Author: Marvin Gardner

The arrow points left. That is the first thing I notice, before the words resolve into sense: a left-pointing arrow, set beneath two lines of capital letters. TWEEDLE DEE above, I’M WITH DUM below. The arrow does not point at the wearer. It points away from the wearer, toward whoever is standing to the wearer’s… Continue reading The Arrow That Points Away: Reading the Tweedle Dee ‘I’m With Dum’ Shirt

The first thing we see is the board. A black rectangle, held at chest height, its edges slightly rounded, the way a mugshot slate sits in the hands of someone who has been told where to put them. Above it, in a plain sans-serif, the words GOT TOO SILLY. Below it, a white bird —… Continue reading The Mugshot Board and the Bird: Reading the Got Too Silly Shirt

The first thing we see is not the cat. It is the word GREETINGS, arched across the top of the print in blue-purple letters that appear to stand up from the fabric, each one given a bevel and a shadow so that the greeting arrives before the animal does. Below it, HUZZ sits in the… Continue reading The Deadpan Cat and the Dimensional H: Reading the Greetings Huzz Shirt

The document, not the legend There is a temptation, when writing about somatic training, to begin with an atmosphere: the softened room, the lowered voice, the student lying on a wooden floor with eyes closed. That atmosphere is real, but it is not evidence. The evidence for what a technique claims is in its documents.… Continue reading Imagery Before Muscle: What Joan Skinner’s Releasing Technique Actually Argued About Dance Training

The orange face is not symmetrical. One eye is a closed crescent — a wink, the lid pressed down like a comma — and the other is a wide, open triangle. Between them, a small triangular nose. Below, a mouth that is mostly a grin but not a clean one: the tongue lolls out to… Continue reading The Wink and the Tongue: Reading the Goofy Jack-O-Lantern Shirt as a Costume of Comic Timing

The mouth is the first thing I see. Not the orange, which is a flat, unmodulated pumpkin orange, closer to a traffic cone than to any gourd I have ever carved. Not the triangular eyes, which are almost friendly in their symmetry. The mouth: a jagged line of cutouts, each tooth a sharp wedge, the… Continue reading The Jagged Mouth: Reading the Scary Jack-O-Lantern Face Shirt as a Costume of Refusal

The floor is the first thing a dancer negotiates and the last thing anyone credits. It arrives before the music, before the mirror, before the barre. It is there in the warm-up and there in the bow. And yet in most writing about dance it disappears into the phrase “the stage” — a neutral given,… Continue reading The Sprung Floor as Choreographic Apparatus: How the Surface Underfoot Decides What Movement Is Possible