I am building a house. It is being built move by move and thought by thought to provide a new and alternate shelter to blur the lines between what we do, who we are and how we dance and what we dance. This house is built with each gathering of Eleanor Smith, Weena Pauly and me. We build it by cultivating vulnerability, trust, both pushing and accepting our limitations, working, trying, failing, letting go of every single generated movement every day, and repeating again and again and again. We build with our fleshed, boned, skinned and blooded bodies: following these magnificent biological containers as they work to create meaning, connect with our psyches, and unfold private imaginations, sensations and feelings. We also build with our messy, crisscrossing and imperfect minds: we root out old beliefs, we testify and let go, we seek to understand what we can about ourselves and each other and revel in what we can’t. After four years this house, while still in progress, is inhabitable and finally, finally we can dance. This dance feels different because it does different things. It feels like empathy, like connection, like an open hand, like life. It looks different, because it moves in different ways. This dance changes each time it happens. It does not strive towards perfection, towards delivery of product or concretized ideas, it celebrates kinesthesia, connectivity, and presence of being in all its glorious manifestations: be it stumbling, flailing, boringness, rivetingness, in its zone, out of it, sharing and withholding. We work within our intersections and our unions, both celebrating and railing against our own separatenesses. We feel, experience, gain feedback from others and each other to learn, no longer judging visually, but gathering and then knowing intuitively and instantly. It is in fact not an ‘it’ at all, it is an us: Weena, Eleanor, me, and you. This dance lives in the house and the house has an open door. We share how we create. We communicate, we talk about it, we write about it, we do not hide and this dance, this house, is being made in plain sight, quiet enough so you can hear it SHOUT. -December 2015