Unbound

Illness (and death) are not the end of dance

Dear friends,

As many of you know, my beautiful momma passed on July 15th, just under a month after receiving a terminal diagnosis. My cells are still ricocheting against the metronome of time as I try to metabolize all that has unfolded in such a short span. I have scattered notes everywhere, clinging to some as-yet-unshaped essay titled In Defense of Undifferentiated, a daughter’s attempt to imagine, understand, and exalt her new gossamer threads, but for now the coherence of those thoughts remains beyond my reach.

There is, however, something important to name. To leave it unsaid would be to miss the strange and sacred timing of Mom’s departure alongside next week’s premiere of Unbound, a film my dear friend Sara Nesson first envisioned more than two years ago when she came to me with the simplest question: “Can you help?” Of course, I said yes, but never fathomed that its release would coincide with Mom’s own. But somewhere in the interstitial space beyond word and form, Unbound and Undifferentiated are sustained by the same breath, so here I am, stepping in. The water feels cold, dark, and deep and somehow, just right.

Bodies living with chronic illness have long since fallen off the pendulum of ordinary time. We find ourselves instead in the liminal space beyond productivity, expectation, efficiency, and the relentless rhythm of before and after. So it took all this un-time, for twenty remarkable people to create a dance stitched together across bedrooms, living rooms, backyards, wheelchairs, and long stretches of necessary rest. A dance where shackles and wings, illness and health, solitude and community, even self and other, blur into one another, giving way to a kind of Exquisite Corpse creativity that is carried as much through form as formlessness, becoming larger, more surprising, and truer, than any individual could have made alone.

Sara has held this vision, and my more recent unraveling, with extraordinary tenderness. Living with her own diagnosis, she has managed to be both fiercely devoted to the work and endlessly patient with herself and the people making it, understanding that honoring disabled, grieving, unfixed beings often means loosening our allegiance to deadlines, living outside the fences of conventionality, and allowing the work to be born again and again on its own looping timeline. I’ve watched her shepherd this film into the world, fostering meaning beyond the silver screen’s final choreography; we have all been nurtured and reconfigured in the making.

Yes, movement is a risk for many of these dancers. Yes, isolation has become their most intimate companion. And yet their lives embody a soft, fluid, sapience our culture rarely recognizes, and has never needed more. They have become masters of small gestures, pacing, enoughness, self-compassion, and the awkward grace beyond inherited rhythms of staged productivity and certainty. They know the terrain of the in-between, the undoable, the never-arriving. They have lived there long enough to discover that what is most life-giving dances beyond the fences of our knowing.

Since Mom’s last breath, I’ve been searching for signs of her everywhere. But it’s too easy, too comfortable, to place her in the dragonflies, the breeze, the 143’s, the thunderous sky. And believe me, I’ve been there. Just yesterday as the clouds rumbled overhead, I longed for my own body to thunder back, booming and cracking open to meet her. Even poets—especially poets—have long insisted that death is the opposite of leaving. But something in my heart wants to, no needs to, reject that safety now. Can I let myself feel the bones of my brokenness and trust that when I stay in the shards of that void, a new possibility, outside of here or gone, this or that, is waiting to be born through me? What if I am closest to Mom inside uncertainty itself, the edgeless space between tidy narratives where life aches and wails and unravels?

I’m leaning in because living with MdDS taught me something similar. Peace arrived when I stopped requiring life to fit inherited categories. Somewhere between movement and stillness, illness and wellness, constraint and liberation, a new way of being emerged. A living that doesn’t collapse under contradiction. I think Unbound has been exploring this all along and, through the extraordinary restraint and grace of a director who never insisted the film be anything other than its own becoming, I like to think we collectively loosened our devotions to duality. Bound and unbound dare to bound toward one another. Sick and well cohabitate in wellness. The living and dead vow happily ever after.

Next Wednesday, nearly a thousand of us will gather to celebrate this gentle, illuminating film and the beautiful humans who brought it into being. I would love for you to join us. To celebrate the many ways our boundaries soften and blur through love, creativity, illness, grief, and a beloved’s final unbinding. For six minutes, let these dancers draw you into a sonorous, gestural transmission, a cellular unbinding that happens while still alive. Stay long enough to feel your own outline become a little less certain. Whatever waits for us there, I’ll be holding the possibility that we have never been as separate as we imagined, each movement loosening where you end and I begin, until we collectively remember what the dancers have known all along, we were always emptiness dancing.

Unbound: Illness is not the end of dance

World Premiere: July 29th @6:30pm ET, followed by a Q&A with cast and creators, and moderated by author and scholar Renee K Nicholson. Some of the cast here with us on Substack include: Sara Nesson Amy - The Tonic Chimére L. Sweeney Lia Pas Mary K McIntire Molly Freedenberg Nancy G. Shapiro

If you want to learn more, read this thought-provoking essay and advance praise for UNBOUND by Renée K. Nicholson.

One might even call it a kind of charting that extends beyond the specificity of a disease. It is not clinical record, but it is a record of a body that refuses to be bound by circumstance. It is a body that communicates, and one that is unshackled from time and space. –Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities

Unbound features an original score by Colby Savary and Oscar-nominated composer Mark Orton.

Thank you to our partners and sponsors, whose work extends beyond this film and into the lives of the communities they serve. Their support of Unbound reflects a shared belief that every body, every story, deserves to be seen and heard.