Expanding Our Range of Motion

Us or Them? 

Democrat or Republican?   

In or Out? 

Protest or acceptance? 

Right or Left?

Right or Wrong? 

Friend or foe? 

Poetic or practical?

Win or lose? 

Good or bad?

Fight or flight? 

Sense or nonsense? 

Male or female? 

Black or White? 

The binaries go on and on and on. 

In this moment when so many of us are stiff with fear, rigid with rage, and locked into our positions, we at DS4SI suggest considering something counterintuitive. When it feels like we can’t think and we can’t move, we suggest that “can’t think” and “can’t move” are in fact deeply connected. In this moment, instead of the binaries offered to us, we believe we need a range of motion. That range of motion—that movement that breaks a binary—can also help us rethink it. Instead of going harder, locking in, ramping up our righteousness, we need to explore the uncertainty, the not-knowing. The thirdness. The weird, the poetic, the perverse, the liminal. 

Trickster figures have long messed with the line dividing this from that, troubling the certainty of categories, lingering in the shadows, the edges, the in-betweens.  If we need to see and feel and inhabit all the spaces between this and that, who can show us this range of motion? Who can help us flex into spaces we don’t even know exist? Who can push us past our boundaries of words, of certainty, of false binaries, of knee-jerk reactions?

Now is a moment to call on the ones who rigorously and joyously know that there are many ways to move a muscle, to take up space, to shape and stretch a thing, to feel and express a thing, to shift or bend a thing. 

Now is a moment to call on the tricksters who fuck with our clarity, who refuse to act right, who eat our righteousness for lunch and leave us the dishes to wash. 

Now is a moment to call on the DJs, who mix one song into the next     so     we     don’t     stop    dancing. 

Now is a moment to call on the weavers, who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machines which were there to replace them, giving us the word sabotage. 

Now is a moment to call on the singers, who remind us that our voices can do more than talk, that they can come from deep in our bellies and rise up, moving us to tears or ecstasy or collective power. 

Now is a moment to call on the improvisers who let us see how very much they don’t know, and don’t need to know, not yet. Maybe not ever.

Now is a moment to call on the acupuncturists, who show us how   if     you     poke     here     it     changes    over     there.          

Now is a moment to call on the househeads, who insist on bringing multiple, often conflicting worlds to the dance floor, who make room for weird cousins, the archive, the strange.  

Now is a moment to call on the comedians, who teach us the power of amplifying the absurd, of using humor to make strange the horrible, to question the unquestionable.

Now is not the time to allow ourselves (or each other) to limit what is thinkable, or doable, or feel-able. Now is a time to bravely insist on a wider range of motion. Yes, this soup. Yes, this backwards walk. Yes, this love story. Yes, this small gathering. Yes, this awful joke. Yes, this commitment to dance every day at 4pm. 

This is an invitation to add to the range of motion! This is an insistence that we cannot wait to know, cannot rely on the familiar, cannot cancel the awkward. 

Range of motion has to live with the muddy, the messy, the wrong, the uncool. Because we will not know ahead of time what will work. We must move without knowing, move with hunches, move with those whom we deeply trust, but let the movement invite those who are still strangers, still strange. In this moment we must summon and celebrate all our not-knowing. We must imagine that we will discover and inhabit spaces that keep us all alive.