The Choreographic Moment: Ideas from Jo Kreiter

The Ghost of a Something

By Jo Kreiter

The choreographic moment is the beginning before the beginning. It’s when something gnaws. Or wakes me up at 3:00 in the morning. It’s when there is a ghost of a something I am beginning to intuit but have not yet fully understood.

Every Thursday I drive down Valencia Street right where it runs into Mission street in San Francisco. Planned Parenthood sits right on the corner. And every Thursday, there is a religious zealot who parks his truck, signs, banners and posters all over the sidewalk in front of the clinic. I don’t know how he is allowed to do this, but no one stops him. He has signs full of lies… like "abortion causes breast cancer," and he has graphic images blown up and distorted. He makes me furious. Here is yet another man trying to tell women what to do with our bodies. That fury seethes in me and jumps out every Thursday when I drive by. That fury is part of the choreographic moment.

Two years ago, I took my son to the library, and while he searched tirelessly through the Manga and Anime, I sat down with Harper's Magazine. Harper's isn’t something I usually read. But I found an essay in it that called out to me. Rebecca Solnit wrote “Cassandra Among the Creeps,” giving a historic and contemporary lens on women and credibility. The article touched a nerve. I thought of Thursday mornings. I had, to this point, been spending a lot of time (years in fact) planning and making a trilogy of dances that explored income inequality through a feminist lens. But this article was a call into the core of misogyny. It is a painful concept I want to delve into with my intellect, heart, and spirit.

At 50, I am really tired of misogyny. The Trumps, Cruzes, and sidewalk pontificators of this world really drag me down. The assholes who are interfering with reproductive justice need to be silenced. I want to make a dance that changes the conversation. Equally, I am aware of a growing connection between aging and misogyny. Conventional wisdom says that women who age become irrelevant. Invisible. I refuse to accept this. As a dancer, I know so many women in their 50s, 60s and 70s whose physical power persists, whose agility persists and whose infectious generosity also persists. This is the beauty that misogyny can’t get to.

So now I am cooking up a block long, evening length, off the ground dance that will insist on the right to be believed, for women. The project won’t premiere til over a year from now. The planning, scheming, fundraising, and collaborating are all in motion, in varying degrees of thoughtful incompletion.

To initiate for the project, I searched on the Internet for women and credibility. Google brought forward images of purses and pornography. I laughed a bit, cried a little and became all the more interested in how, where, and whether women are being believed at this point in the 21^st century. The Credibility Project will address the issue of credibility for women. This site-specific dance will give spectacular language to a serious sociopolitical issue that has not been carefully examined since Anita Hill challenged Justice Clarence Thomas. A lack of credibility for women is simultaneously a legal, social, and economic problem that lingers. I look forward to the process of researching it, the creative practice of making it, and to the act of performing it in public space, where our laws, institutions and cultural assumptions actually affect us. I hope the guy from the sidewalk on Valencia Street comes to see the show.

Jo Kreiter is the Artistic Director of Flyaway Productions. www.flyawayproductions.com