Residency Reflection: Sara Zalek
Transitions

Chicago artist Sara Zalek did a virtual residency with the Dance Center in the fall of 2020.

When the pan is hot and I am pouring the mixture into it, what I don't know is whether I should leave it be for a while and flip it, or if I should stir it as I'm pouring in.

You might ask, well, what is it that you are making? An omelette or a scramble? I want to decide at the moment of the pouring and not a moment before. This is the experimental part.

I am sitting at my laptop wondering how I can translate the movement into the words back into movement and this is the choreography, and I'm stuck with sitting. Language has been a barrier for experiencing my full self. Words cannot describe everything about me or you, or anything about the whole of feeling and existing in this world. I had given up on language. I am inviting it back in, but more slowly, and on my own terms. I do not commit to what I lay down on paper, because that seems so final, and I myself am only a work in process.

I remember sitting in the attic that had become my bedroom at fourteen, smoking cigarette after cigarette and listening to David Bowie, sobbing, sure that no one would ever know that I was filling ashtrays in the closet, that no one else would understand the feeling of my new self rising in this immature body. I would climb out to the roof to lie with my face to the sky and let those tears stream into my ears, bewildered at myself wanting to live and die all at once, like a bolt of lightning. I loved to memorize those songs about the end of the world, about Big Brother, the songs of Aladdin Sane, of Diamond Dogs, of Ziggy Stardust. All these personalities in one human. I felt a number of personalities in me, too, so I would sing the lyrics as my own feeling, and I found no irony there.

The door to dreams was closed, Your park was real and dreamless.
Perhaps you're smiling now, Smiling through this darkness.
I had so many dreams, so many breakthroughs....we should be home by now.

(David Bowie lyrics from his studio album Aladdin Sane, released April 13, 1973)

I felt I must have landed from a spaceship onto this Earth as Bowie had, that there was no one else that understood, and they definitely didn't go to my high school. A familiar feeling to many, I now know. This was the eighties and we had moved three times in just a handful of years. Back then 2020 meant hindsight, the way we can always see after the fact how it could have been better. The year 2020 was the far away future. Now it has too many other meanings we could not have known until we passed through it. The eye of the needle. We are weaving.

I realized a snag in my understanding of time upon coming home after seeing my mother for the first time since 2019. Her tiny frame is now hunched and frail, and she looks as if she has aged ten years. 2020 was not one year: it was more like ten. We, as a people, rethought our lives, relearned our history, and remade ourselves so many times over in 2020 that the effect has been a decade of wear. 

The 2020 vision board I made in December of 2019 predicted the unveiling, that I was changing into the me who resembles the myth of my great-grandfather. The one that left his rural Minnesota home to search for gold in Alaska with no word for eighteen years. He came back with one really nice suit and a limp that rendered him useless on the farm from that point on. This is me, now with a new artificial hip that he never had, wanting to give him a chance at this timeline, to find some grounded connections to that mysterious history. I had assumed that I would feel pain and that (a new) breathing being would come out of my (figurative) vagina, screaming in this reality. As I fell back, I spread my legs and waited for the thing to crown, and I cried and I cried and when I stopped crying I found that only a thin veil had peeled itself away—and this "revelation" would be many more layers of unraveling, and it would take way more time than a the moments of childbirth, and it would be more like the lifetime of the child. This is my process of creating.

My father's mother, the daughter of the great-grandfather I never met but long to know, would write me letters every single week of my life once we moved away from Minnesota. I was six when we left. I kept moving and moving, all my life, until I stopped in this house on Dickens in 2010. For many years her letters recorded the arcs of my journey across the country, into other countries, and back again, eventually landing here. Her last letter she sent a full year before she passed, it was delivered to my current address. My mother had come to Chicago many times as a child, I recently learned. My father, he only dreamed of it. I feel now pinned (like a butterfly) on the map to Chicago. I have not judged that pinning, but I feel the wind blowing into my wings, causing a stir, the potential of release.

I am stronger, more clear, more precise as a person now, but I am still capable of disappearing, and fearing my disappearance. My family does not acknowledge my gender-fluid identity, even when I am around them. I don't know what my friends think of me most of the time; I have trouble understanding what other people perceive. I do know that I am finding my own value, and learning where I can thrive and sustain and live with more ease in myself. This is what I want most at this moment, this moment of pouring in.

Aside: Forgive my naïveté but I did not realize that the stakes were so high. Or did I? Buried deep within my subconscious, my basic actions, maybe there was always this evidence that life was a precious thing, and that one moment was even more precious than that—but I still have a hard time seeing it. In December 2019, I quit smoking successfully. I had smoked for almost forty years. The removal of this poison has left me more vulnerable than I imagined possible.

When I was a child, I told my grandmother I wanted to be a writer and because of that my life had to be about having experiences and adventures. The myth of my great-grandfather was implanted early. Everything I did was specifically about having interesting exchanges with people, and places, and creatures both real and imagined. It meant creating and performing strange art rituals to sing meaning into life. Presumably so that I could later, as an old person, then share those experiences through some character inventions. The decade of 2020 has pushed that timeline up, and I have reached that moment where a narrative sputters to a flow, the words tumble and twist their way around and out. I am carving language out of the silence of memories. I had no idea how tired I would get. How much simpler I would need to make my nest.

I want to be someone else, other than who I am. Constantly and always. Forever transforming.

When I dance, I am no one. I am all energy and sensation. I am a body of cells responding to other bodies of cells, to space, to sound, to subtle forces of physics. I am a water body. I am responding to the fluidity of energy, a feeling, and an impulse. I am in time and out of time. I am present, I am leaving, I am coming back. I am abstract—full of rhythm and noise and nuance and pheromone and habits and behaviors—and all of this gets sorted out while I am dancing.

I am dancing. American culture, we love dancing, and we all know a little more about dancing than we did in 2019. We also all know a little more about getting by with less, getting by with things not as we assumed them to be, getting by without things we thought we had needed before. I know for certain that we still need touch, and we are finding ways to get it. We are getting by.

In the car my friend exclaims, "This moment is so wonderful! I cannot believe I have been without people for so long, and now, to sit with you here, and to be driving with you is a miracle!" It is 65° in March and we have both the windows down and both of us are double-masked; we are driving food around to the Love Fridges in the neighborhood. We are working together for the first time since 2019. We have been using WhatsApp to stay in touch through text, photos, and links of our favorite things. Sending pictures to each other of our favorite willow in Humboldt Park, and we live less than a mile apart. We go to the tree now, and find someone else sitting in it. We leave him to be with the willow and decide we want to have dinner together soon, out on the back porch.

How do I know that I want to keep making performance, making art? Making art means making time to connect and finding new ways to do it. I need to be useful to thrive. I need action, and that action must have impact. I want to be with people when I am making, when I am sharing art. I don't want it to be subject to the chin-down heads-up situation of the critic, of the buyer, of the curator, who decides if what I make is worthy of talking about. I reject the curator as a content generator. I reject the artist as only entertainment or a social justice engine, and the art that's been left to some privileged fringe that has rendered itself functionless and solipsistic.

I make art to live, to keep waking up to this world, to keep believing in something bigger than myself, to be one part of a bigger whole. Art as purpose.

If you would like to know at this point, I do identify as a redhead, a ginger, as hybrid, as gender fluid, as masculine and feminine, as a creative spirit, an Artist that transcends the current time. I am white but I choose "rather not say" or leave it blank on all the forms.

I do not identify as an exotic creature who you fantasized as wilder, feistier, sexier, and most uncontrollable. I do not accept labels of gay or straight at any point, I reject these binaries. The discrepancy threatens to separate us from one another. I’m thankful some language has evolved to include me. I was born female, but I loathe to be automatically inferior. I am of mixed European descent, a solid half is Swedish. I was taught early about my brutal Viking heritage, that these were ones who raped and pillaged every land and people they came in contact with. My father's great-grandparents settled in Northern Minnesota, became religious and farmers, surrounded themselves with their families, poverty, and piety. My mother's family also found religion and harbored secretive outraged male aggression after war times. My parents didn't stay.

Myths about history, mine and yours and ours, have been constructed and reconstructed. I exclaim that I will never allow myself to be labeled by you and yet I'm sure you have labeled me, and made some discriminations based on what I've told you this far. It's natural enough.

During my digital residency at the Dance Center, I created hybrid works of dance and videos and writing and images. My great-grandfather August would be proud to know I published a poem in his name and honor in The Understory Quarterly winter 2021. Along with filling one red journal and two small books I sent to a tiny publishing house, I made a handful of watercolor paintings which depict my personal journey of relearning about American history, about the more honest history of slavery, the Great Migration, the Reconstruction, segregation, Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow, the undercurrent of violence and aggression toward Asian Americans, Latino and Native American people, spread to break us—all the brutal policing, systemic violence, and white supremacy that was mistaught to me as a white American. Angry.

I reject my childhood education. I process my learning in a new way. Armed with my pen, my brush, ink and pencils, I am listening to correct my miseducation, I am relearning and watching and listening even more. I cut up the images I paint and draw and write and I send them to my friends, my colleagues, my family, as letters of support and love. The whole and its parts will likely never meet again. Chicago's post office has such trouble sending and receiving, with intercity mail being sent through the mystery of Carol Stream, that more than a few of these cards have been returned “unable to deliver” even with the address correctly labeled. Some just disappear. Some people have let me know they received something, or asked about the images, other people have said nothing. I am interested in how these pieces are connected, regardless of whether we comprehend or find those connections again. These photos may serve as documents to reconnect us in the future.

These cards are very slow to construct, deconstruct, and distribute, much slower than I anticipated. Mail is full of unseen mechanisms and handlings.

Life moving at glacial speed, simultaneously at light speed. How will we transition now? How do we come out of this split, this binary, this partisan ruling? I stand with BIPOC, bipolar, non-binary, Queerness, otherness, immigrants, and refugees. As loath as I have been to be labeled, I am nothing and no one without these identifiers now. I would disappear into the ether if I did not choose over and over to wake to this reality. Even though American culture has attempted to neuter me, I am here to offer only one tiny cell of reflection, one fleck of color in the iris in the mirror, one bee in the hive (that still lives) in the wilderness. I offer this tiny wild in my continued making, supported, yet unsupported by anyone other than myself. I do hope you get something from this reading, or that something here I have said or done might inspire your own brightness to shine.

Sara Zalek is an interdisciplinary artist and convenor of action based performance, rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation. Their work is intimate and raw, poetic and participatory in nature. They promote the intentional act of disruption to ignite social and ecological change.

Zalek performs live online, outside, and for pre-recorded sessions; most recently in residence at the Dance Center at Columbia College of Chicago, a 2015 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, a 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee, and a 2017 Ragdale Foundation Fellow. They have performed and curated performances at the Chicago Cultural Center, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, Lumpen Radio, Defbrillator Gallery and many more.

Through Butoh Curious Chi, Zalek connects national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas (including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music). They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about the personal and collective bodies.