We met in Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On, both of us standing there in that peculiar space where dance becomes something else entirely, where the whole apparatus of performance gets laid bare and you’re just… there. Naked in a different way.
I played the DJ. At one point I had a “solo” … the direction was simple, brutal in its honesty: dance the way you do when you’re home alone. So I did. I spun around as fast as I could until I got dizzy, then spun the other way to counteract the dizziness. Because that’s what I actually do. That’s the truth of it.
The choreographers didn’t approve. They wanted something else. Something more palatable, more “dance,” more bullshit.
Muriel came to my defense.
Her words. Her status. Her spine. That’s what allowed me to do my spinning dance to Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer.” That’s what kept the truth in the piece.
She was a principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet. Was. Past tense doing absolutely nothing to diminish what she carries in her body, in the way she inhabits space like it owes her rent. She knew what real movement looked like, and more importantly, she knew what real honesty looked like. She stood up for the dizzy spinning because it was true, and truth is the only thing worth defending.
Brilliant doesn’t quite cover it, that word gets thrown around too much, gets cheap. But Muriel’s got that thing, that thing where intelligence isn’t separate from the physical, where thought moves through muscle and bone, where the mind and body finally stop their bullshit divorce proceedings and actually work together like they were designed to.
And beautiful, yeah, but not in some vapid decorator way. Beautiful like a Coltrane solo is beautiful, structured chaos, impossible grace, something that rewires your understanding of what a human being is capable of.
Her very presence makes you want to be better. Not in some sappy inspirational-poster way, but in the way that watching true mastery makes you realize you’ve been phoning it in. Makes you want to be a better artist because mediocrity suddenly feels like a personal insult. That’s the real thing right there. The rare thing. Someone whose excellence isn’t about making you feel small but about showing you what’s actually possible when you stop fucking around and commit. Someone who’ll go to bat for your dizzy spinning when everyone else wants polish over truth.
