Introducing Speak, Dance

A new series about dance and words

Welcome to Expanse Journal’s new series, Speak, Dance. The series will begin tomorrow with an interview with Israeli choreographer May Zarhy and will continue for the next two weeks in June with two other Israeli choreographers, Roy Assaf and Michael Getman. These first three installments in the series are going to be in the Q & A format. However, I don’t plan to abandon the series after these three Q & A’s or stick with only the same interview format. This project is ongoing.

What is Speak, Dance about? It’s about dance performances that have spoken language and/or text in them. It’s about dance artists who create using words, writing, text, and language in ways that I find interesting.

The series is starting off with three Israeli artists because, while I was attending the International Exposure 2025 festival in Tel Aviv in early December, I came to a realization after a few days that not only were a lot of dancers in Israel versatile performers, the way some choreographers were working with text, language, and voice were also deeply fascinating and vastly different from one another.

At first, I was going to bring together the three interviews into one story that combines criticism and feature writing, but they are each so different that I thought a straightforward interview format would better serve each of the interviews. And so why not start a series on a topic I would like to keep exploring as well?

While I do think that arts reviews are part of an important tradition that should still be practiced by writers and regularly published by periodicals, I have grown tired of writing straightforward reviews and don’t want to touch them again for the foreseeable future.

One type of story in arts journalism I never truly like to write is, what we call in Thailand, a preview. This could be in the form of a Q & A or a short feature telling the reader about an upcoming performance. Although I love talking to artists about their processes, seeing them at work, and writing about these things, I’ve never liked the promotional aspect of a story about a show that has yet to happen. And when a production turned out to be lacking or vastly different from what the artist was trying to sell to the public, I felt not only duped, but also terribly guilty for having helped to promote it.

However, when I was doing my podcast, Bangkok Offstage, during Covid, I was starting to discover a happy medium: interviewing artists after their productions had already been staged. I found this kind of conversation much more reflective for both the interviewer and the interviewee. I get to ask more critical questions, and the artist gets to look back at their own process and creation.

All these three interviews with the Israeli choreographers were conducted after I had seen their works. And that’s going to be the process going forward for this series. Definitely not a preview. A review of sorts. And it will always involve the act of attending a performance and at least one interview with the artist afterward.

As for the name: Speak, Dance. It comes from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory. I have yet to read the book, but I’ve always loved the title. Nabokov had wanted the title of the British edition of the book to be Speak, Mnemosyne after the American title, Conclusive Evidence, made people think it was a mystery novel. His publisher didn’t think Speak, Mnemosyne would work either, as the name of the Greek goddess of time and memory was probably too difficult to pronounce for the average reader. And so one of the most beautiful book titles was born.

I’m aware that, unlike the word “memory”, the word “dance” is not only a noun, but also a verb. Speak, Dance certainly doesn’t work as well as Speak, Memory. But I like the mystery and ambiguity of the name. It could be read as an imperative sentence, as someone telling or imploring dance to speak. It could also be read as two verbs, two actions, joined together by a comma, just hanging there, suspended in the air—no period, question mark, or exclamation point to anchor them to the ground, to pin them down to certainty.

Dance itself is still a mystery to me as a writer. I’m not a trained dancer or choreographer. I’ve dabbled in dance criticism. I’ve written about movement and the body in the performing arts context for many years. To this day, I still struggle to capture dance and movements in words. When a movement piece or a dance contains words, I often feel more anchored to logic, to comprehension. The task ahead of me as a writer suddenly seems much easier.

But there would be no point in writing either if language is no longer a mystery to a writer. Depending on how it’s used, language can even further mystify dance.

But certainty is never a good starting point for any creative or intellectual endeavor.

So speak, dance…