Thought Process
POEM
RECIPE
Ecclesiastes
Flantastic!
BY TAYLOR JOHNSON ’13
BY JEFF HAGAN ’86
How to testify? In the marketplace for my voice was everything was meaningless Knee-deep in the mud with my tongue out. monsoon. mason jar. morning glory. Must I carry even the idiolect of gravel; glossolalia and stupor of all things moving and unmoving? I fall in and fall back out. O, exaltation! the Virginia pine grows straight up to deeper blue, and most taproots I’ll never see. I was waiting for you to turn around pretending none of this baffles me. Not taking it personally. Excerpted with permission from Inheritance by Taylor Johnson, published by Alice James Books in November 2020. Text copyright Taylor Johnson, 2020. 12
the work of ana maria alvarez ’99, a los Angeles-based activist, dancer, choreographer, and founder of the CONTRA-TIEMPO dance company, always begins at the granular level. With the piece she is sifting through now, it’s quite literal: Acúzar. Sugar. Ideas for dance pieces come to Alvarez in dreams and in the shower and, since the coronavirus pandemic, in meditation. Once an idea arrives, she researches it exhaustively, following multiple paths wherever they take her and hacking her way where no path exists. She collects all of the disparate materials into a journal—a notebook in the old days, a Google doc more recently—and shapes them over time and in collaboration with members of the company or members of a community into living work that responds to the cultures, environments, and moments in which it is presented. The child of labor union activists, a daughter of Cuba and a granddaughter of Spain, a descendant of Cherokee and Scotch Irish Southerners, and a double major in dance and government at Oberlin, Alvarez was perhaps bound to create political work. But, she says, “All culture-making is political. It’s about society, it’s about our systems, it’s about our people, whether overtly or not. There is no apolitical work. It doesn’t exist.” This includes her work about sugar. Alvarez recalls that the Cuban singer Celia Cruz—the Queen of Salsa—famously punctuated her performances with joyful shouts of “Acuzar!,” and audiences ate it up. But the history of sugar is soaked in suffering—it was traded for and cultivated by slaves, and colonial economies were built on foundations made of sugar. But she also thinks sugar has gotten a bad rap. She’s been researching the ways ancestors—and some contemporaries—use it in healing. It turns out that a spoonful of sugar does make the bitter medicinal herbs go down. But sugar has such a bad effect on her son that she no longer keeps it in the house (minus a secret stash for herself). “The story is always more complicated,” she says. In the fall of 2020, Alvarez was looking at two years of lost CONTRA-TIEMPO tours and mounting stress due to the pandemic, and feeling the country was falling apart. She