a word on context.

September 11th 2001 8:45AM was a tragic moment in our history as world citizens, so too many moments that came in the aftermath of that. I was not in NYC for 9/11, I was in Miami, in a second grade physical education classroom. I did not watch ash fall to gravel, I watched over and over two planes crash into two buildings on a TV screen. Today I am in Peru watching that same image on a Canal EN, referred to me as Peru’s CNN.

I made my first dance about 9/11 in 2010, as as senior in high school for John A Ferguson Senior High’s dance showcase. It was simple. I called it Where We Were, I sat on a couch mimicking the flipping through TV channels with a remote, when the pulse of the music dropped dramatically my eyes fell on the news that two planes had crashed into two towers in a wild city I’d beheld only in movies and on well… TV. I sat on that couch and cried for 2 minutes, that was my dance. In 2014, my senior year at university, I was choreographing The Crux of the Matter, I happened to hold rehearsal on 9/11. We took that day to wander through a park, reading memorials of victims, and used that spirit of remembrance to create movement as a kind of homage that found its way into the work, a piece about the re-building of a broken world.  I appreciate those dances so much because they were true to my context, how I experienced 9/11 from Florida, as a person who had never seen the twin towers stand in the Manhattan skyline. 

So today I’m wondering: what does it mean now to be an art-maker in NYC? Each of us art-makers, wherever we are, make art in the context of our place, of it’s history, it’s misgivings, it’s trauma. And we are in relationship with that. What does it mean to make art in the context of a city’s grief? What does it mean to be making dance in the context of NYC’s 18 year old grief?  What does it mean to commit to making art in a place full of people who were here first, many of whom suffered and felt through this event at irreparable consequence?

Every year I feel this day, although I knew no one caught in those towers.

This is the city where people feel that loss intimitley every day AND the city where conspiracy theorists still show up daily to advocate their take on 9/11; the country where 9/11 led to war and racism AND where people believe it didn’t even happen. Today, I’m not able to find myself in the tangle of experiences my identity as an American citizen holds, but I do question my responsibility as a person who has called New York home. A person making art for  this place, sometimes, of this place. 

xo,

DZ Maciel