Occasionally I make dances. The movements tend to be drawn from family photos, movie stills, or, just as often, someone will move a certain way and we'll say, “Oh, that's great, let's use that.”
☙
He said, you know, whatever
About smokers and Yiddish speakers
Building tables without legs
Then after a long pause
He says nothing
I think he’s an arborist or whatever
He takes exquisite care of arbors
The audience is suddenly instrumental
They are deeply concerned about nothing
Sort of a religion
Lessons in a dutiful sort of way
I was doing well but suddenly I’m really not
Most mammals live stressful lives
I guess I’m going for politeness
Quick easy ways to get started
Learning lessons
Good in a mammalian sort of way
I discover who I am while sitting in a car with my cousins
Overhearing two guys building furniture
What did it feel like? It’s like if you saw a sheet
A cloth hanging
And then something bumped behind it
I think of a broken leg or something
Something that wasn't really given to me
Funny how it was mine
We spend 10 minutes looking through a door
We were like, Why does that feel good?
Once you start paying attention it’s hard to stop
Listening to moods is the sound of the world turning
It’s the rarest form of generosity
But listening to everyone backfired
I hear someone else’s coworkers deciding where to get coffee
Someone else is crying to be let into the room
I had to deal with the grief
I decide not to listen to the difference between advice and a trial
My stomach, the relationship between the herd
What’s that called?
Transference, someone says in a baby voice
I daydream about secret money
About the elevator I’m in dropping
The person next to me says, Don’t worry, tech problems. Happens all the time.
A large businessman tells me he loves me
I’m having the same tech problems
I keep going back to those
At my sister’s wedding everyone could see my asshole
The cake was really good
I think widely about what back pain is
He’s grappling with something he heard on the radio
He’s taller than I thought
I think, Why is he not talking?
It reminds me of one of my favorite puppets
He says, Everything that comes into the room has to be useful
How does this compare to other people?
We know that waste rhymes with matter
I think father knows best
What’s your favorite food? I ask him
I continue to talk to him for 5-7 minutes
It feels like speaking to concrete
Because in actual life, I realize, people move through your thoughts over and over
It’s especially painful at the back of my mind
I liked that too
I see that moving in a small amount of space
Turned things into other unexpected things
A woman became a field
And I’m being pulled along by unexpected twists and turns
The collective fragility brought me to the present—
(Sorry, I’m almost done)
What thou and I did
Rituals for an uncertain future
I think of the way we as a society run in circles in the living room
Teaching children to capture butterflies
Enough innocence to carry them through the unknown
Even though they don’t belong to us
I see myself as a rat and a mother
Contemplating sugar cubes
Stealing air mattresses
A pile of unmatched socks
Missing my father
Stirring mashed potatoes
Getting my finger stuck in a mysterious coincidence
Snorting sugar from plastic straws at restaurants on the Fourth of July
To see a pleasure clearly that I’ve discovered probably 50 times already
I refuse the idea of noise
I was anxious so instead I put my body in recovery mode
But you froze
If you want that, you should go back into that position when you dance
Something might surprise you
Hayley Stahl is the author of Performance, forthcoming from Nightboat. Her plays include Not Being Able to Paint, Music, and Music 2. She lives and works in New York