The Brooklyn Rail

Eighteen months ago, the choreographer Juliana F. May and I started sending each other voice messages on WhatsApp. The idea was simple—to talk about dancemaking and process, and to find a way of writing about that—but neither of us knew where we wanted it to go. At the time, Juliana was at the very beginning of a new project. This month, from November 5–8, that work, Optimistic Voices, makes its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

After a couple months of talking into our phones, I realized these voice messages were disarmingly intimate windows into Juliana’s process. I started to transcribe the messages I received, and what follows are a selection, edited for clarity and privacy. They’re an artifact of an artist’s process unfolding across eighteen months, hewn through conversations with a friend. You could even call them a collection of optimistic voices.

April 4, 2024:

Hi. So great to hear your voice. I’m waiting for the locksmith to come. Sexy work that I’m doing here.

You asked me about the piece. I feel like I haven’t really begun working yet, although that’s not true. I need to name the ways of working that we don’t think about as working. I was putting eyeshadow on through the reflection of the microwave and someone was vacuuming behind me, and I was like, “Oh this feels good.” Feels kinda like French New Wave.

February 1, 2025:

I’ve been thinking about you, and—a lot’s coming up. I think that with each project I just reidentify that I see the world of my work through movement. I’ve built this movement culture over twenty-plus—more, thirty-two years of cultivating improvisational ways of spouting movement. Even if I’m getting involved in text and songwriting, movement is what I most geek out to.

The movement doesn’t change that much, but to onboard new people into its culture is really fascinating. It’s helping me articulate the wiry, hard edges of the movement—its lack of technical phraseology. It’s an intrinsic, desperate, gross motor sense of very attuned spinal articulation right next to this really dumpy garbage can of, like, energy heave. Move from point A to point B, be like a garbage can, but also be this articulate, unwinding paper clip. The tension between those two objects feels like the heart of the movement culture. Working with new people is forcing me to articulate that more, which is really great.

It’s also: “Oh, here are all the old patterns. Oh, that’s not gonna—whatever—that’s not gonna work.” There’s a lot of chatter that’s quiet [laughs], in the exchange between me and them [the dancers]. I spoke to them yesterday about feeling like we’re developing hundreds of city-states that will either be reified or be completely flattened and collapsed.

February 9, 2025 [text messages]:

Yes yes

My work is made with my kids breaking down the doors

I’m constantly working in short spurts throughout the day

Grabbing 30 seconds-2 min

Speaks to the density of the work too

February 10, 2025:

Okay, I will stop being so in your voice memos, because I have to go anyway, but I fucking love the Odyssean thing. I love it. I think that is it. I don’t actually know anything about it. I mean, I think I read The Odyssey. Is that the quality I’m looking for—that it’s endless? That it’s this sort of epic journey?

I’m always asking people, “Where is the chorus? To ground us and make us feel good and bring us into this climax or repetition?” I often create motifs—and I don’t even know what a motif is, but someone told me that. [Laughs] A motif is just a thing that keeps coming back. I’m also thinking about the sense of Greek chorus, and my unapologetic search for—it’s disgusting to even talk about emotional truth, but—an un-apologetics of emotional truth. That is the chorus. Right? Again, the grotesqueness of the universal, but of course.

February 10, 2025, later in the day:

I’ve been thinking about this idea of infatuation in these short spurts of working. It feels really important in the toggle of the mind, in the process. I get really infatuated with an idea and think that it’s the only idea I’ve ever had, and that it is the entire work. The infatuation can last a week, or two weeks, or maybe an hour, but it’s really important that it coats all of me. And then it’s a very fast, saturated cut. Then it’s gone. But I have to go into the deep end so I can push off and feel where the fuck I am. Test reality a little bit. There’s a borderline quality of going all the way into something, which is obviously not a new thing artistically, but I’m really actively bringing it into my mind. Infatuations. Like, “I love you. We will be together forever.”

February 18, 2025:

It feels like I’m sort of leaving dance in some way by embracing these song-word odysseys. That feels hard. I’m really intoxicated by the songs and the singing and the words right now. I keep tiptoeing back to making other material, but I’m actually just not that interested. I think I need to just stay the course and work on the music, even though that feels hard in rehearsal, because I hired them all to be dancers and now we’re just singing.

March 29, 2025:

I’m waiting for the doctor at urgent care, playing the game (Is it COVID or perimenopause?), and a creative thought just occurred to me. It’s not deep; it’s pretty basic. I think the unrelenting quality in the work has to do with my demand, in rehearsal, that when I try something, it has to work every time. There’s no grace. It has to prove itself anew every day. There’s decisiveness in that clarity, but also, it’s hard to be in such a ruthless space all the time.

August 11, 2025:

I’m working on these monologues, these kinds of Ann-Margret, Bye Bye Birdie, Shirley MacLaine direct addresses to the audience about domestic sexual life. Now I’m just like, “Where the fuck does the dancing go?”

There’s this fifteen-minute dance section that I’ve been straining and crushing and stacking for months, and I keep fucking with it and ruining it. Do those fifteen minutes just get quartered into four sections and scattered through the piece, so the dancing just arranges itself into four little museums?

At BAM the audience is pretty distant, and yet, you actually have to stop, in the dark, and look at something. In museums you can come and go, which always feels too cavalier for me.

I still feel very committed to the power of the theater: stopping in the darkness to watch something. It feels like the backroom of video rental stores, behind a curtain. Adults only. Interesting to think about that in the context of a work that’s about children, and children in adult spaces, and how children are constantly in adult spaces, and how we constantly try to block them from adult spaces, which just makes them want to peer into those spaces even more. How we build out these systems of shame to protect them against sex and adulthood.

I’m gonna stop there and go work on the piece, God help me. Okay. More soon.