When dance seemed distant from my body, filmmaker Ella Harmon and I decided to experiment on their old rooftop in Greenpoint on a cloudy spring day (2021). Through their choices of angles, lighting, and editing, Ella skillfully turned my movement into a landscape of muted eeriness. A queer body juxtaposed against a skyline dotted with steeples and church towers serves as a reminder of the omnipresence of organized religions in the lives of the LGBTQIA community. The Church's self-righteousness contrasts the beauty of queer love. This video is a query into the potential of a "queer" spirituality outside of the Church's judgmental eye. How can we foster community, love, and faith in ways that don't exclude, banish, or traumatize "the other." So many atrocities are committed in the name of organized religion. How can we have a relationship to a God, knowing this? As Indigenous People's day passes, we bring our focus back to the horrors the church has brought upon the stewards of the land. We dance on today, Lenapehoking. With these lives in our hearts, we ask these questions for those who could not. This dance lays itself out belly upwards. Vulnerable. Grotesquely emotional in protest of a world that sees stoicism as strength and difference as weakness. I allowed myself the paradox of losing control for the sake of repurposing the sacred.
