My body only knows what it knows.
I remember words I would repeat to my niece when she was younger: “Don’t ask the fish about the water.” It was my attempt to have her question her thoughts—to be endlessly curious about what she didn’t know, to pursue knowledge.
Baggini asks us to question everything, saying the function of questioning isn’t to establish certainty, but instead to test the grounds of what we believe so that we can be certain (29).
“I doubt. Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am.” Descartes reminds me that even though there are imposed systems of gender, race, economics, norms, rituals, and customs placed on me, the only liberation I truly have is in my thinking. And thus, I come to my first trouble. The brain is part of the body. Therefore, does my ability to move and express itself also form part of my liberation? If I can liberate myself through movement, then no one can confine me.
I recall seeing a man with his headphones standing at the streetlight. He breaks into dance. And although his movement is structured much like high-quality expressive pop dance (by this, I mean he isn’t rolling on the floor or doing anything that would be considered lyrical or contemporary dance), I’m struck by his ability to not care what people think. In that caring, we become captured by society. Our bodies become enslaved to the modalities of the body that are sanctioned or considered “normal,” legible, or proper for the circumstances. And yet, my body knows it wants to be free like that man. To not care. To have the freedom to express itself. I move my arm in a wave-like manner. My head is still stuck. My feet are still planted. All I can do is move my arms. I notice a small move up and down. As if my body knows what upward mobility feels like. What skyscrapers feel like. What colonization feels like. What capitalism feels like. And it can’t do anything else but that. I want to move like that man at the streetlight. In fact, I want to roll all over the road. I want to throw myself atop the hoods of cars. Dance like I’ll live forever—a reference to Fame: The Musical. I want to allow the dramatics to set me free, to unshackle me from the constraints that others have placed on me.
And so I return to Descartes and the liberation of the mind. Perhaps instead of “I doubt. Therefore, I think. Therefore I am,” it could be written: “I move. Therefore, I can be free. Therefore, I can change.”
The Portuguese have a word—mudança. I’ve been obsessed with this word ever since I was in my twenties. It simultaneously means to move and to change, as if suggesting that when you move, you inevitably bring change.
When I teach all-abilities dance, I begin with a lesson on the breath. The breath is what moves us. I ask everyone to stand still, to not move a muscle. And although stillness is what everyone is striving for, ultimately there are two underlying things happening. First, we are, in fact, moving at 30 km/s through the universe as we rotate, feet firmly planted on the Earth. Thanks to gravity and the atmosphere, we don’t perceive this. How beautiful to be part of this queer existence on the earth—that we can be still and be moving so fast at the same time. Secondly, thanks to the medulla oblongata, we don’t have to think about breathing. Breath is constantly there. Even when you try to hold your breath, your life force (or your brain) will inevitably force you to take in a breath to keep on living. And so, as this breath fills your lungs, your chest expands, blood moves, and then breath is released back into the world, only to be taken up by the trees that feed on our carbon dioxide. That breath causes so much movement inside us, itself moving around the earth through our exhale. We don’t need to do much to bring about movement. We don’t need to do much to bring about change. Movement and change are interlinked. They are inevitable.
Artist, writer, researcher, and Indigenous matriarch of the Umbanda spiritual belief system, Leda Martins, writes about spiral time. In a keynote address at the Performance Studies International Conference in Fortaleza, Brazil, 2025, Leda stated that the only true thing in the universe is energy. And we know that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed (Newton). Martins points to this understanding of energy as a basis for Umbanda cosmology and, furthermore, into ideas around performance. There is no beginning. There is no end. There is only energy that changes. Long before you get into the theatre, something is happening. You then enter the theatre and take your seats. The curtain goes up. The actors have been rehearsing this for a month. They just entered the stage from their dressing room offstage right. You breathe in. They say their first lines. The story unfolds. The characters are transformed. You are taken on a journey. You feel things. The actors bow. The curtains go down. You exhale. You get up and exit the theatre. You reflect and ponder on what you have just witnessed. You have discussions with other people who may or may not have watched the same production. And years later, you reflect on that story and how you see it in everyday life. You breathe in. You breathe out. Artwork, through this lens, has no beginning and no end. It is just a series of culminating journeys and transformations that continue on and on.
My feet are two ancient rocks—my ancestors—atop of which old oak trees have grown. Two of them, meeting at the pelvis. That pelvis holds what was once a quiet bowl of tranquil turquoise blue water. But over time, the tectonic growth of fascia and the fracking of trauma have dislodged the mountains it is held in. A crack has slowly ruptured up the granite cliff, leaving it all feeling quite precarious. At any point, it could all collapse, crushing the oak trees and the ancestors. Atop the granite cliff lies an unbalanced weight: the right pulling down, the left projecting forward. They are imbalanced and moving, each in their own time, like a grandfather clock—swaying idiosyncratically. The pendulum of one makes the other sway faster. This causes the crack in the granite to rupture even more.
Quietly, at the top of all of this, is a quiet rainforest, where the fog is so thick you can’t see anything ahead of you. On a sunny day, everything clears up, and the bowl of water can be seen with the naked eye. The oak trees feel strong and rooted.
And the ancestors dance in circles.
Yes and, two
Ancient
Rocks.
Yes,and turquoise blue water.
Yes,and te ct on ic gr ow th of fa sc ia
Yes,and F r Ac King oF TrA uMa
Yes,and rupture up granite cliffs.
Yes,and crushing the oak tree and the ancestors
Yes,and the pendulum of one
Makes the other
Sway faster
Yes,and
The fog
So thick
You can’t
See
Any
Thing
In
Front
Of
You.
Yes,and
The ancestors dance in circles
Queerness is wild. It does not travel in a straight line. Because of this, i want to engage with the meaning of queerness in a discursive way. I want to dig into the Earth and see it’s layers. I want to travel, instead, around something, in some sort of Fibinaci pattern, to spiral myself into a subject-matter through engagement with multiples. I want to exist in a pluralistic state where there are many of one thing and mulptple many more. I want to exist inside a constellation blending the personal with the academic, the felt sense with the sciences, the mysterious with the rational . In basic terms, I want to engage with queerness in a discursive way. Queerness as a constant moving site, a process of overlapping sites, temporarily in situ and at the same time moving; a chain of meaning devoid of any finality. Miwon Kwon states that the operative definition of site in art for the past 30 years has been the physical location. (29) This is a grounded, fixed and actual space. And that as we began to explore the expanded field of the art object, we examined art work on a phenomenological, socio-instiutaional and ultimately a discursive level. I want to examine this subject-matter from these lens. What is most important is this discursive level where the subject-matter is ungrounded, fluid and virtual. Queerness is ungrounded, fluid and virtual. It touches on everything that exists. Come with me as we travel this spiral that orbits our DNA, the Earth and the perhaps the Universe itself. May we journey. May we wonder. May we be wild.
Works Cited
Baggini, Julian. How to Think Like a Philosopher: Essential Principles for Clearer Thinking. Granta, 202Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated by Jonathan Bennett, 2017, www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf.
Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. MIT Press, 2002.
Martins, Leda Maria. Keynote Address. 30th Annual Performance Studies International Conference, December 2025, Fortaleza, Brazil.