawing exercise pinned up on the wall where you can draw yourself dancing in the line, just like that image on the right.