Beneath the Surface: The Art We Tend Between the Lights
A REFLECTION ON THE QUIET CULTIVATION THAT MAKES VISIBLE WORK POSSIBLE
As you’ve all come to know, art—for me—is not only what we present when the lights are up; it is also what we tend in the intervals, what we carry when the work is less visible, and what continues to grow beneath the surface.
So much of creative life is measured by what can be seen: the performance, the exhibition, the premiere, the finished piece. These moments matter. They gather people together. They offer evidence of devotion, discipline, and imagination. They give form to what has been imagined in solitude, rehearsal, research, and risk.
But I have learned that the visible moment is only one part of the ecology of art. Beneath it is a network of unseen commitments: the practice that no one applauds, the questions that stay with us after rehearsal ends, the care we offer one another when the process asks more of us than we expected, the listening that changes the room before anything is made public.
These intervals are not empty space. They are part of the work. I have felt this especially over the past year, and now as I move into the second year of this particular phase of my journey—a phase that resulted in relocation and in my becoming Chair of a School of Dance in a university setting. Though my previous role as Associate Chair and Director of Dance prepared me in many meaningful ways, this new role—and this different institutional environment—has felt distinct in its scale, texture, expectations, and the kinds of listening it requires. It has been a season of visible responsibility and quieter recalibration, of learning new rhythms while carrying forward the questions and values that have long shaped my creative life.
In the midst of this transition, I have quietly experienced an uncomfortable distance from the closeness I prefer with my art. That distance is not absence, but it is real. It has asked me to listen differently to what remains alive beneath the surface: the instincts, practices, and commitments that do not disappear simply because the studio, the stage, or the making process looks different for a time.
I often think of this as tending. Tending suggests patience. It asks us to notice what needs water, what needs pruning, what needs rest, and what must be left alone long enough to reveal its own direction. It reminds me that growth is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is subterranean. Sometimes it looks like staying with a question. Sometimes it looks like choosing not to rush toward certainty.
When the lights are up, we encounter the bloom. When the lights are down, we meet the roots.
What has surprised me, though, is that the very thing I have feared being farther from is also what is leading me forward. My art—and the ways I do it—is exactly what is shaping my success in this new role. I am navigating rooms, relationships, systems, and possibilities as I would choreography: sensing weight, timing, spacing, momentum, resistance, and breath. I am paying attention to what is said and unsaid, to how people enter, gather, shift, and move together.
That means my responsibility is larger than production, and leadership is larger than administration. It includes how we gather, how we listen, how we make room for complexity, and how we remain accountable to the people and places that shape the work. It includes holding values akin to those that drive my art: curiosity, rigor, care, relationality, imagination, embodied knowledge, and the courage to remain present with what is unfinished.
Perhaps this is why I return again and again to the unseen labor of art. It teaches me that visibility is not the only measure of value. The work continues in the pauses. It continues in the body, in memory, in community, in the choices we make when no one is watching. And if I tend those spaces with care, then what emerges—whether in the studio, in a meeting, in a classroom, or under the lights—may carry a deeper kind of truth.
This image, too, invites me to consider the relationship between what is seen and not seen—what blooms into view and the roots quietly making that bloom possible.
TOP PHOTO: Pictured: Helanius J. Wilkins and Scott Levy. Performance Post-Talk at Sallie Bush Community Center (Green Box Residency). Photo courtesy of Stellar Propeller Studio.
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